Old Indy Turns Into Old Lady

INDIANAPOLIS —  Now look what they’ve gone and done! I swear, won’t they leave anything alone? Is nothing sacred anymore?

They’ve gone and de-fanged the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Taken the hop off its fastball. Turned it into a bridle path, so to speak.

It’s kind of like they’ve disarmed Germany. Taken a sword away from a Cossack. Taken the horns off a bull. Quills out of a porcupine.

Imagine the Pacific Ocean without sharks. Or reefs.

Can you imagine Fenway Park without the short left-field fence? Yankee Stadium with the right-field seats in Queens? What if they wouldn’t let Dempsey fight out of a crouch? Made Nolan Ryan pitch left-handed? Took putting out of the game of golf?

Well, what they’ve done to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway would bring tears to your eyes. They’ve tied it down, put a gag in its mouth and a blindfold over it. It’s like the old Pearl White serials with the damsel tied on the tracks and the Limited on time and bearing down. It’s helpless in the face of 33 of the best auto racers in the world. It has no way to fight back.

It’s safe, for cryin’ out loud! Has no weapons. Just has to sit there and take it.

You know what the wall has meant to Indy, for example. The wall was to Indy what his left hook was to Mike Tyson. The Old Equalizer. It was always laying there waiting. It could bide its time while those young whippersnappers went roaring around the brickyard in 40-second laps. It figured its time would come. Sooner or later, you would hear, “S-c-r-e-e-e-e-e-ch! Wham! Bam! Floppeta-floppeta, whack, kaboom!” and the sky would be raining car parts for 5 minutes and a driver would limp out from the billowing smoke. Take that, wise guy!

Indy was tough. No prisoners. You wanna rumble? Let’s go!

They’ve taken her into custody. Frisked her. Confiscated her clubs and knives. Put her on probation.

It’s not fair to the guys who crashed here. The guys who can tell by their knees when it’s going to rain. Who hit the wall at Mach 1 and got an engine--or a fire--in their laps.

You know what they’ve done? Honey, they shrunk the track. They took passing out of the picture. They may have bought themselves a 500-mile pace lap. Whoever gets in front might stay there. There’s no room to pass.

They got a lah-dee-dah warm-up lane. Got grass between it and the main track. This means when cars come hustling out of the pit--and you know what an all-fired rush they are in when they do that--they have to keep the race traffic well west or east of them before they can rejoin it.

I ask you, is this any way to run Indy? What is this--an economy run? Or a race?

Just think of the lives they’ll be saving. To say nothing of the rubber and metal. They’ve even heightened the fences around the oval. The customers won’t have the thrill of looking up from their fried chicken and seeing a tire with a wheel in it bearing down on the barbecue.

They’re trying to get the cars to--get this--go slower!

You ever know a race driver who wanted to go slower? Neither did anyone else. Ever know a race driver who could even sit still outside of a car? The only time they sit still is at 240 m.p.h. Then, they’re content.

They’re studying race drivers at this year’s Indy. An outfit called “Human Performance International” is trying to find out what separates them physiologically from the rest of the population. The answer is, hardly anything. They do tend to have superior eyesight (though a couple of winners have had corrective lenses or glasses). But, basically, what makes them different is they’re “T-types.” I’m not sure what that means altogether, but it adds up to the fact that they like danger. They’re risk-seekers. But it’s socially acceptable risk. They’re not bank-robbers. They like the risk to be calculable. In other words, they’d bet on a pair of treys, but they’d check the table first.

They’re not consumed by a death wish, in spite of popular notions to the contrary. They actually have less suicidal tendencies than the run of the population. They simply think they can control the dangerous environment they find so exhilarating. Their cardiovascular system is basically as ineffective as anyone’s. Arie Luyendyk, the pole-sitter this week, says his pulse rate goes up to 130 to 180 during a race. Their nutritional intake is as inadequate as ours. If you see a guy eating a doughnut, it might be an Unser.

But what they have is a need to succeed in a dangerous environment. If they weren’t in a race car, they’d be on a mountain or in a diving bell. They’re the kind of men who were in U-boats or lead tanks in World War II.

But they don’t like the deal rigged. They don’t like the bull with the shaved horns, the lion with a sore paw, the cat without stripes.

I flew to Detroit with Tony George, whose grandfather restored this racetrack after World War II when he found it weed-festooned and headed toward a shopping mall.

Tony Hulman (for whom his grandson is named) not only saved it from the wrecker’s ball, he rebuilt it into a national heirloom. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway is now a historic landmark, like one of those houses George Washington slept in, the courthouse at Appomattox, the Alamo or Little Big Horn.

Wasn’t Tony George afraid of not keeping faith with the brave pole-sitters and wall-hitters who made it a national monument?

Tony, a former race driver and football player himself, grins frostily and says: “Everybody is prejudging the race. We’re not going to be able to tell what these differences will make until the checkered flag falls.

“It is the instinct of a race drier to find the shortest way around a track. We have narrowed some of his options, made it more difficult by putting things like a berm, a grooved warning strip under the white line to keep the cars on the main track.

“But if I know race drivers, they will find a way to race, a way to pass. We don’t have horns on these cars, you know.”

Luyendyk, who will lead the 33-man thrill seek Sunday, agrees. The new configuration will “bring the driver back into the picture,” he insists. “The driver is very much the major element in the mix. We are in control of our destinies. We have to find a way to drive fast past people driving fast, as usual.”

Indy will be relieved to know these guys aren’t planning to clinch with it or jab it to death or try to dazzle it with footwork. They’re going to slug it out with the track, after all. It can rest easy. It’ll be able to show the stuff that made it a national museum and won’t be turned into a kind of complicated not-200-m.p.h. Rose Parade, after all.