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An Outsider’s Inside Look At Indy

I was born in sunny Nome , Alaska and became an Indy 500 fan thanks to Herk Edwards, a gold miner turned machinist whose shop was next door to my parents’ home. I’d watch for hours as he turned impellers and shafts for the companies that found the gold that he had missed. Before he moved from California to the Territory of Alaska, he’d been a dirt track racer and mechanic and one of his pals was Bob Veith, 1956 Indy 500 Rookie of the Year. They stayed in touch and every year, Veith would send up the Champion Spark Plugs films of the race. I became hooked and used to listen over Armed Forces Services Radio on my dad’s old Hallicrafters shortwave. That worked okay until the Cold War heated up in the early ’60s and the Russians started jamming every radio signal across the dial.

In the early ’80s, I moved to Anchorage and continued to follow the race. In 1993, I finally decided to make the trip and see the race in person. I was such a novice, I had no idea how to go about getting tickets; remember, this was pre-internet so I picked up the phone and called directory information in Indianapolis. Somehow, I ended up talking to what was then called Indianapolis Raceway Park. I asked the receptionist about tickets and she was all set to sell me a pair to the midget race ‘The Night Before the 500’ until I figured out that I needed to talk to IMS. I called them and discovered the race was sold out and was every year. I then discovered the wonderful world of scalpers, got scalped and headed for Indy. On Carb Day ’93 I walked into the track, turned to my wife and said, “Look around because here’s where you’re going to be spending Memorial Day for the next, oh, 40 or 50 years.” My wife smiled and nodded and we’ve gone back every year since.

But that makes me an outsider, at least compared to most of you since I am sure I go to Indy in a completely different way than you. I read somewhere that about 1/3 of the race day crowd drives down for the day from Chicago and northern Indiana and there are solid contingents from Louisville, Cincinnati/Dayton and St. Louis . Add in all the folks from central Indiana and the immediate Indy area and my bet is that very few people arrive by air.

How many? Well, the Indy airport averages 10,000 people a day during normal operations and that jumps to 20,000 a day by race weekend so out of 300,000 in attendance at the Greatest Spectacle, maybe 30-40,000 race fans fly in for the race. And here’s how that experience worked this year:

Thanks to a 4 hour time change, we have to get out of bed at 5am to catch our 8am nonstop flight to Chicago . We board the plane and are ushered into first class we’ve earned enough miles with Alaska Airlines to gain vaunted MV/ GOLD status so trumpets blare and we’re given a free drink. Wait until the flight back when FC is full and we will be back in steerage with the rest of the peasants .I pass the 6 hour flight by watching a couple of obscure but very enjoyable movies. First up was ‘Tran Siberian,’ a drug dealer mystery set on a Russian train that starred Woody Harrelson, Ben Kingsley and Emily Mortimer. Top shelf and well worth finding. I followed that up with ‘Tell No One,’ a French 2006 film that also involved murder and deception. Again, it’s highly recommended as long as you don’t mind reading subtitles.

Travel Tip 1: I watch movies on airplanes on my trusty Lenovo T61 laptop. I download them to the desktop and run them from there rather than playing DVDs. This saves clutter and a bit of battery life. I use a free program called Handbrake that’s available on the Internet at www.handbrake.fr

Works great and plays in QuickTime although I have had better playback with KMPlayer, a free media/DVD player software that is also available on the ‘Net. Aren’t computers fun?

Travel Tip 2: Before a long trip, get a decent pair of noise-canceling headphones. About half the people on a plane use Bose QC2s and I have used them in the past but they cost $300 and are never discounted. My Bose’s gave up the ghost a while back so I bought a pair of Sony MDR NC 60s for $120 on eBay and they work fine and make long trips tolerable. Yes, you can use your racetrack scanner headphones on the plane but you’ll look like a real dork. And on the subject of headphones, make sure you get the style that goes around the ear rather than ON the ear. A pair of on ear headphones crushing your lobes for 6 hours will make you look and feel like an old wrestler.

