This Weekend's Question: Your Indy or Indy Car Experience  

As Greg had mentioned, we also had the Indianapolis Star newspaper delivered to our house during the month of May back in the late 60's through the 80's.  It was really the only way back then to know what was happening.....

My earliest memories of Indy are listening to the radio in the late 60's. After a few years of that, my dad and I decided to go in person.  He had attended once or twice before I was old enough to attend...  I know he was there when Graham Hill won in 1966 - I would have been 5.

We went to every Indy 500 between 1971 and 1985.  We tried to go to the 1986 race, and had tickets for it, and I'm pretty sure we were in our seats on race day (Sunday), and the following day (Monday)... probably sitting there in the rain hoping it'd stop raining and they'd get the track dried, but at some point they postponed it all the way to that coming Saturday (I think it was mainly because of TV contracts.).  That had never been done before...  It was always that they would run it on the next day that they were able, not postpone it all the way to the weekend which was still many days away.  We were not able to spend the rest of the week in Indiana and/or drive back out the following weekend, so our streak of attending ended.....  Kind of soured us on attending in person - Tickets went unused, and I've never been back, although I probably should have returned at some point.

Saw Al Unser Sr win in my favorite car (The Johnny Lightning Special).  Saw Mark Donahue win in my other favorite car (Sunoco #66.)

Sadly, saw Swede Savage's crash in 1973 in turn 4, and he would pass away a month later.  That event (or I should say the impact of that event on me as a 12 year old who thought about very little other than racing) had a lot to do with me starting a website 30 years later, but that's a story for another time....

I was sitting between turns 1 and 2 when Danny Sullivan did the famous spin and win right in front of us.  The crowd went nuts....

Attended Indy Car races at Langhorne and Trenton until they stopped having them.  Always liked going in the pits after the races and making my way around looking at the cars and standing near drivers who hung around after the races for a while.  I think I got a couple of autographs, but mainly, I'd just stand in the background....  It was a pretty cool thing to do as a kid who had only read about and seen pictures of guys like Foyt, Andretti, Rutherford, Johncock, McCluskey, Bettenhausen, Vukovich, McElreath and more.  I guess just actually seeing them in person was good enough for me.

Got to meet Denny Zimmerman at an Old Bridge reunion many years ago.  I was at Indy the year that Denny was Rookie of the Year.  50 years later.... didn't matter....I thought that was really cool to just "chat" with an Indy 500 racer.

Had two cool experiences with Johnny Rutherford.  The first was sneaking out to the actual pit stall side of  the pits from my infield pits bleacher seat as soon as the checkered flag waved at Pocono back in the mid 70's.  I was standing in Rutherford's pits when he pulled in and stayed there while he was getting out of his car.  (Again, pretty cool for a 13 or 14 year old or so.... feeling like I was almost part of the crew!.)

About 25 years later, I got to tell Johnny the story in person at the SEMA show in Las Vegas.  I was working a booth for a company that I worked for at the time, but somehow ended up abandoning that and making my way over to "The Good Guy's" booth as I was going to go to the Outlaw races that night on their $'s (thank you Good Guys!) and Johnny was walking around the show, and walked over to the Good Guys booth where I was kind of inside (looked like I was working for them I guess) at that moment, and he started talking with me about street rods/etc.,.  Super friendly... looked at you in the eye when he spoke to you....  I reminded him about the Pocono pit deal from the early 70's... and I provided such detail (star his helmet... his wife Betty was there...., etc.,) that I think he thought I might be a stalker!  I was always a JR fan, but even more so after seeing him in person like that, even though his racing days were over at that point.

I don't know for sure, but I might be an Indy Car fan for even a year or two longer than I've been a short track fan... I barely remember drawing pictures of  race cars, but they were all Indy Cars...Don Branson's and others when I was probably 5 or 6?  It was probably because I showed so much interest in Indy cars that my dad and I started going to East Windsor, Langhorne and Trenton at some point in the 60s.

Lot's of memories over those 60 years, and nothing brings it all together than watching the Indy 500 every May.