Hooked on speed

Racing is an incredibly popular spectator sport. But a Midwestern transplant raised in the shadow of the Indy 500 finds that a lot of East Coasters still don't get it

by Kathleen Hughes

AS COATLESS APRIL pushes to May T-shirts and shorts, the driveway salt container is displaced by a bag of peat moss, and children start counting down the remaining weeks of school, I expect to see black-and-white checkered banners strung across porches and garages, proclaiming, "Welcome Race Fans!" After all, St. Patrick's Day decorations are replaced by Easter, which are replaced by the Indianapolis 500, right? Well, no. This is Rhode Island, not Indianapolis, and there's no epic car race here on the Sunday before Memorial Day.

Much as summer coming to Rhode Island is a wonderful thing -- especially after this past winter -- I can't avoid the annual May nostalgia for my hometown, Indianapolis, Indiana, the city dubbed the "Amateur Sports Capital of the World," which has been home to the greatest spectacle in racing since 1909. This longing is surprising to most East Coasters. And when I try to explain it -- the school bus arguments, before we lost all our baby teeth, about whether Johnny Rutherford or A.J. Foyt Jr. was the better driver, the giant school bulletin board speedways, with our class as the car rounding the fourth turn, summer as the brick finish line ahead, and our principal waving the checkered flag, which was also the pattern of my prom date's cummerbund years later -- I am met with skepticism. After all, one of the unofficial slogans of the Indianapolis 500 is similar to Mardi Gras, except it promises no beads: "Show us your tits!"

Perhaps I should elaborate.

In the track infield and in parking lots all along 16th Street, the long east-west avenue that borders the south side of the 90-year-old Indianapolis Motor Speedway, dozens of campers and trucks display handwritten poster

boards, as well as unofficial soft drink and beer banners, proclaiming this entreaty. Men and women sit alongside in lawn chairs holding beverages in cup coolers, with a radio turned up, watching the world go by. One can purchase T-shirts with the slogan. Whatever the tackiness, offense, and slight danger these people and their signs communicated to me as a child, when my mother would frown and pull me closer to her as we navigated the crowds, I saw a certain festive buoyancy (to coin a phrase), which was mostly good-natured, too.

For two years when I was a teenager, I didn't see much of the race because I was on the track's infield, reputedly a dangerous place for women given the copious amounts of men and alcohol and, of course, the slogan -- women on the infield were said to heed that command. But apart from this, the infield is the ultimate tailgate, because you can stay there and the sporting event literally takes place around you, as if you're holding court in the end zone of a football field.

The first year, when I was 17, I rode to the infield through a speedway tunnel at dawn, in a pick-up truck piled high with friends and hay to cover a keg of beer. The truck also carried six feet of scaffolding for observing the race -- you can't see a thing without this kind of device or a front-row parking spot. You can hear the race, of course, in high-decibel surround-sound, like a woodwind right up to your ear, which makes it all the more difficult to believe that I slept through the first 20 laps that day. What can I say? We'd been all up night and there was beer.

By the way, my parents didn't know I was doing this. Yet an experience I had that day remains, I think, one of my father's all-time favorite stories.

It was around 10 a.m. in the infield, which means lap 75 or so of 200. Brazilian Emerson "Emmo" Fittipaldi would eventually win. I was walking to the bathroom, overproudly wearing the sweatshirt of an Ivy League college to which I would matriculate in a few months. A relatively amiable looking guy in his mid-40s, sitting in a lawn chair on top of his camper, caught notice of me as I passed and offered some kind of catcall, but then asked how I was doing. I smiled politely but kept walking, given all those horror stories about the infield. And then he says, "Hey, what's your sweatshirt say?" I was ridiculously impressed with myself -- so I stopped and turned to allow him to get a good look at it.

"Yale," he says. "Isn't that something?"

I smiled again, but turned to keep going.

"Hey," the guy called after me, laughing, but I didn't stop. "Hey, show me your smart tits! Let me see those intel-lect-ual tits."