So we arrive in O’Hare, always a pleasant experience. Experienced travelers and novices all hate O’Hare because it sucks. The place is crowded and poorly laid out despite countless remodels and improvements. The restaurants are uniformly lousy and everywhere you look, there is security equipment placed strategically to block aisles and create lines and jams. And there are always lots of people milling about because air traffic is heavy and delays are common. A couple of years, we were on our way back from Indy and every flight was behind schedule because of thunderstorms. We boarded our flight 90 minutes late and taxied out – and taxied and taxied, doing laps around the taxiways. Hey, I’ve seen that hangar before . Finally after driving around the tarmac for an hour, the pilot said that because we were late pushing back, we had lost our takeoff slot and that by taxiing for so long, we’d burned up too much fuel so we had to go back to the gate and refuel we finally got off the ground 4 hours late.

But heading towards Indy on this trip, the weather was terrific and we arrived on time. Well, sort of. We touched down and then had to wait for 30 minutes for our gate to clear. We got off of Alaska Airlines and headed towards American Airlines to see if we could catch an earlier flight to Indy. The gate agent told us to wait while she finished boarding the confirmed passengers. After calling some names and pulling their boarding passes, she turned to me and asked, “What can I do for you?” “We have reservations for Indy but we’re trying to make an earlier flight,” I said. “Well, I have 17 people on the standby list, I don’t know why you are waiting.” Well, because that’s what you told me to do

We left and went to find something to eat. Travel Tip 3: I’ve eaten in all the restaurants in O’Hare and found every one to be awful and, yes, that includes Wolfgang Puck’s and the Macaroni Grill. There is one single exception: Down in the food court on Concourse K is a sandwich joint that has the best corned beef west of New York .

We boarded our flight from Chicago to Indianapolis and, thanks to the time change, arrived in Indy before we left. For those of you who have not been to Indy in some time, prepare for a new experience. There is now a completely new and modern airport that looks like something, well, from the movies. The place is huge, much larger than a city of this size can justify. Just speculation, but my bet is that the town fathers figured that air traffic out of Indianapolis would dramatically increase due to the presence of one or more discount airlines; the plan was that Indianapolis would become a regional hub and rival Cincinnati for air traffic. That hasn’t happened, as numbers I saw showed that traffic into Indianapolis actually dropped 9% last year. I saw the same thing happen some years back in Colorado Springs . I used to have to travel into Colorado Springs for business and was used to flying into the old Colorado Springs Airport . When my wife and I traveled to Pikes Peak for the first IRL race there, we traveled into that same airport. The next year, a bigger, grander place had been built on the other side of the airport and I was not quite sure why as the old airport certainly seemed adequate. Come to find out, a discount airline named, I think, Western Pacific had convinced the Colorado Springs officials that a new airport was needed because they were going to be overwhelmed with traffic from Denver . Their thinking was they would offer low fares to and tell folks in Denver it would only take 15 minutes longer to drive from the city to Colorado Springs than it would take to drive to Denver ‘s new airport, DIA which was way out in the sticks and suffered from a bad reputation due to well-publicized baggage snafus. Thanks to their efforts, at one point Colorado Springs was the fastest-growing airport in the United States . Then DIA fixed their problems, Western Pacific promptly went broke, and t he next year, Colorado Springs became the fastest shrinking airport in the country. So, today, when you arrive in Colorado Springs , they taxi up in front of a giant airport that looks like a ghost town and the old airport sits there crumbling away on the other side of the runway.

The same sort of thing appears to be happening in Indianapolis . That airport is nice and shiny but it is big. Really big and virtually empty. We walked through the long concourses and through the main lobby and walked some more and finally found our way down to the baggage claim. During this hike, the passengers off our flight were the only people in the place. We waited for our bags to come off and slowly but surely here they came. At least they came off looking fine but then here came my last bag.

I traveled quite a bit and I’ve had suitcases damaged but I’ve never seen anything like this. All my belongings were strewn up and down the belt; shirts, pants, underwear, shoes, race backpacks, everything was on the belt. An agent came out with a couple of plastic totes and began dragging my stuff off and throwing it into these big trays. I finally saw my bag; it was completely wide open the zipper was broken and had been torn away from the frame and what I will call the top flap was folded in half.

It appeared that my suitcase had been dropped from the belly of the airplane straight onto the tarmac. Needless to say, I was slightly unhappy. I asked the baggage agent what my next move was and she rather smugly said. “Well, we can resolve this right now.” She went in a backroom and came out with a small suitcase and said, “You can put all your stuff in this bag, leave your suitcase behind and we’re done.” No, we’re not.

