Kick-off At The Brickyard

Indianapolis—Opening day at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is very much like spring football.

Teams are excited for a new chance at the big prize. Some have new wrinkles to their game to try out. The roster is full of potential.

Angie’s List Grand Prix is the next event on the INDYCAR schedule, over the infield road course here, but make no mistake—the 500 is on everybody’s mind.

It’s almost like playing a small, private school in a tune-up before hitting the field to face Ohio State a week later.

Indianapolis is an egalitarian event. Unlike the Derby, yesterday, with fancy and expensive hats; men in blue seer-sucker suits and Panama hats, and children dressed like young princes and princesses, you come pretty much as you are.

That, to me, is the charm of the Indianapolis 500, the thing that keeps people, families, generations coming back year after year after year.

The whole place kind of opens its arms, embraces and engulfs you, no matter your place in the world, and you can never escape.

It does so physically, as you trod the enormous grounds from place to place.

It does so mentally, as your mind tries to digest the noise, the urgency, the speed of these cars.

It does so emotionally, with its dollops of patriotism and Memorial Day thanks to the military and our veterans.

Even Gomer Pyle, that lovable goof on TV, took on gravity and purpose here for years until this final solo last year.

The drivers at Indy often comment about their excitement when they enter the complex. It is indeed dramatic to enter from 16th Street, transit in a narrow little lane under the racetrack and stands, then emerge into the light inside facing the Museum.

This seems to be a common emotion. Fans say it, media say it, old-timers who have been to the Indy 500 consistently since childhood claim it too.

Someone should study a limbic connection between the Brickyard and the brain.

At a football stadium a true fan usually has a particular spot he wants to park and tailgate out of. More than likely he sits in the same seats, year after year.

It’s the same here. The young will come into the infield, pop open their coolers and spend the day drinking and sunning (if not sinning). The families come and sit in their grandstand seats in the sun, or the rain, with a few sandwiches and a six-pack chiller.

The better-off, perhaps sitting in seats handed down from the generation before, watch from beneath partial overhangs that cover much of the higher grandstand seating along the front straightaway.

And the hangers-on, the rowdies, and the somewhat questionable ones throng in the Coke Lot, a huge parking area at the corner of Georgetown Road and 30th Street where anything goes on the night before the race.

Last year there was a murder there.

It’s Indianapolis. It’s the friendly Midwest (just stay out of the Coke Lot). It’s almost true to your picture-book world of middle America, what Nixon called the “silent majority”, what the founders called “We the People.”