Indy-The World's Fastest Carnival Ride

In The Early Fifties it was a movie titled To Please a Lady, starring Clark Gable, with actual race footage and the faces of real drivers like Mauri Rose and Wilbur Shaw and huge ferocious cars resembling U-boats on wheels. The tires were absurdly narrow and grooved with tread on only the right half of the running surface. The movie was my first glimpse of a world that had previously enthralled me purely with sound. I was ten years old and to drive at Indianapolis was the only thing worth growing up for. Each Memorial Day was spent with engine sounds and the voice of Sid Collins. It didn't matter much what he said, it was just the sound of his voice switching to his reporters around the track, the roar of the cars in the background and the litany of what were, for me, almost holy names: Troy Ruttman, Tony Bettenhausen, Jimmy Bryan, Sam Hanks, Johnny Parsons, Pat O'Connor and, most holy of all, Billy Vukovich. It meant school was getting out and I could get sunburned and go fishing and spend three months on Lake Michigan trying to let the magic names fade into some kind of perspective. Whenever I wasn't in a bathing suit, I wore slightly grimy white-duck trousers and a grease-smudged white T-shirt, because that's what Vuky had been wearing in the one photo I'd seen of him, sitting on a workbench, barefooted, his knees pulled up to his chest, exhausted and dejected after leading the 1952 Indy for 191 laps until a 50-cent steering part let go and put him into the northeast wall. "The tough little driver from Fresno," the papers called him, using his standard quote, "Just don't get in my way."

Then Vuky won in 1953 and again in 1954. It was the way it had to be. Speeds had climbed past the 140-mile-per-hour barrier and everybody wondered if they hadn't reached the limit. "We're going too fast out there," Vuky said.

"Well, Vuky," the interviewer reflected, "you're the only one who can slow it down."

But he didn't slow it down. He qualified for the 1955 race at 141.071 miles per hour, was leading the race at the end of 56 laps when he crashed and was killed attempting to avoid a pile-up on the back straight. I saw the newsreel and the photograph of the now-primitive-looking Hopkins Special lying upside down, the hand of my boyhood hero protruding from the cockpit as if waving goodbye. I remember feeling somehow responsible for Vuky's death. It was the first time I hadn't listened to the race. My father had taken me fishing in Ontario, and on Memorial Day we were flying down from Saddle Lake in a pontoon plane when the bush pilot tuned in the race on his radio and told us that Vukovich had been killed. I asked him to turn it off. I didn't want to hear the cars or Sid Collins and the magic names if Vuky wasn't among them anymore.

Another year went by and my aversion to racing cooled. But it would never be quite the same without Vuky. My interest turned to road racing and more exotic, if somehow less personally awesome names like Juan Fangio, Stirling Moss, Phil Hill and the Marquis de Portago. It was more intricate and interesting racing, and I learned to pronounce Le Mans like the French and Sebring and the Mille Miglia and Nürburgring. But as much as I pontificated that it was dumb to turn left all the time, Indy, with Collins and Tony Hulman orating "Gentlemen, start your engines," was still where the magic was.

I never drove at Indianapolis. I never even came close. I raced sports cars for five years, with moderate success, then stuffed one into the end of the pit wall at Riverside, broke every bone in my body and quit. For seven years, I stayed away from racing, not wishing to taunt myself with failed aspirations. Then, three years ago, at the invitation of Bob Jones, a friend who covers racing for Sports Illustrated, I went to Indianapolis for the first time, as a spectator.

It wasn't quite the way it had been in To Please a Lady. The bricks had been covered with asphalt, the great wooden pagoda replaced by a glass-and-steel tower, and most of the names had changed. There was a Bettenhausen, a Parsons and a Vukovich, and, though they were a new generation of drivers, the sons of the men I had idolized, the names retained their fascination. There were newer names that had acquired their own aura--Foyt, Ruby, Unser and Andretti--and several, like Donohue and Revson, I'd competed with on road courses ten years earlier. I remember being a little awed by the realization that those men I'd learned to race with, and sometimes beaten, were driving and even winning at Indianapolis. Of course, they weren't the same men, and neither was I. But Indianapolis was the same track (at least it was in the same place) and finally going to it was like visiting a historic battleground, with one important exception: Another battle would soon be fought there and another and another. New monuments would be built over the old. Racing drivers must perforce live totally in the present and pay no more than a token deference to last year's winner or last year's dead.