Traveler Tip number 2: Don’t take the offer. The suitcase she was going to give me was much smaller and cheaper than the one they had destroyed. I left with my old suitcase and a claim form just before I left Indianapolis I dropped off the damaged suitcase and a claim form with all the documents that they had requested, and different agent told me that they would send my suitcase to Dallas and either replace it or repair it. Either way I’m far better off than had I taken the cheap piece of crap they were giving me on Wednesday night.

Special Indy tip: Once you leave baggage claim, you don’t have to take the escalators to get to your rental car. If you follow the signs, they will direct you up several flights of escalators, across the tunnel and into the parking garage where you will take more escalators back down to ground level to get to your car. A much easier approach is simply gone out the door, across a pedestrian walkway into the garage.

We found our way to our rental car and headed downtown. I’ve been to Indy so many times, I don’t even need a GPS and know exactly where to go. Indy tip number two: We like to stay downtown – but not really downtown. Going to Indianapolis , you have numerous choices for hotels but they tend to cluster. You can stay up on the north side but that’s a long drive to the track and a long ways to the action downtown. Same thing applies to hotels down on the south side off of 65. We like staying downtown so we can walk to the restaurants and stores and feel a part of the general buzz but we’ve also found that staying at the really nice hotels downtown can be something of an issue. In the past, we’ve stayed at the Omni and the Crowne Plaza and a couple other places downtown and although those hotels a very nice, parking is an issue as you always have to valet park so you can’t come and go. For the last six or eight years we’ve stayed in either the Marriott Courtyard or the Marriott Residence Inn which are just a couple blocks away from the downtown core. We checked into our hotel and began to unpack, a task made easier since my suitcase was already open. I looked at the clock and it was about 1030 local which meant that we had been traveling for about 12 hours. We turn on the TV and went to bed.

Since there is now no track activity on Thursday we used that as kind of a rest and unwind day. We fooled around a little bit, did a little shopping went past the track and just soaked up a little of the Indy ambience. Instead of going out for dinner, we just went to Marsh’s and grabbed some chicken and salad. I did notice, however, that the hotels and general traffic in the downtown area did not seem to be as busy as I would’ve expected.

Friday is now Carb Day and although some traditionalists objected to the schedule change, it is, by most accounts, a huge success. I’m just glad that IMS didn’t rename it Tire Pressure Day. Through something of a fluke, we had VIP infield parking passes so we drove straight from our hotel into the infield and parked right behind the hospitality area just off Gasoline Alley, a first for me. We got there in plenty of time and walked up to the Tower Terrace and found the place was packed. In my view, there was a larger crowd there for Carb Day than Pole Day. We watched the final practice, watched the Freedom 100 and then decided to wander the grounds a bit. That may have been a mistake. There was a huge crowd, reportedly the biggest Carb Day crowd ever. It was hot and uncomfortable, it was really hard to even walk around. There were crushes of people, many of them drunk. Real drunk. I finally fought my way into the men’s room and patiently stood in line. While I was waiting to get to the urinal, heard a bunch of screaming and hollering which I didn’t quite understand. Is this the first time these guys have been drunk, what’s the big deal? I looked to my right and saw very attractive young blonde girl with her shirt around her neck exposing a pretty nice set of implants. Isn’t science great? By the time I processed this, she turned around, began removing her shorts and was preparing to pee in the urinal at which point, she started hollering to the crowd, “Don’t touch me!” I left, figuring I didn’t need to see that. I’ve been to concerts, bars, porting events and racetracks before but I’ve never seen a girl pee in a urinal. If you took this gal home to mom, she’d slap both of you and throw you out of the house.

We wandered around for a bit but the crowd started getting a little ugly and since we’ve already seen Three Doors Down twice, at Indy and at Homestead , we decided to make our escape for a while. I dropped off my wife to go shopping and then came back to the track only to discover that since the band was playing, they weren’t letting anybody back into park. I learned a long time ago not to argue with the yellow shirts

I then decided to get my radio programmed and went looking for the Racing Electronics trailer. This was Friday, two days before the race as I drove down Georgetown I noticed that there are far fewer vendors and trailers than there used to be. When we first started coming to Indy in the middle 90s, there were vendors down most of the short chute on 16th and a good ways out Crawfordsville Road as well as being down the virtual length of the main straight on Georgetown . That’s all changed. There are now virtually no vendors on 16th across from the main gate, there are just a few on Crawfordsville Road heading west and where once the vendors extended almost to Turn Four on Georgetown, there are probably only a third as many. Combined with what I’ve seen from the hotel activity, my bet is that there are still a lot of people coming to Indy for the 500, but they’re not staying as long. There must be far more people who come in the night before or the morning of the race and leave immediately following the event.

