We have no idea what to expect when the green flag drops on Sunday’s Indianapolis 500, just as we had no idea what was going to happen during the previous 103 editions of the Greatest Spectacle in Racing. What we do know is that this year’s 500 is going to be weird.
For starters, it’s August and not the hallowed month of May. The most massive crowd in all of sports, more than a quarter of a million spectators in all, will be missing, relegated to a smattering of tailgate parties and lookie-loos in the parking lots and backyards of Speedway, Indiana, that surround Indianapolis Motor Speedway, aka the Racing Capital of the World.
“When we are in the cars doing work, it feels like May, other than it being like 100% more humid,” said Marco Andretti, pole sitter for Sunday’s race. “The strangest part is going to be Sunday when we walk beneath the Gasoline Alley sign and into the garage and the sea of humanity isn’t there. There’s an energy that comes with that. It’s my favorite part of race day. Not having that, that will definitely be the moment when it will feel the weirdest.”
But despite COVID-19’s worst efforts, even a race run during the wrong month in front of empty grandstands isn’t guaranteed to be Indy’s strangest race. After all, the Brickyard as we know it held its opening ceremonies almost exactly 111 years ago, on Aug. 12, 1909. That’s a long time. Plenty of calendar pages for conjuring up plenty of moments worthy of their own corner in Ripley’s Believe or Not, between the two-headed cow and the Tibetan skull bowls.
So, what’s this weekend’s primary competition in the race for Weirdest Indy Ever? In the words of the late great Tom Carnegie, Weeeee’re on it!
1909: Would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon?
On June 5, 1909, the 2.5-mile rectangular vision of Carl Fisher and the other IMS founding fathers was under construction, but they still wanted to host an event that would draw people from nearby Indianapolis to the farmland where their racetrack was being built.
So, they hosted a hot air balloon race. Keep in mind, this was only 5½ years after the Wright brothers had taken to the sky, so balloon races were still a very big deal. They were also still being filled with natural gas, so they were also still a very big dangerous deal. A total of 6,000 fans paid 50 cents each to watch the six participants — “aeronauts” — in the first Balloon National Championship. They cheered when the balloons launched. They grew silent when the spheres drifted out of view. Then they boarded the trains back to town, thinking, “Wait? Was that it?”
A southward wind pushed the balloons, named for the cities where they had originated, out of Indiana to towns all over the map, from Tennessee to Mississippi. The winners were co-pilots John Berry and Paul J. McCullough, who traveled for 26 hours, 35 minutes before landing the balloon dubbed University City just south of Fort Payne, Alabama, 382 miles from the Speedway. They had actually flown much farther south, but a northward wind was blowing them back north when Berry decided to land.
“If we had landed two hours sooner, then we would have been 50 miles farther south. We could have stayed up many hours longer,” Berry said later. “But I believe that we would eventually have been driven back in the vicinity of Indianapolis.”
That might not have been a bad idea. After sleeping in a home in Sigsbee, Alabama, Berry and McCullough had to talk their way onto a train to ride back to Indy with their deflated balloon.
1913: Congratulations, now walk this white line…
Nearly every year since 1936, when Indy 500 winner Louis Meyer first slugged down a bottle of milk in Victory Lane, every winner of the 500 has done the same. The only notable exception was 1993 winner Emerson Fittipaldi. The owner of multiple citrus farms instead grabbed a carton of orange juice … and was promptly booed by a couple hundred thousand tradition-obsessed Hoosiers.
In the third edition of the 500, Frenchman Jules Goux dominated the day, leading 138 of 200 laps and winning by a margin of more than 13 minutes. May 30, 1913, was a scorching hot day, and when Goux made his first pit stop, he screamed to his pit crew in French, “Get me some wine or I’m done!”
His crew, also French (he was driving a Peugeot, naturally), went into the crowd looking for some vin. According to reports in The Indianapolis Star the next day, the crew happened upon a group of Pittsburgh millionaires who hooked them up with a handful of small bottles of the good stuff, wine and champagne. Goux grabbed one of the bottles, broke the neck off on the pit wall, chugged the pint of wine, and drove back into the race. By race’s end, he had gulped down all six bottles. When he got to Victory Lane, he asked for another and promptly guzzled it down, too. That’s seven pints of wine.
Last year, as I was interviewing 2019 Indy 500 winner Simon Pagenaud, I reminded him of Goux. “Milk now,” the Frenchman said with a wink. “I’ll become Jules later tonight.”