That was in 1973, and it proved a bad year to reacquaint myself with racing. During the final practice session before qualifying began, I had just come through the 16th Street tunnel on my way to the pits when I heard a loud whuump and turned to see Art Pollard's car, both right wheels broken off on impact with the wall, sliding sideways through the short chute. About 100 feet in front of me, the axle stubs dug into the infield grass and the car began flipping. Upside down, it skidded back onto the track, flipped right side up and came to rest in the middle of turn two. Pollard sat motionless amid the alcohol flames, visible only as heat vapors rising from the car, and at that moment, a strange thing happened: Looking back on it, it seems improbable, but I could have sworn I heard the crowd in the bleachers on the far side of the track, in unison, scream, "Save him!"

It was a full 30 seconds before the crash truck arrived, put out the flames and extracted Pollard from the car. The two disembodied wheels rolled together in formation and came to rest in the infield as neatly as if they'd been stacked there for future use. Several hours later, in an interval between qualification attempts, they announced that Pollard was dead. A fat woman in the bleachers behind the pits broke into tears. There was an official minute of silence, then qualifying resumed. The announcer announced a new one-lap record. The fat lady was cheering.

Two weeks later, I went back, waited through the tension of two days of race-delaying rain and two aborted starts, one of them catastrophic, and went home. I watched the carnage on television, Salt Walther's legs protruding from the wreckage of his burning, spinning car, Swede Savage's fatal crash in turn four and the STP crewman hit and killed by an emergency truck speeding to the rescue. It seemed a more macabre spectacle couldn't have been planned. Indy had lived up to its reputation and anyone who'd paid his five dollars hoping he might see blood got his money's worth.

The rules were changed in the interests of safety. The fuel capacity of the cars was halved to diminish fire hazard. The size of the airfoils was cut and pop-off valves installed on the turbochargers to limit boost, all in hopes of slowing the cars down. The track facility was improved, spectator barriers strengthened, the pit entrance widened and the inside wall in turn four, the one that had killed Savage, eliminated. The 1974 race was one of the safest in the Speedway's history, no fatalities and no serious injuries. Maybe I would go back to Indianapolis, I thought. After all, it's the possibility of an accident that is racing's fascination, the risk without which racing would be sterile and pointless, but it's the almost historical certainty that sometime during the month of May, someone will be killed there that has tended to make Indy seem more like a Roman circus than a 20th Century sporting event.

•

I remember that I was fishing in Key West with Bob Jones when we heard the news that Peter Revson had been killed practicing for the South African Grand Prix. I had known Revson and raced against him back in the early Sixties. Jones had done a personality piece on him for Sports Illustrated and had spent many evenings with him in the course of five years covering major races. The news came over the radio and, for what seemed like almost an hour, neither of us had anything to say. Finally, when so much time had elapsed that it seemed to come almost out of context, Jones said, "You realize that for the next six months now, nobody will mention his name."

"Yeah," I reflected, "and when they do, it'll be as if he had lived twenty years ago."

It is easy to understand this sense of detachment among the drivers. If they were to ponder too deeply the dangers to themselves or the deaths of their (continued on page 176)World's Fastest Carnival Ride(continued from page 108) competitors, their imaginations would take control and make it impossible for them to continue. Physical courage relies, to a great extent, on the ability to suspend the imagination, and sometimes this kind of control is transmitted to the outsider as callousness. I was standing a few feet away when Johnny Rutherford was interviewed shortly after the death of his close friend Pollard. "It's too bad that you can't turn back the clock," he said matter-of-factly. "Art was doing what he loved to do, and there's a risk we all take." His statement seemed to echo Faulkner's, that "The irrevocability of action is tragic." A few minutes later, Rutherford went back out onto the track, qualified for the pole and set a new lap record of 199.071 mph, a heroic effort that would have been impossible for any man whose mind hadn't been totally on his business.

•

Saturday, May 3, 1975, and the track is supposed to officially open for practice, but the sky is overcast and threatens rain. Nobody expects any really hot laps the first day out and, with qualifications still a week away, most of the top drivers haven't shown up. There are several rookies (highly experienced racers but new to Indianapolis) who must learn the track and turn ten observed laps within each of several speed brackets to pass their driver's test, and a few veterans, anxious to get back in the groove and check out their cars. The only real question on anyone's mind is who will be the first driver onto the track. Being first out has no effect on qualifying or on the race, but it, like everything else here, is part of a tradition. It's supposed to be a coup. It generates a good deal of publicity and publicity is what attracts sponsors and sells their products. It's why Gatorade and Surefine Foods and Jorgensen Steel invest up to $300,000 to run in this race, the hope that their sponsorship will generate millions of dollars' worth of publicity, maybe even get a picture of their car--their billboard on wheels--on the cover of a national magazine, the kind of advertising money alone can't buy.