Saturday is Parade day, an event that my wife likes almost as much as the race itself. We have settled into a pretty comfortable routine after many years, and have our Parade strategy pretty well figured out. We leave the hotel a little before 10 and have breakfast at Le Peep. We get done a little after 11 and walk another block to Pennsylvania . There’s a large public building diagonally across from the Indianapolis Star and we always go up there and stand. A couple of times, we bought tickets but it was a giant pain in the neck to find your seats and we discovered you can see the parade easily for free. This year’ s parade was the usual combination of cornball acts and high school marching bands, some of whom were very good floats. And don’t forget the D-list celebrities. Predictably, the biggest rounds of applause go to Mario, Helio (a.k.a ‘Elio) and Danica. Especially Danica. There were two little girls directly in front of us, sisters about eight or nine, and when Danica came into view, they started jumping up and down and yelling and I thought there was going to be an accident. It’s really fun to see how excited some of these kids get over her and occasionally we miss the impact the Danica has on the sport.

Saturday afternoon, we had a little time to kill, so we went to the zoo which we hadn’t done in several years. The highlights for me were a visit to the bear exhibit where they have two young adult grizzlies that were captured about 5 miles from my house. We also saw walruses that came from about 50 miles from where I used to live in Nome a polar bear that came from someplace in northern Alaska as well. Glad to see our state is doing its part to populate the nation’s zoos.

Saturday night, again, our routine is to go to what used to be IRP and is now ORP and watched the midgets. Going to a small track like that is truly an enjoyable way to spend an evening; it is a relaxed and comfortable atmosphere, lots of cars, smoke, action just a great way to spend a night. We left around ten and got back to our hotel for a quick snack and went to bed, hoping that the questionable weather reports for the race were going to be wrong. On the way up in the elevator I bumped into Al Speyer of Firestone. I introduced myself and thanked him for his contribution to the sport. He was pleasant but he looked pretty tired and one could tell he had been working pretty hard. He was heading for bed early which surprised me a little I would have thought that he would have been tied up with sponsor events until the wee hours but he had enough.

Race day morning dawned and I threw up the curtains to see dazzling blue skies. We went downstairs, had a quick breakfast and drove to the track. Again thanks to the parking pass, we drove right to that great parking spot in the infield. For the last 12-14 years, we’ve taken the bus so driving to the track was a new experience for me.

We spent a pleasant hour or so just kind of wandering around the speedway before the big event. We then walked across the track to head to our seats in E Penthouse; oddly enough, this was the first time I’ve ever actually set foot on the track itself. I’ve taken the bus tour many times before and I even drove around the track once in a rental car during Community Day, but I’ve never actually in on the track. I’ve never had a hard card or credentials that allow me access to pit lane or the track surface itself. I got down on my knees and looked at the track and was a little surprised by a couple things. First of all, the service is very smooth; there are almost no seams where the individual courses of asphalt were laid down. Second, those NASCAR drivers are a bunch of whiners. You really have to examine closely the so-called grooves that were left by the diamond grinding three or four years ago.

We walked on through the grandstand and up to our seats high above turn one. A word about seats: Over the years, I’ve sat in a lot of different locations in the track. In fact, during practice, 10 years ago or so my favorite spot was inside the infield grandstands in the North short chute that no longer exist; as we know, those were torn down to make way for the F1 course. It was at the top of those stands that I stood the day in ’96 when Arie Luyendyk ran the fastest lap ever at the Speedway , one of the most breathtaking things I’ve ever seen. And a partisan aside here – there are those, including me, who still think that that Arie’s lap that day was the fastest lap ever turned by a racecar on a closed circuit. Yes, I know that CART reported higher speeds at Fontana but they used a different measuring system for that track and the time may have been inaccurate . But enough of that – As I said, I’ve sat all over the track and have always found that the E Penthouse seats are, by far the best seats in the joint, he penthouse tickets are the way to go. I bought my tickets off eBay and, no doubt, paid too much for them. The lady I bought them from has had these tickets in her family for many years: her husband used to operate some kind of sports marketing firm and at one time, he had the rights to over 100 seats that fell into her lap when he died.

