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Sports events depend on attracting fans with the promise of instant gratification, and something like the Stanley Cup Playoff divisional finals have carried through on exactly that promise, with Chicago and Anaheim fighting for the West title while the New York Rangers and Tampa Bay battle for the East’s berth in the finals.

However, the annual epic known as the Indianapolis 500 had reserved a three-hour niche last Sunday where it commanded total attention. Juan Pablo Montoya won the 99th running of Indy, and some skeptics might wonder how, since he couldn’t seem to get any victories in NASCAR during the last few years. But the Indy 500 is a far different animal. You don’t start out with basically an equal car, and then battle your way to survival. In NASCAR, there is never a feeling of certainty that the best driver, or the best car, just won.

Montoya, who won the Indy 500 in 2000, driving for Chip Ganassi’s Target Team, had returned after trying his hand at Formula 1 and NASCAR, and the talent-laden Roger Penske team hired him on in a fourth car. It was clear the Penske and Ganassi teams had the upper hand – as usual – with nine of the top drivers in one or the other livery. Chuck Dixon of Ganassi won the pole, and took off to lead 84 laps of the 200 laps around the 2.5-mile oval. Will Power, a Penske driver, and teammate Helio Castroneves led their team. Montoya, meanwhile, was caught up farther back, and absorbed some damage from a first-turn, first-lap crash and had to pit. When he came out, he was hit hard enough from behind to damage a rear wing, and had to pit again, settling back in 30th place when the race finally restarted.

Montoya, always popular with Indy race fans, was masterful as he worked his way up through the field and emerged in contention with those drivers who had been up front all day. Montoya, a native of Colombia, outran Dixon, Tony Kanaan, Castroneves, and Simon Pagenaud, and had only Penske teammate Will Power in front of him. The two took turns drafting each other, passing and repassing for the lead several times.

Power’s crew had streamlined much of the downforce out of his car in exchange for slippery aerodynamics for the final segment, knowing he was going to be one of the leaders. Striving for top speed on the straightaway while forfeiting some handling capabilities in the turns appeared to be perfect strategy. Especially when Power made his move for first place in the closing laps.

Surprisingly, Montoya ignored a strategy to wait for a final bid with a lap to go, and he made his move and gained first with three laps remaining. Regardless of which one you wanted to win, it was breath-holding time as Power seemed certain to use that extra speed to get close enough for a final pass. Instead, Montoya was able to hold him off and win the race.

The race restored some of the old-style tradition and drama to the Speedway – something that had been mostly missing ever since the Indy Racing League locked out the higher-profile CART teams in the mid-1990s, forcing CART to form a rival league and severely damaging the credibility of both.

It was like the good-ol’ days when the Penske team and the Ganassi team were battling for the upper hand. Penske had Montoya and Power 1-2, Ganassi had Charlie Kimball and Dixon 3-4, then came Honda’s Graham Rahal (co-owned by David Letterman) and Marco Andretti 5-6, followed by Helio Castroneves. Simon Pagenaud, another Penske driver, and a factor all race, dropped to 10th at the end, and Kanaan was up front all day until losing control and crashing into the outside wall.

The drama started before the race this time. All the cars were Dallara bodies, and all had either Chevrolet or Honda engines operating under new rules. At Indianapolis, the teams could choose to load their Dallara cars could be differentiated more by allowing them to design their specific body shells. Chevrolet chose a sloping rear, topped with a horizontal wing for downforce. Honda chose a more intricate design, with a taller rear peak topped with a flat panel, while smaller panels with horizontal wings topped both rear tires, and the sidepods were specifically designed for downforce.

At 230 miles per hour, it was still plenty difficult to guess which was which as they flashed by in a blur of color. But a peculiar decision made in the name of safety right before qualifying set the stage for some controversy. The Chevrolet design, it seems, enhanced speed, while the Honda design, tested endlessly based on all Honda had learned from countless road-racing seasons, was refined to never lose the downforce that is so pivotal at Indy. The two designs seemed equal, until things got serious with final qualifying set-ups.

Then Castroneves and two other drivers found the handling vanished in the turns. The rear got light, danced around, and the cars were hurled into end-over-end somersaults into the outer wall and catch-fence. All three escaped injury, but all three were driving car with the Chevrolet engine design. The Indy Racing League took action immediately, with qualifying set to begin. They order turbocharger pressure reductions on all cars, lowering the peak power, and they insisted teams use race-day set-ups instead of the super-slippery qualifying plans they had.

The Chevrolet teams and drivers were greatly relieved that their cars were converted from ill-handling to stable, while the Honda-powered teams were understandably upset. Their countless hours of refining their set-ups meant their cars were able to run any speed without losing stability, yet they were forced to conform to the rules instituted to make the Chevy-powered racers safe.