Dick Simon, a 42-year-old retired insurance executive from Salt Lake City, wheels his car to the end of the pit lane, ready to go. Then a few drops of rain fall and his crew covers the car with a plastic sheet. A band of Scottish pipers marches onto the track and the absurdly elaborate pageantry of May in Indianapolis has begun. Every flower show, car wash and tea party will append the label 500 festival. Today's official events include a radio-controlled model-car race, a bridge tournament, a "Dress Up Like Mom" parade, a "Look Like Your Favorite Television Personality" contest, a bubble-gum-blowing contest and the Mayor's Breakfast, at which 1665 paying guests will hear Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder pick A. J. Foyt as the race winner, meet the 500 Festival Queen and then adjourn to the opening ceremonies at the track, where each of those attending the breakfast is permitted to make one lap in his Corvette or Cadillac.

The 38 Buick official pace cars stream by, bearing celebrities. A few more drops of rain. The Festival Queen accepts her crown and steps up to the microphone: "I wanna reckanize the twenty-eight princesses behind me." Now it's pouring. The band marches off, the crowd scatters for cover and Simon's car sits abandoned, fogging its plastic shroud in the pit lane. The rain pools up all afternoon, discouraging everyone but the golfers on the Speedway golf course, their official black-and-white umbrellas dotting the fairways.

•

The bar at the Speedway Motel has the atmosphere of a neighborhood tavern. Everybody knows everybody, and if you don't know everybody, everybody knows you don't. But the waitress will flirt with you all the same and you're invited to listen in on any stories you like. It's fairly quiet this evening and as I sip my gin and tonic, I remember sitting there the evening after Pollard's crash, overhearing a large man with ruptured capillaries tell how once in Korea he'd put a .45 to the head of his "moose" when he'd gone back to his hooch and found her "shackin' up with a nigger supply sergeant."

"Wha'd you do?" his companion asks.

"I shot 'er head off."

"Really?"

"Yeah, but I missed and shot off her foot instead." The scalp beneath his silver flattop flares with laughter and, still laughing, he turns toward me. "Say, you don't know what happened to that fella crashed in turn one, do ya?"

"He's dead." I don't want to discuss Pollard in this context, but it is the only straight answer to his question.

"Aw, shit, I'm sorry," he says, as if apologizing to me.

"You really shot her in the foot, huh?" His companion is intrigued.

"Naw, I never hit her at all. I just shot the bed full of holes." He leans toward the bar and covers his face with his hand. "Aw, Jesus," he says and begins weeping.

Something bumps my leg and I notice seat belts dangling from each of the bar stools.

It's getting dark and the rain still hasn't let up.

The next morning, a rookie named Billy Scott beats Simon to the track. Scott passes his driver's test with no problems. "A cakewalk," he says to me as he steps out of his car. But Jigger Sirois, who in six years at the Speedway has yet to make the race, is having trouble again. He takes four or five laps to warm his engine, then stands on it coming past the pits. I am standing next to a track photographer when we hear the engine noise fade in the first turn, the horrible scrubbing of tires, an instant of silence and the dull grinding thud of rubber, steel and fiberglass embracing concrete. "Oh, goddamn Jigger," the photographer slaps his thigh, "he done it again." Now the track is officially open.

Already there is gossip about cheating, and Foyt. as everyone's nemesis, is the center of attention. George Bignotti, who for years has been Foyt's crew chief, has publicly accused Foyt of carrying more fuel than the rules allow. Foyt won the California 500 in a walkaway, and Bignotti has suggested he did it carrying an extra five gallons of methanol in the canister of his fire extinguisher. The controversy has raged all month and, though the concerns are genuine, I sense a certain patina of showmanship.

No one, not even those with the most peripheral interest in racing, seriously entertains the possibility that anyone can go faster than A. J., when and if he finally gets around to it.

On the first day of qualifying, Foyt pulls in after one lap at 189.195. It is the fastest lap turned in during the first half hour of qualifications, but not close to the 192-plus laps he's been turning in practice. He rants around the pits, ostentatiously complaining about his tires, then storms off to his garage and locks the doors. The story goes around that he is so pissed off he has taken a screwdriver and punctured all four tires on his car. "That'd be a good trick," he says later. "I'd like to see somebody try it." There is also some speculation that the tire tantrum is a ploy to get his car back into the garage so he can tamper with the U. S. Auto Club-installed turbocharger pop-off valve and illegally increase its pressure.