It's these Indy details -- including the amusing subversiveness of the textbook Indiana redneck, on top of his camper, giving me shit for an Ivy League sweatshirt, which is, I think, what my father loves about the story -- that make me a Hoosier as much as skipping school to go to a big game at Fenway marks someone as a native New Englander. I don't love basketball, God save me, but I do love the 500.

NOT ALL EAST COASTERS dislike car racing, of course. It ranks as the second most popular spectator sport after the NFL -- reflected most recently by the national outpouring of grief after the death of beloved veteran Dale Earnhardt in February. Hundreds of thousands of fans organized and attended satellite memorial services, including one in Warwick. Two Coke machines with the racer's likeness were stolen in the Providence area. "It's tough losing him," says Rocky Hudson, a volunteer firefighter in Warwick, who attended the Daytona 400 race in which Earnhardt was killed. "Everybody loves to see Dale, win or lose. When it happened, everybody grabbed each other." There's also a premier NASCAR (National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing) and Indy car course, the New Hampshire International Speedway, about 80 miles north of Boston, and a few smaller tracks around New England, such as Seekonk Speedway in Seekonk, Massachusetts.

But mostly, when car racing comes up in my discussion these days, here in Providence, New York City, or Boston, people give me that knowing, sympathetic, "We're all attached to things from our childhood/home" look. Or, the implicit suggestion is: "You're so quirky, being from Indiana and all." And if someone actually responds to my asserting, "The Indy 500 is so cool, you have no idea," the remark is typically: "You go to watch the crashes. Admit it."

I don't usually share the smart tits story right off the bat because it tends to confirm what well-to-do urban East Coasters suspect about car racing: that it's a beer-drinking, bales-of-hay-in-back-of-the-pick-up, Midwestern thing. Just consider some of The Onion's humorous recommendations for improving NASCAR safety: "Drivers who fail the pre-race Breathalyzer test must start from the Miller Genuine Draft `Think Before You Drink' back row," and, "To ensure concentration, drivers must abstain from sex with farm animals the night before a race." And this, coming from a publication that until recently was based in Madison, Wisconsin -- they're supposed to understand! Alas, they're in Manhattan now. Perhaps that explains it.

I'm by no means a car junkie, although I try to avoid automatics at all costs. I bought a VW Golf a few years ago, only to later learn it's considered a "driver's car." That suits my feminine machismo just fine but, frankly, what I like most is the fenced-off place where my dog can ride in the hatchback. Earnhardt's death struck me as awful news, but I've never been to Daytona. I just don't have much interest in going to any race other than the Indy 500 -- which means that my affection for racing is mostly about home, childhood, and regional pride in my Midwestern roots.

The Indy 500 features not Onion-maligned NASCAR stock cars, which are highly specialized vehicles similar in appearance to the Monte Carlos, Mustangs, Camaros, and Grand Ams that the boys in high school drove, but Indy cars, which look like Formula Ones and consequently get more respect (the difference is that Indy cars race only on ovals and are faster, while Formula One cars are more agile, to handle the street courses). Indeed, a distinct shift in attitude is evident if I mention that Indianapolis is now home to this country's only Formula One race. Urban East Coasters are sometimes impressed by this, because, I suspect, it's European -- Ferrari, Monaco, and all those signs of international affluence and sophistication.

But defending car racing can be more complicated, and sometimes I resort to describing the raw power of a vehicle rounding a sharp 440-yard banked turn at 230 mph, with another vehicle just inches away -- closer than most of us like to get doing 60 on I-95. I talk up the physics and the guaranteed adrenaline rush, no matter if you were weaned on the Curse of the Bambino and think car racing is a hobby, not a sport, and therefore worthy of derision.