1967: Turbocharged? No, turbine-charged
Today’s IndyCar entries are essentially stock cars, held to very tight guidelines and restrictions when it comes to power and shape. But Gasoline Alley used to be the wild welded west of engineering ideas. If you were to line up all of the out-of-the-box ideas that have hit bricks over the past 111 years, it would look like the Jawas lining up misfit droids to sell to the Skywalkers.
There was a diesel engine debut in 1931, a six-wheeled car in 1948, a Smokey Yunick-built racer with a sidepod engine housing in 1964, and a Battlestar Galactica-looking “Eagle Aircraft Flyer Special” that was built by an airplane designer and was nicknamed the Crop Killer before failing to make the race in 1982.
But the king daddy of open-minded race car thinking came during the so-called Jet Age of the 1960s, when turbine-powered machines started whooshing their way around Indy. In 1967, Parnelli Jones captured the nation’s imagination with his STP Day-Glo spaceship machine, even coaxing Johnny Carson to give it a spin. Jones had his Paxton Turbocar cruising at the front with only four laps to go when a bum bearing knocked him out of the race.
1981: Mario, Bobby and the ring
Every day, at least once per day, Mario Andretti slips on his 1981 Indianapolis 500 champion’s ring. But don’t bother scanning the Borg-Warner Trophy for Mario’s 1981 face. It isn’t there. That spot belongs to Bobby Unser, Uncle Bobby’s unmistakable smiling mug perpetually celebrating his third Indy win. On race day, it was Unser who pulled into Victory Lane, drank the milk and celebrated. But at the awards banquet the next night, it was Andretti who sat at the head table and accepted his ring. The final outcome of this race wasn’t determined in May at all but rather in a boardroom in October. And you thought this year’s August date was late.
Under caution on Lap 149, race leaders Andretti and Unser both pitted. The rules stated that when cars rejoined the field, they were supposed to blend in at the exit of Turn 2, behind the last car they saw at the end of the pit wall as they left pit road. Andretti did that. But Unser kept going, passing the entire field and settling in way up front by the pace car. Fifty-one laps later, Unser won with Andretti in second.
An incredulous Andretti prepared to file a protest, but then received a phone call that he’d won the race. After a summer of depositions and angry statements from lawyers, on Oct. 1, 1981, a full 131 days after the 500, a U.S. Auto Club appeals board finally ruled that robbing Unser of the win was too severe a penalty, reinstating him as champ but with a $40,000 fine.
To this day, the once-strong friendship between Unser and Andretti remains strained. At the root of the estrangement is Andretti’s refusal to hand over his ring. Unser says, “I no longer give a s— about that. I got a ring of my own that’s way prettier than his.”
1997: Fluids, in more ways than one
The 1997 Indy 500 was going to be weird no matter what, thanks to the political war that had ripped American open-wheel racing in half. The second 500 run under the banner of the ragtag Indy Racing League filled the field via strange rules and was unable to take the green flag on Sunday because of rain. On Monday, the prerace traditions were continued, but the Purdue marching band had to be in class and Jim Nabors had to return to California, so Florence Henderson sang “God Bless America” a cappella and a Nabors performance was played off an old cassette tape from 1993. They got 15 laps in … and then it rained again.
Finally, on Tuesday, the race was run. But early favorite Robby Gordon, who also ran the Coca-Cola 600 in Charlotte on Sunday night, had to pull into the infield grass when his car caught fire, caused by having sat in Gasoline Alley all night while full of fuel. On live national TV, Gordon looked like Ricky Bobby in “Talladega Nights” rolling in the grass to stop an invisible fire. There was a fire, but thanks to the methanol fuel, it couldn’t be seen.
What could be seen was Gordon’s yellow catheter tube, flopping around as he rolled around. Gordon said later, “I guess I forever answered the question racers always get most: How do we go to the bathroom in the car?”
Arie Luyendyk won the race, but in controversial fashion. When Tony Stewart wrecked, bringing out a caution with two laps remaining, everyone assumed the race would end under yellow, especially the 1-2 cars of Luyendyk and teammate Scott Goodyear. But suddenly, the green and white flags were waved, despite the fact that the yellow caution lights remained. While most of the field, including Goodyear, stayed paused for the lights, Luyendyk took off to grab the win. In Victory Lane, ABC Sports caught its second embarrassing moment of the day when the Dutchman screamed “Give me that god damned milk!”
Two weeks later, Luyendyk’s IndyCar life got even weirder. Another scoring snafu sent him to Victory Lane to dispute the results, where he was slapped in the face by another winner of multiple Indy 500s, A.J. Foyt.