Late in the afternoon, when the track is cooler and three other cars have qualified at over 190, A. J. tries again. The first time he goes by, everyone knows that if he survives, the pole position is his. I watch him power through turn two, using every inch of the track. I can feel everyone around me holding his breath, A. J.'s engine screaming at full power, watching him slide to the back-straight wall till there isn't an inch of daylight between his right rear tire and the unimpressionable concrete. I can feel his engine vibrate all the way down the back straight and into turn three. No one is really surprised when they announce his first-lap speed of 195.313 mph, and we know we are watching something so frivolously momentous, so ethereally and courageously executed, and yet seemingly so pointless--a man, unquestionably the best in the world at what he does, transcending even his own abilities, placing himself at the mercy of intricately overstressed steel and rubber and any stray speck of dirt on the track, to go nowhere faster than anyone else possibly could. For three minutes and five and a half seconds, all the allegations of cheating seem pointless. A. J. Foyt owns the track and no one will dispute it. "I thrilled the hell outta myself three or four times out there," he says, just to let everyone know it hasn't been quite as easy or as predetermined as it looks. Johnny Rutherford, who holds the one-lap record at Indianapolis and won the pole position in 1973, made the definitive statement on those four crucial laps after qualifying a disappointing seven mph off the pace: "Some days you eat the bear, and some days the bear eats you."

Television has come a long way in transcribing sports action on a field, court or track, observable from almost any angle, to a circumscribed image composed of dots and spaces on a screen, capable of a multitude of points of view, but again, only one at a time. Anyone who has gone to a race after watching them on television is astounded at how fast the cars zoom past. Maybe part of it is being there with the earsplitting engine noise, the smell of rubber, oil and asphalt, but when you get out from behind the telephoto lens and see how long those straights really are and how little time it takes a racing car to cover the seemingly immense distance from turn four to turn one, it causes a certain physical sensation in the scalp and at the base of the spine that television viewers never know. "My God, they're going fast." It's no longer the sort of leisurely motorized game you've watched between commercials. You feel the ground shudder under your feet and it feels a little threatening.

But maybe the camera is better than the naked eye at projecting the driver's experience of speed. Of course, there are vibrations, sounds and g-force sensations that the driver alone can experience, but when a man lives long enough at 200 mph, 200 mph becomes the norm and he slows it down. Through his eyes, as long as he remains in control, things don't happen with the frightening rapidity with which we perceive them. For him, the track isn't a chaotic blur but a calmly perceived series of sensations; now, now, now and now. He fixes on nothing and is therefore not startled by the brevity of his relationship with any object in the field of his experience. It's a kind of Zen by default, in which survival depends upon nonattachment and single-mindedness, a Gestalt from which no element can be removed and examined.

Apart from Foyt's run, the greatest spectator interest on the front straight is generated by a rabbit. Qualifying is stopped and several spectators chase the rabbit up and down the track in front of the pits, the crowd cheering, as in the lion-feeding scenes in Quo Vadis, each time they pass. The rabbit has strayed into a jungle without cover, nothing but asphalt, concrete walls and four pairs of Adidas track shoes pursuing him. Five minutes later, he is strung from the infield fence, dead from an apparent heart attack.

•

It's a fairly reliable axiom that the best drivers will be offered the best cars and rookies, unless they're already established superstars, consider themselves fortunate to have any kind of ride for Indy. Billy Scott, the rookie for whom the driver's test at 170 mph has been a cakewalk, found that trying to push the same car just 12 mph a lap faster to make the race was a nightmare. And inferior equipment wasn't his only handicap. "Indy is the biggest race in the world," Scott says. He leans close to be sure I can hear him over the din of the bar. "I saw those huge grandstands full of people watching me, and it suddenly hit me where I was. A couple of times, I'd start down the front straight and hear myself thinking, 'Gee, I'm really at Indy.' Then I'd catch myself and say, 'Cut that shit out and drive.' Finally, I took an eight-hundred-and-sixty-nine-foot spin coming out of turn three and ended up on the grass inside turn four. The car was OK, and so was I, but that really got my attention, like a dog shittin' a loggin' chain."

Scott fails to make competitive speed on two qualifying attempts and the car owner decides to try another driver, Graham McRae, an Indy veteran. But McRae's times are no better than Scott's. On his last attempt, Scott overcooks it coming out of turn four. The rear end comes loose and he makes a spectacular spin down the front straight, shedding fiberglass and suspension parts like a dog shaking off water. "Too bad he didn't stuff it beyond fixin'," a driver quips. "Now some other poor son of a bitch'll have to struggle with it next year."

I tell Scott about my friend Dave McDonald, who was killed 12 years earlier coming out of turn four in an unstable car, how Jimmy Clark had followed him in practice and told him he should refuse to drive it in the race.

"But I couldn't do that." Scott seems shocked by the suggestion. "I mean, if I stepped out of a ride, I'd never get another one. I'd be all washed up."

•

"The thrill isn't there anymore." Andy Granatelli, who, with his legendary Novis and his turbine car that died three laps short of winning the 1967 race, has been responsible for more innovation and spectator interest than any other man in the Speedway's 59-year history, looks tired and almost on the verge of tears as he talks about his 29-year lover's quarrel with Indianapolis. "Driving down here each year, I used to get so excited I'd start edging down on the accelerator, going faster and faster, till by the time I got to Lafayette I was driving flat out.

