Impossible to work

I don’t think of myself as a car racing fan. I just like to drive cars. I know that gasoline is bad news for a variety of reasons, but I enjoy the whole process of starting out in 1st and working my way up to top gear. Especially if I’m on an open stretch of road and can really push my car to its limits (and it does quite well for a 4-banger, thank you very much). When my friend Richard called a few months back about staying with me for a few days before heading to OK for a wedding, he mentioned that he was flying to Chicago on Memorial Day weekend and wanted to go the Indy 500. Since I’m willing to try new things I said “Sure, why not?” and went about procuring us tickets. When I found out how much it was going to cost to sit where we wanted to sit in Turn 3, I came to the conclusion that there was no way I was going to enjoy this whole thing. It was just never going to be worth it.

I was wrong. Really wrong. They call it the greatest spectacle in racing for a reason: the thousands of people sitting in the infield and many in the stands that don’t seem to realize there’s a car race going on in front of them. Take hundreds of thousands of white trash, a few thousand normal people and one black man (he was sitting two rows in front of me. I was clearly in the diversity section of the stands) ask all of the men to take their shirts off (regardless of whether or not they should), throw in a few women flashing the stands and set it all around 33 cars travelling at speeds in excess of 200 mph and you will indeed have a great spectacle.

I thought I was going to be into it for the first five laps and then maybe the last ten or twenty laps. I thought the white trash were going to piss me off. I thought the whole “Go America yeah!” attitude was going to make the situation decidedly unfun. But I was wrong. The nationalism was no good (but really, to be expected. I learned from one man that the white people all came to America legally. I believe there are a few indigenous peoples that would disagree with that, if they hadn’t been obliterated by European immigrants with guns and small pox). The lack of shirts on the vast majority of the men (including the very overweight tattooed and pierced black man in front of us) was also nasty. But the race itself, that was awesome.

I’ve flipped the TV on during Indycar races before and thought it didn’t really look all that exciting, and I was right. It doesn’t look exciting on TV. There’s just no way a roving camera can demonstrate the dangerous speeds these cars can reach or the wind they produce. But when you’re at the race track watching these machines roar past you at 215 mph, you can’t help but be entranced. And deafened. I put my earplugs in the first time the cars came round, before they started racing. Richard was more willing to ruin his hearing but eventually put his earbuds in to take the sting off the sound. I’m a wimp and desire to keep what remains of my hearing in tact, so I had earplugs in for the entire time, more or less.

And then there are the battles. Watching cars going that fast pass each other is super intense. Watching them crash against the wall is also intense, even when under a yellow flag. Al Unser, Jr was the only car we actually saw crash in front of us, and it looked to us like something broke in his car as he couldn’t have been going over 90 mph when it happened.

All in all, the race was awesome. I was transfixed. I was tired of the word “Danica” by the end of the day. I was decidedly pro-car racing by the end of it. Well, screw stock cars, they aren’t as cool nor as fast. I never thought I’d say this, but I can’t wait for the Indy 500 next year. Perhaps it won’t be ridiculously hot next year so I can spend more time exploring the speedway. And next year (I think), all of the cars are supposed to be running on ethanol (as opposed to this year where I believe all of the cars were running on a mix), which makes the race less evil, right? It doesn’t matter what the fuel is, the carnival atmosphere will still be there, with rednecks as far as the eye can see.