Indy 500 filled with legendary tradition at a fever pitch

INDIANAPOLIS - Mike Griffin has the deep baritone voice of the former radio announcer that he is. His face is tanned and rugged, and his stare says, "Don't even think about it."

Griffin, co-owner of Panther Racing, looks as tough and worn as an aged pair of Red Wing boots.

Yet a couple of decades ago, in a time before self-improvement authors told men that it was OK for them to cry, Griffin put on a pair of hot-pink pants and went to a car race at a track that housed a zone of iniquity known as The Snake Pit.

Such is the power, the pull of the Indianapolis 500 and its home for 90 previous races, Indianapolis Motor Speedway: They cause rational people to do irrational things.

Drivers will forget the excruciating pain of horrific injuries, car owners will mortgage their homes and tap into their children's college funds, and fans will drink muddy water and sleep in a hollow log (figuratively, of course) to get to Indy on Memorial Day weekends.

Want spooky? Some even say the lure of the speedway has supernatural overtones.

Indianapolis Motor Speedway was built in 1909 as a 328-acre test facility for the American auto industry, which, at the time, was growing in central Indiana. The original surface was crushed rock and tar. But the surface was soon repaved with more than 3 million bricks.

Small auto and motorcycle races were run over the next couple of years. In 1911, a large, grand car race was planned. It would have a big purse and be on Memorial Day weekend.

In 1927, the track was bought from the original owners by flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker, who had raced in a couple of 500s. The track fell into disrepair during World War II. In 1945, it was bought by Tony Hulman, whose family continues to own it today.

The speedway has grown to the point that it seats a quarter-million fans, and the 500 is billed as the largest single-day sporting event in the world. Some of the warmest moments of athletic triumph, and some of the grimmest moments of mortal tragedy, have occurred there.

Above and beyond everything that has occurred in the 500 is what driver John Andretti, whose family has experienced the highs and lows of the place, called "the power of Indy" the other day.

Indy, he said, gets into your blood.

Ron Hemelgarn is a longtime IndyCar team owner whose driver, Buddy Lazier, won the 500 in 1996. Hemelgarn said: "I don't know what it's like to be a drug addict, but I imagine it is something like the feeling for Indy. It's an addiction."

How and why?

"That," driver Richie Hearn said, "is hard to explain."

For many, it's the endless list of traditions associated with the place: the milk, the parade, the high school bands, the bagpipes, the songs, Jim Nabors, Tom Carnegie, the covered grandstands, the yard of bricks, the balloons, Georgetown Road, Gasoline Alley, the Pagoda and on and on.

It is The Race, people who have attended will agree.

"Hey, I respect Humpy Wheeler," John Barnes, a team owner who has wrenched Indy cars for decades, said of the president of Lowe's Motor Speedway. Wheeler will tell you his Memorial Day NASCAR race has passed Indy as an event.

"He's a great promoter," added Barnes, "but this is 400,000 people and more tradition and more of a spectacle" than the Coca Cola 600 will ever have.

Indy addiction can start at an early age.

The other day, Andretti talked about how fellow students at his high school near the speedway would jump out of windows when teachers weren't looking and run over to watch their heroes practice.

Hemelgarn saw his first 500 when he hitchhiked to Indy from his home in Dayton, Ohio, in the early 1960s.

"I dreamed that somehow, some way, after that I was going to get involved in this," he said. "It got into my blood, that's for sure."

Hemelgarn owns a suite at the speedway these days. He visits it more often than just the month of May. He said he likes to come to the speedway in the dead of winter, when nobody is at the track. He sits in his suite and looks out at the snow coming down and his mind takes over.

"This place is magic," Hemelgarn said.

Magic?

"Absolutely," he says as he stands in the concrete garages that line Gasoline Alley. "It's haunted."

Don't laugh, said Gary Pedigo, a fellow team owner and lifelong resident of Indianapolis .

"It's mystical," said Pedigo, who says he has had hundreds of dreams about the place. "It probably is haunted. It may sound goofy, but I think there are things that happen here that they (the owners of the speedway) don't want to talk about."

To drivers, the speedway is more about obsession than mysticism. To them, the track and the 500 are not a place and a race. They are sustenance.

"You know, it's weird," Hearn said. "You really don't have to win the race to conquer it. Just getting in is big. But I get (perturbed) when I'm not here (in May). I get upset. I didn't race last year. I watched on TV. It was horrible."

Hearn understands why drivers come out of retirement to take one last shot at winning Indy. He understands why Mario Andretti last year pondered taking a shot at almost 70 years old. He knows why, over the last decade, headstrong team owner after headstrong team owner has swallowed massive amounts of pride to depart the Champ Car series and join the IndyCar Series ranks.

Al Unser Jr. was the first to defect from Champ Car. That was in 1990, five years after the Indy Racing League and what was then called the CART series bitterly split apart.

Asked why he did it, why he risked the scorn of peers and verbal wrath of open-wheel fans by defecting, Unser said, "My main thing is, I want to get back to Indy."

Few who have driven at Indy merely want to come back. It's more as if they need to come back.

"To be quite honest," driver Dan Wheldon said this week at Indy, "the only thing that matters is this. This is the be-all and end-all."