"But there's been too much tragedy," he explains, "that and U.S.A.C.'s continual legislation against innovation. It all comes to the rules." He gets up and goes to the refrigerator for a can of diet pop. He's lost 50 pounds and waddles less conspicuously than he used to in those STP commercials. "If they went to stock blocks, stock oil, stock gasoline and street-available tires, you'd have a better race and you'd have something about the cars the spectators could identify with."

"What about the changes they've made," I ask, "like wing restrictions and fuel limitations?"

"That's a start. But they didn't go far enough. Look, you've got a governing board made up of 21 car owners, drivers and mechanics, all legislating their own interests. I mean, you ever see a committee of 21 that ever got anything done? No. What racing needs is a czar. Limit the fuel to 200 gallons. You'd slow the cars down to 170 and you'd have a better race. The spectators wouldn't know the difference. They can't tell if a car's going 200 or 150. You ever notice during qualifying how they never cheer for the fastest cars till after they hear the time announced? They can't even see the drivers anymore, can't see their style or the way they drive, can't even see the numbers from the pits anymore.

"They killed my driver and my mechanic." There's a kind of forlorn intensity in his expression that, though he doesn't say it, pleads, Don't you understand? Two years earlier, the last year Granatelli entered the 500, Swede Savage, driving one of his cars, was leading the race after 57 laps when he lost it coming out of turn four, crashed brutally into the inside retaining wall and suffered burns from which he was to the a month later. A Speedway crash truck, rushing the wrong way up the pit lane, struck one of Granatelli's crewmen from behind and he died an hour later. Those in the pits, already horrified by the explosion and almost total disintegration of Savage's car, saw the mechanic's body tossed like a rag doll 50 feet into the air.

"Swede had just come out of the pits." Granatelli pauses and draws his hand across his forehead. "He'd taken on eighty gallons of fuel, and it was a completely different-handling car than he'd been driving a lap earlier."

To understand why Savage lost control in that particular corner, it's necessary to speculate on what he must have been thinking just before it happened.

Bobby Unser, who had previously been Savage's teammate, had insulted him in print, had told the media that Savage couldn't drive, that he wouldn't even include him on a list of the 100 top drivers. Jerry Grant, who, like Unser. had been driving a white Olsonite Eagle, explained it to me. "The track was oily, really slippery in the groove, and Swedie was running high, making time by staying above the groove, where the track was dry. I think what happened was that he saw a white car in his mirrors and thought Unser was closing on him. I guess he didn't realize it was me and that Bobby was a lap down at that point. Anyway, he must have been thinking about what Bobby had said about him, 'cause he dove down into the groove to close the door on me. The car was heavy with full fuel tanks and he was just going too fast to hold traction when he came down into the oil slick. It just must have been brain fade. For a second there, his mind must have been somewhere else."

The race was stopped for an hour and 15 minutes after the crash, restarted and then called after 332 miles because of rain. Granatelli's other car, driven by Gordon Johncock, was declared the winner, but it was a sad victory for Andy.

The diet-pop can is empty now and Granatelli sets it on the table at the end of the couch. "Last year, when we were coming in over the airport, my wife looked down from the plane and saw the Speedway. 'The thrill is gone, Andy.' That's what she said." He looked down at the floor and tapped his chest. "It just isn't here anymore."

•

Dan Gurney is balancing on a small bicycle in the Jorgensen Steel garage in Gasoline Alley. I'm leaning against a workbench and he seems to have me pinned in the corner with the flashing wheels of his unruly mount. He pulls up into an occasional wheelie and I notice, with some relief, that the frame brace bar is thickly padded. "We can't forget we're in show business." His blue All American Eagle rests unattended in the adjacent stall, race ready and immaculate. "We're competing for the entertainment dollar with football, baseball, hockey, whatever's going on at the same time, and those other things are more solidly entrenched and better organized than we are."

Like Granatelli, Gurney feels the rules, as they now stand, are stifling championship car racing. "I'd like to see us get more in line with the rest of the world, go to the Grand Prix formula and get a full international sanction, so we could attract foreign drivers again." I recall Granatelli's complaint that Indy had become too homogeneous, that there were basically only two kinds of cars there anymore, the McLarens and Gurney's Eagles, and no more Jimmy Clarks, Graham Hills or Alberto Ascaris. "If we had foreign drivers here again," Gurney continues, "they'd have to build a third tier on the grandstands." He also wants to eliminate rules that favor turbo-chargers. "Turbocharged engines cut down the noise and the diversity of sounds and, frankly, that's a big part of the spectator appeal."

