CUP: More To The Brickyard Than Just A Race

Sprint Cup

CUP: More To The Brickyard Than Just A Race

Indianapolis Motor Speedway is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year...

Tom Jensen | Posted July 25, 2009 Speedway, IN

'This track has always been special to me before I ever raced here,' said Jeff Gordon(Photo: LAT Photographic)

From the moment you drive through the tunnel at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, you can tell you’re someplace special, not at just another race track.

The first Daytona 500 was run in 1959, when Eisenhower was president and the Cold War was heating up. But Indy opened 50 years before that in 1909, when the average price of a new home in America was $4,500 and a loaf of bread cost a nickel. The year Benny Goodman and Errol Flynn and Sen. Joseph McCarthy were born, the year the U.S. Mint issued the first Lincoln pennies and the U.S. Navy opened a far away base called Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu, Hawaii.

Indy was here long before the Internet, television or radio, before most families even had automobiles. And in the century that’s come and gone since it’s opened, the 2.5-mile track has played host to thousands of brave young men and women who came here to race. Over its long history, at least 60 drivers, crewmen, track workers or spectators have lost their lives in crashes here.

Tradition — and the respect for the bravery of those who raced before SAFER barriers, HANS devices and other modern safety measures — is something one can almost feel walking around the Brickyard. This track seems alive, the same way Wrigley Field or Fenway Park do for Major League Baseball fans.

And that sense of history is one of the many reasons this race is so special to the participants.

Indiana native Ryan Newman, who on Sunday will attempt to add his name to the list of Allstate 400 at the Brickyard winners, said he’s especially fond of the old roadsters that dominated the Indy 500 until the rear-engined revolution of the mid-1960s.

“I have always enjoyed watching the Indy roadsters and some of the (video) clips and pictures I've seen, are some of the best racing,” said Newman, driver of the No. 39 Stewart-Haas Racing Chevrolet Impala SS. “But the cars themselves are absolutely beautiful. They are the most beautiful race cars I think, ever built. Seeing some of those cars in the museum, the history of the sport, and guys like Parnelli Jones, A.J. Foyt and all the great drivers that drove those roadsters. To me, that was when Indianapolis was in its prime.”

Newman said he’s carrying on tradition when he races here.

“I like the history of the sport,” He said. “To know people like A.J. Foyt, Mario Andretti, Parnelli Jones, Jim Hurtubise and Mel Kenyon, that all those people have been through here at some point, walking the same path out to the pit lane and driving the same line on the racetrack that I am, is something really special. To know that I’m stepping in their footprint as I walk to my race car, that, to me is what’s special.”

Just by virtue of the fact that he grew up in Indiana, Newman knew all about racing at a young age, as did his boss and teammate, Tony Stewart. “You either grow up with a football, basketball or a steering wheel in your hand in this state,” said Stewart. “You are going to have one of those three in your hands by the time you graduate high school at some point.”

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tom Jensen

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