It was sort of like a group of rowdy students being kept after school, and the orderly students being forced to stay after with them. Had the Hondas been allowed to stay with the boost they’d been designed to run, Rahal and Andretti probably would have run right up with the leaders instead of accepting fifth and sixth.

Indy History Needn’t Be Ancient

Among the most intense memories in a long career of sportswriting are the annual pilgrimages I made to Indianapolis for the 500. The first one I ever covered was 1969, when Mario Andretti won the first of what we all thought would be a half-dozen Indy 500 victories. But he never won another.

The next year, Al Unser won his first of two in a row. Working for the Minneapolis Tribune, which was eager to expand my coverage of motorsports, allowed me to expand my presence at Indy, and we ultimately rented an apartment for the month of May, which was far more cost-effective than being the victim of the price gouging that went with 500 weekend. That also allowed me to attend both qualifying weekends and write enough feature advances to prepare all of our readers for the biggest weekend in sports.

When it was at its peak, the Indy 500 drew about 400,000 fans. Think about that. A huge 2.5-mile oval race track, outlined by enough seats and standing room area to house five times the population of Duluth for one event. In the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, that was the largest sports crowd in the world, and the first qualifying weekend, with its pole-winning opening, was probably second, with at least 200,000 watching the cars go around four laps, one at a time.

 I stayed at a modest hotel, for about $60 a night, for qualifying. When I came back for the race, the same modest room was $350 for race weekend, with a three-night minimum. Later on, it got expensive. Every square foot of every yard in the vicinity surrounding the track was covered with either cars or people camping out. For being such a mob, it was pretty incredible there weren’t major issues for the police to handle. They instead could focus on traffic control, waving people in one way, and sweeping the traffic out going the opposite direction afterward.

 One of my major accomplishments was that I was covering the Stanley Cup Playoffs at the same time for the Minneapolis Tribune. So after covering qualifying and writing a dozen preview features for Indy, I went off to cover the Stanley Cup finals between the Philadelphia Flyers and the New York Islanders. I figured there was no way I could get away to return to Indy, but the Islanders managed to beat the Flyers in the sixth and deciding game on Saturday night in then-new Nassau County Coliseum, so I wrote hastily – then went to work. I found a way to hook up with an early morning flight from New York to Indianapolis, and reserved a rental car to be picked up at the airport.

When I got to Indianapolis, I loaded all my luggage in the trunk of the rental car, then had a great idea. Traffic moving to the track was the logjam of all time, I knew, but the shuttles that take people from the airport to the track had special lanes. I rented a spot on the shuttle, left the car parked at the airport, and made it to the race with plenty of time to spare. I wrote my follow-up to the previous night’s Islander victory from the press box at Indy, then turned my attention to the race. When it ended, I ran around and got all the quotes and interviews for a full story and a couple of sidebar features.

Then I caught a ride to the airport, jumped in my rental car, and drove to Chicago, where I caught a plane back to Minneapolis.

 Over the years, spectacular moments decided several races, and after looking through some of my many archived stories and photos from past years, I came upon my coverage of both the 2000 and 2001 Indy 500 races. Turns out, both of those races made interesting previews for this year’s race.

 In 2000, the four-year feud that had driven the more sophisticated CART race teams – including Penske and Ganassi – away from Indy to start their own league, had ended. The end came when Penske’s high-buck sponsors said they simply wanted to race at Indy, so he came in. Ganassi and others followed. Tony George the boss at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, boasted that he had won the battle. But the race proved otherwise.

Montoya, driving for Ganassi, was a 24-year-old rookie at Indy in the 84th running of the Memorial Day race. By winning, he became the first rookie in 34 years to capture the 500.
One year later, a Roger Penske driver named Helio Castroneves won the 85th Indy 500 and started his own tradition. Former CART drivers finished first through sixth, in case any leftover fans who thought the Indy Racing League got the better of the four-year split. After guzzling some of the traditional milk, Castroneves took off across the track to pay tribute to some of the 300,000 fans, and he spontaneously jumped up on the wire catch fence and climbed halfway up it. That became a Castroneves trademark when he won subsequent races.

Castroneves was only 26 then, anther Indy rookie, and when Penske teammate Gil de Ferran finished second in a matching car, it not only was 1-2 for Penske, but 1-2 for drivers from Brazil.

So now we flash forward to last Sunday and the 99th running of the 500. Castroneves, who now has won three Indy races, was a prime favorite and was competitive, but couldn’t stay up front at the end.

And Montoya, whose first Indy victory in 2000 saw him overtake and beat Penske’s best to triumph in a red Ganassi Target car, this time beat several Ganassi cars driving for Penske. What goes around – and around, and around, and around – comes around, at Indy. A true spectacle once again.