I remind him that the Indianapolis 500 is already far and away the largest spectator event in the world.

"I know that," he smiles earnestly, "but that doesn't mean it couldn't be bigger." A man from ABC interrupts to tell Gurney they'd like to film an interview for Wide World of Sports. Dan politely explains that he's busy right now and that he'll get to it as soon as he's free. I feel slightly impertinent, holding up ABC, like the flea with an erection who floats down the river, hollering for the drawbridge to be raised, but Gurney takes one thing at a time. The man from ABC will wait outside with his crew.

"Where was I?" Dan smiles in apology for the interruption. "OK, another thing about turbochargers is that they make the race so technologically intricate that it works against younger, less experienced drivers, so that you've got the same crop of 40-year-olds out there leading the race every year. What makes this race unique is tradition and the ripples that it causes all around the world. But what I don't like about it, and I guess it's a part of that tradition, is the amount of time we have to spend here. It's like a whole month in a police state." While we are talking, I notice three Indiana state troopers with night sticks, Sam Browne belts and mirror-finish sunglasses in the bright alley beyond the garage door. I don't like to reinforce stereotypes, but they look polished, impersonal and just plain mean, like licensed bullies. Their presence is an integral part of the atmosphere of this race, as are the rioters, sadists, muggers, streakers, fornicators, motorcycle gangs, Frisbee players and drunks who occupy the infield like 30 armed tribes. The faint odor of tear gas is almost as common on race day as beer, popcorn and hot rubber. I smile and notice that the troopers are talking with Bobby Unser, who, the previous week, was made a special sheriff's deputy, had a police radio installed in his car and 30 minutes later drove across town at unrecorded speeds to be the first on the scene to arrest three teenagers suspected of smoking marijuana behind an all-night market. "Maybe it's necessary for it to be that way in order to put this race on the way it is," Gurney scratches his head and smiles wryly, "but we're all anxious to get back to the United States when it's over."

•

It's the evening before the race and Speedway, Indiana, has become a refugee camp. Every field and vacant lot within miles is packed with trailers, tents, motor homes, sweating bodies, piles of empty beer cans and back-yard barbecues. Refugee camps are better organized. These are the Mongol hordes, the Huns awaiting race day to storm the gates of Rome. Campfires glow. I'm certain I can hear the throbbing of tribal drums, unintelligible chanting. Police sirens are as commonplace as the random explosions of cherry bombs. A prison bus with heavily wire-meshed windows speeds past. There will be a total eclipse of the moon tonight and it seems to hype the lunacy. Except for a few nervous mechanics and staff personnel, the Speedway is empty and quiet. From a helicopter, it would look like a black oval, a void in a galaxy of fire and chaos.

The motel room I'm sharing with Bob Jones faces 16th Street and is less than 100 feet from an entrance to the track. It's a convenient bivouac, but only a self-hypnotist could sleep here. Although the gates won't open till five A.M., the traffic starts stacking up shortly after midnight. I close the door, turn out the lights and lie awake with the sirens, honking horns, motorcycle engines and the anticipation of the race. I wonder how well the drivers are sleeping or if they are.

At nine o'clock, two hours before race time, I head over to the track. I've been given a pass to shoot photographs from the balcony of the Penske Suite overlooking turn two. It's a precarious though very pleasant setup. Drinks, snacks and air conditioning will be available a few steps away and the view of the short chute, turn two and the back straight is excellent, though I'll be sitting less than 20 feet from the edge of the track at the point where the cars begin to exit the turn. I felt a little exposed there watching qualifying, feeling the vibration and heat from the passing cars and gauging the strength of the cables reinforcing the wire fence that was all that separated me from the track. I reminded myself that it was only steel cables that held up the Golden Gate Bridge and that if they did fail, anything that happened would happen so fast that I wouldn't have time to torment myself with the hope of escape.

The chairman of the bank, whose traveler's checks have cosponsored the Penske McLaren driven by Tom Sneva, points out the bar and buffet, tells me not to hesitate to ask for whatever I need. I stake out a seat on the corner of the balcony where no one will be moving between my lens and the track, fix myself a tonic water and check my focus and exposure.

The prerace ceremonies have begun, the celebrities have been driven around the track, Peter DePaolo, winner of the 1925 500, has taken a lap in a Duesenberg that ran in the race in 1930, the Speedway has been presented with a plaque designating it a national historic landmark and the final lines of the invocation drift across the infield: "With a hand over the heart, a prayer in the soul and brains in the head." Now everything seems to accelerate, including 350,000 pulse rates. Jim Nabors gargles Back Home Again in Indiana, 5000 helium-filled balloons are released, Tony Hulman takes the microphone: "Gentlemen, start your engines." The parade and pace laps come off without incident, the cars snaking from side to side to warm up their tires. Some of the drivers wave or salute as they pass the suites of their sponsors and I am reminded of knights dipping their lances to the ladies whose favors they wore. The ritual hasn't changed, only become more commercial.