Next, I'll gush about the roar that emanates from 33 cars lined up in 11 rows of three, with the fastest car on the inside of the first row, after track chairwoman Mari Hulman George, whose family has owned the speedway for nearly 60 years, commands, "[Lady/ladies and] gentleman, start your engines!" This roar, louder than anything you can anticipate, reverberates through your sternum, all the way down to your feet, almost like the sonic boom of the F-16s that sometimes execute a flyover before the race. This sound -- low and sonorous, and, to be honest, a little bit scary, it bespeaks such power -- can be heard for miles beyond the track, and yet it doesn't render people inaudible or make you want to plug your ears.

If it seems like I'm getting somewhere, if my skeptical urban chic compadre is actually listening to what I'm saying, thinking, maybe, the Indy 500 could be cool, then I'll push on: talking about the warm-up laps behind a pace car, when the drivers shimmy back and forth in their tight configuration, trying to warm their tires and make them sticky, for the same reason that gymnasts chalk their hands and hockey goalies rough up their ice -- they need purchase on their performance surface. And then, as the field rounds the final turn on the third or fourth pace lap, and start down the main straightaway, everyone, all 300,000 of us, lean forward to see if the pace car pulls off and the race begins -- this is perhaps the very best moment.

It's not unusual for one or two of these million dollar machines, which are as high-strung as prize racehorses, to stall or break down during pace laps, and if so, they need to be cleaned or pushed off, or restarted before the race can begin. There was 1982, when second-year Penske driver Kevin Cogan, starting in the number two position, gunned his turbo boost (or, in other accounts, his foot slipped on the clutch) at the starting line, pushing his vehicle right into Foyt, causing a multi-car, race-ending accident for veteran Mario Andretti. Foyt was characteristically ripshit. Hitting tennis balls against the garage, my brother and me -- all of 10 -- listened to this on the radio since live television coverage was blocked inside Indianapolis.

If all is well, and the pace car drops quickly into the pit lane, parallel to the main straightaway, the green flag will be waved, and the race will be off as soon as the cars cross the three-foot stripe of bricks that marks the start-finish line. The cars shoot forward, like jets catapulted off the deck of an aircraft carrier, as they jockey for low position going into the first turn. By the next lap, the lead cars are at moving at 220 to 230 mph, as they howl past and slide to a Doppler effect low, too fast to see in much detail beyond the color scheme.

And now my 500 pitch circles back to the beginning: if you've never seen a car going 230 mph barrel into a rounded quarter-mile, 90-degree turn, with another vehicle a breath away, and 300,000 people cheering, their heads swiveling, you better believe that your pulse will accelerate, you'll want to take a picture, or pick up binoculars to see what happens on the far side, or maybe you have a stop watch -- but you will react and adrenaline will course through your body.

ALAS, FOR BETTER or worse, the smart tits story is more popular with friends than any of my attempts at conveying the feel of the race itself. This is OK with me, as the race and its spectacle -- the slogan men and the Indianapolis elite who wear broad hats and white dresses to climb over Styrofoam coolers and Pabst cans, to their seats high above the rest, with views of three turns, where they pop magnums of Champagne like they're Vanderbilts -- are inseparable. Maybe it's the spectacle that prevents urban Easterners from enjoying the sheer sport and thrill of the race, much like a bad subway experience, catastrophic traffic, or a $15 hamburger could color a Midwesterner's afternoon at a New York City museum.

It's the culture of car racing, after all, that galls my Eastern friends. Some of this is understandable. Car racing, after all, is not a sport native to the region. NASCAR has Southern roots in moonshine runners racing their souped-up cars. Indy or CART racing has Midwestern roots, and Formula One is European. The race schedules reflect this -- the only major East Coast track north of Delaware is in Loudon, New Hampshire. Car racing is also a sport that is popular largely in places that don't have major league sports teams (or haven't had them for very long). East Coasters have dozens of teams in four major sports to champion.