Just like complaints about Carb Day and qualifying, I know some traditionalists are not in favor of the move to a later starting time but I think it was a smart decision. I remember a couple years ago looking out over the stands to the west when the green flag fell for the start of the race and being struck by the thousands of people that were still trying to make their way into the speedway. Now, folks have all day to get there and amble into the speedway and take their seats. When the green flag fell, there were very few people still coming to the track. In my view, that’s a good thing.

As for the race itself, you no doubt saw the same things that I saw, a tough tactical battle that played out over the course of the afternoon. Early on, as we know, it looked like Helio (a.k.a. ‘Elio) and Briscoe were going to run away with things and then the Ganassi cars took over and drove away. For much of the race, I was certain that this year’s race was going to end up being a duplicate of last year’s race which was pretty dull as Scott Dixon clearly had everyone handled. That turned out not to be the case. What about 40 laps to go, I began to wonder about fuel and wonder if, by chance, the race might fall into someone else’s hands other than ‘Elio. I started hunting around on my scanner to try and figure out who had fuel enough to go the distance and I was struck by how calm both Wheldon and Danica were when talking to their pits. Previously, every time I listened to Danica on the radio, she was almost frantic and was very excited and very nervous. This year, she was talking with Michael Andretti and in very calm and measured tones said ‘we’ve got enough fuel left, let’s go get them.’ Wheldon was a little more animated but he, too, seemed to think that he was going to be able to run to the finish and I go the impression that there was a chance that ‘Elio might run dry. Then came the Meira-Matos crash and any chance of a Wheldon or Danica victory was gone. ‘Elio cruised to the finish and was very emotional as has he won the race. I know many feel that he puts on some sort of an act but it is most assuredly not. I was in Indy for Pole Day while wandering through the garage area, I spotted ‘Elio shaking hands and talking with a couple of fans. I went over and as he got ready to peddle away on his bicycle, I shook his hand and said, “Congratulations, thanks for being here.” I could see the tears were welling up in his eyes as he was plainly affected by the simple fact that he was allowed to continue his pursuit of what he loves.

The checkers fell and we leisurely ambled back down across the track once again to our terrific parking spot in the infield which was nice instead of having to rush to catch the bus. On the way back across the track I stopped long enough to gather up a pocket full of marbles and take them with me although I’m not quite sure what I will do with them. We watched ‘Elio in victory circle and his victory lap and then got into the car to drive back downtown to our hotel. IMS certainly has the traffic there figured out it; took us about 15 minutes from the infield to 16th Ave and once we got on 16th, all the lanes were operating east and all the cross streets and intersections were closed. We drove straight downtown and were back at our hotel in less than 25 minutes, a shorter time than it takes during the week when there is no race. We went to the grocery store and got some dinner and went back to the hotel and watched the tape delayed broadcast and on that subject, the less said, the better. After watching Versus telecast the first couple races, it is pretty clear that ABC simply does a very poor job of covering these kinds of events. They had lots of cameras and the production values were solid but the on-air talent is not very good and the entire focus of the event was sloppy and amateurish.

The next morning we got up and leisurely drove to the airport for our afternoon departure. Some years back, we used to try to hustle out of town on Sunday night but learned a long time ago that was pretty silly. Now, we travel on the Memorial Day Monday and get home Monday evening in plenty of time to go to work on Tuesday and do just fine. Our flight left Indy at 4:30 and, thanks to the 4-hour time change working in our favor, we walked into our home a little after 10 that evening.

This was, simply put, another fabulous weekend. The weather was great, we saw everything we enjoy and there is absolutely nothing like the Indy 500. I will go back every year until I can’t climb the stairs to get in the stands anymore and then I’ll watch from the infield. Yes, we’re already making plans for next year and the years of follow. And even though my wife and I are lifelong Alaskans, for one day in May we feel as if we are truly back home again in Indiana.

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