For the drivers, the prerace tension is over and they are locked into that impenetrable concentration that comes the moment they are strapped into their cars. As they approach the starting line, everyone becomes very quiet, probably the one moment when none of the nearly half million people in this arena has anything to say. The engine noise accelerates, a series of bombs explodes in the air, and then a great cheer goes up from the crowd. The announcer's voice booms, "And the 59th Indianapolis 500 Mile Race is under way, the greatest spectacle in racing."

After the start and the excitement of the initial laps, the race, for most of the spectators, diminishes to a monotonous stream of almost indistinguishable cars and anonymous drivers flowing by at over 200 mph. I don't mean that it isn't still exciting. The noise itself is enough to keep the adrenaline pumped up, but you have to rely on the track announcer to understand what's happening. It's very much the way it was all those years I listened to it on the radio, but with a lot of special effects thrown in. I'm aware that Johncock, who had jumped into a commanding lead at the start, has dropped out. It's a 500-mile race. Running away with the early laps may please the crowd and momentarily put a driver in the limelight, but the chances are he'll be all but forgotten when the checkered flag falls. Foyt and Rutherford are swapping the lead now, though I'm seldom certain who has it at any given moment. As the cars scream out of turn two, it all seems effortless, though they're fighting the limit of adhesion. They pass so close it almost seems I can touch them. In twos and threes, the engines surge down the back straight like aircraft engines out of sync.

There's a yellow light and most of the cars head for the pits. For a full ten seconds no cars pass and the silence is startling. I'm keeping my camera ready, watching what's coming out of turn two and trying to answer the questions of the distractingly pretty lady who has taken the seat next to me. Our conversation is disjointed, broken sentences sequenced in the brief intervals between passing cars. Occasionally, a whiff of her perfume mingles with and subsumes the perspiration and burning rubber. She's a young Grace Kelly type from somewhere in Pennsylvania.

Several times I stand up to watch some passing action down the back straight. Sneva is running a highly respectable fifth and is still very much in contention. He pulls to the inside to lap several slower cars and the precision of his judgment keeps me standing. It seems he won't have time to get past them and back into the groove to set up for turn three, and I realize that at that point he's traveling at about 220 mph. He's deep, almost too deep, but in the last few feet, he cuts back to the outside, clear of the traffic and right in the groove. Then I remember how it always looks more impressive from the outside than it does from the driver's seat. Once at Mosport, during practice for the Canadian Grand Prix, I walked over to watch at turn one while my car was being worked on. I was frightened and astounded at how ragged and perilous it seemed, the cars skidding and vibrating through the reverse-camber downhill turn. "Jesus, that's scary," I thought. "How can they do it?" Then, half an hour later, I went and qualified on the pole for the G.T. race. I didn't know how to do it; I just did it.

More laps, more questions, more fragmented answers: "They're limited to--" two cars scream through the turn, nose to tail, and I wait for the noise to fade, "two hundred and eighty gallons, which means that--" another car passes and I can feel the heat from its exhaust, "at the mileage they're getting, they--" this time I'm interrupted by the track announcer's calling attention to Wally Dallenbach, who started in 21st position and is now moving up toward the lead at an alarming rate, "couldn't finish the race if they didn't do at least--" another car, "a few laps under the yellow."

I've been watching Dallenbach. His engine sounds stronger, pitched higher and wound tighter than the other cars'. And another strange thing is that though he's gobbling up the field, his line through the corners isn't following the groove. He's running through the middle of turn two each time he passes, not drifting wide and using the whole track the way other cars do when they're turning hot laps. Each time he passes, it seems he's operating on a separate principle of physics, as if the laws governing centrifugal force have been suspended for him. Later I would hear rumblings that he had a small tank of nitrous oxide (laughing gas) that was being injected directly into the cylinders, giving him an extra 150 horsepower with no increase in boost, and that his unorthodox line was to compensate for the extra sensitivity under his right foot. It occurs to me that if that were true, it might be possible that the nitrous oxide was being injected directly into Dallenbach and that his extra speed was the result of an altered consciousness. Whatever the facts, Dallenbach is laughing on the 60th lap when he passes Foyt and goes on to open up a 22-second lead.