Still, this doesn't preclude many cities and regions from being more receptive to car racing. Arizona, Colorado, and California all have sports teams, no significant historic or geographic link to car racing, and yet they host successful races. What I perceive as urban Northeastern hostility toward car racing, then, comes down to old Yankee pride in the face of an essentially Southern and Midwestern sport sweeping the country, and urban distrust of "country" folk, even if the whole rest of the country seems fairly enamored of them. Put more simply, urban East Coasters tend to think most everyone else, except for certain Californians and Western mountain residents who can't hack East Coast life, are a little slow-witted and dull.

CAR RACING DOES exist here, it's just not a headliner sport. Fifty years ago, car racing in New England was perhaps more on national par, with numerous tracks that have since closed. In the 1930s and '40s, races ran inside the former Boston Garden on a tenth of a mile track, as well as at a small track inside the old Rhode Island Auditorium on North Main Street in Providence. The cars were midget cars, torpedo-like, with squared off fronts and windshields, and "open wheels," meaning they lacked wheel wells. There were nine tracks in southern New England since mid-century -- five in Rhode Island alone, including Lonsdale, near Lincoln, which was built down into the earth, like the Rose Bowl Stadium, and could seat 33,000 people, according to racing historian R.A. Sylvia of Warwick.

The tracks were built amid post-war confidence and the swelling American love affair with the car, powered in part by the growth of interstate highways. Today, the survivors are speedways in Thompson, Connecticut, and Seekonk, Massachusetts. The others faded away for a variety of reasons; Lonsdale was at least partially doomed by the town of Lincoln instituting a seat tax for every event, regardless of whether a seat was occupied.

The 55-year-old Seekonk Speedway is both a relic of times gone by and a well-located facility aiming to ride the wave of NASCAR success. It was built by D. Anthony Venditti in 1945, because he liked to race cars, his son, Francis, now the Speedways' owner and general manager, tells me one recent morning in the track office, which looks out on Route 6. A large photo of D. Anthony, who died in 1991, and his wife, graces the mantle, as do pictures of track events over the years, including ostrich races, "motor polo," and infield boat racing. "My father was really a visionary," says Venditti, 65, citing his father's construction of the track and the quirky ideas he employed to keep it going. "He had tremendous foresight."

Little tracks like 14,000-seat Seekonk can be found around the country and are indicative, in some ways, of a region's socioeconomic composition, as well as its distance from a major city. There's a small track, for example, in West Liberty, Iowa, a small farm town that's home to a Louis Rich poultry plant, a large number of native Iowans, Thais who came via a church program, and former migrant Latino farm workers. Whenever I went, the stands were full of spectators for Saturday night races, much like those held during the summer in Seekonk.

In Mears, Michigan, a tiny farming and resort community about halfway up the west coast of the state, which is far from a major city, and has a similar combination of former migrant Latinos and long-time locals, a dune buggy track can back up traffic on an otherwise empty country road for miles.

The tracks in Seekonk, West Liberty, and Mears, whatever their cars or leagues, all have a little bit of Horatio Alger about them. Anyone who knows something about cars can race and from there, a procession towards sponsorship deals and Winston Cup or Indy car fame is possible, if remote. Racing is a way to be a local hero in places where any kind of big time is pretty far away.

Growing up in the ultimate home of car racing, Indianapolis, I was aware that this was our principal distinction. Local manufacturer Eli Lilly's introduction of insulin and Prozac isn't very sexy by comparison. The Pacers were terrible, the Colts weren't there yet or brand new, and everything else we did as a city was smaller than or second-rate to Chicago. But when it came to the Indy 500 -- "The greatest spectacle in racing" -- no one could touch us, worldwide. It seems improbable that car racing will ever build a more powerful following in the land of the Red Sox, Celtics, Yankees, Giants, and '76ers, or that most natives of these Northeast cities will understand, or care, why car racing enthralls much of the rest of the country. That's too bad, but it's also comforting. If East Coasters loved the Indy 500, if they felt at home there, something would be lost. And if my friends out here enjoyed my odes to the Indy 500, I'd have to care about the Patriots.

Kathleen Hughes can be reached at khughes[a]phx.com.