•

One hundred and twenty-six laps and almost two hours of racing. Senses are beginning to numb and the stream of cars is beginning to have a hypnotic effect on the afternoon. I have a mild headache, my throat's getting sore and, fortunately, or unfortunately, Grace Kelly is asking fewer questions. The tension begins to dissolve into monotony. I'm less attentive with my lens and have pretty well determined that I won't have to shoot any action on this turn today. Somebody taps me on the shoulder and as I turn to my right, I hear a scream from the crowd, followed by a loud dull thud. I turn back to my left and there, not 40 feet away and 20 feet in the air, just above eye level, is the top of Sneva's helmet. Flames have engulfed the rear half of his car and it's cartwheeling horizontally along the wire retaining fence. I have a stop-action image, looking at the car as if from above as it hurtles toward me, but not on film. I've forgotten about my camera. For an instant, I am certain I'm witnessing a man's death and that it will also be my own. Things have gone too smoothly, the atmosphere has been deceptively benign, and it now seems this track has demanded another catastrophe. I leap over the now vacant chair to my right and, as I turn toward the suite, I see the reflection of the flames in the sliding glass doors and feel the heat sweep across my back. The instant of danger has passed and I turn back toward the track just in time to see the disembodied engine tumble by in a ball of flame. Debris fills the air like a flight of sand grouse. The Nikon takes over, zipping off exposures like a digital computer, one last somersault before the car comes to rest, right side up and on fire. It really doesn't resemble a car anymore, just a burning tub of metal, not 30 feet away, a driver's helmet protruding from the flames. The original fire had been burning oil, but now the methanol has ignited and can be seen only as intense heat waves blurring the edges of the wreckage.

The fire marshal is herding everyone off the balconies and into the suites. He sees my camera and press badge and lets me stay, though I've finished the roll and have to change film. It is obvious that Sneva is dead. It's the most brutal, spectacular and horrifying crash I've ever seen, and I've seen at least a dozen that were fatal. The scene in the suite couldn't be more macabre or more comic. All these people know Sneva in some capacity. Several of them are the sponsors of his car and he's crashed and been annihilated right in their laps. Sneva's wife has gone into hysterics and has been hustled out to the balcony overlooking the golf course on the far side of the building. Grace Kelly, who was fixing a drink at the time, has fallen backward and sat in a tray of chocolate brownies. The chairman of the bank, in nervous relief, tells me how delighted he is that I've been able to get good pictures. Though I'm sure it isn't his intention, it sounds as if, in his role as gracious host, he has arranged the crash for my photographic convenience. Everyone looks sick to his stomach and I am changing film. "Did you get it?" I look up into the wide eyes of a young-executive type.

"Ya, I think so."

"Did you get Mrs. Sneva?"

"What?" I'm certain I've misunderstood.

"Did you get pictures of Mrs. Sneva?"

I choke on my own saliva and shake my head. "I didn't hear that. No."

"Good for you," he says earnestly. "Good for you."

The fire marshal lets me back out onto the balcony to photograph the work of the fire crew. There are clouds of chemical vapors, flashing lights, scattered detritus and crash crews diverting traffic to the grass verge inside the track. Then I see something that, for a moment, I am certain is an illusion. Sneva moves. His helmet is wiggling back and forth and he's put his arms down onto the fuselage, trying to push himself up and out of the cockpit, but he appears to be stuck. Another driver has abandoned his car and is trying to help the emergency crew get Sneva out of the wreckage. The struggle goes on for several minutes till they finally free him, dragging him up and out by his armpits. Not only is he alive but he walks, with help, to the waiting ambulance, lies down on the stretcher and is taken to the infield hospital. Still, I am not confident he'll recover. I remember how, two years before, Swede Savage rode to the infield hospital sitting up but died of his injuries a month later.

The ABC slow-motion replays show Sneva passing Eldon Rasmussen and running just ahead of Foyt in the short chute between turns one and two. Sneva's right rear tire touches Rasmussen's left front and Sneva finds himself upside down and airborne, heading for the outside wall at almost 200 mph. Sneva's car slams into the wall tail first, the wing, engine and rear wheels separating, in a protracted dance with the flames and scattering fragments of metal and fiberglass, the remains of the car cartwheeling three times along the wall, then somersaulting three times down the asphalt, to come to rest, on fire, in the middle of the track. It's the kind of accident usually associated with dirt tracks at less than half these speeds.

Three weeks later, Sneva is recovering from his burns and practicing to qualify for the 500 at Pocono when I talk to him on the telephone. "It was like a dream," he tells me. "We watched the TV replays and it looked like it was all happening to somebody else. We passed Rasmussen in the first turn and thought we were by him in turn two. We glanced in the mirrors and he wasn't there, he was right beside us and we saw that the wheels were going to touch. From there on, it was as if we were dreaming, as if we were lying in bed dreaming we were flying through the air upside down. After we first made contact with the wall, we don't remember anything till we woke up in the track hospital and wondered how the car was." I ask him how it's going at Pocono and he tells me that the first day out he was pretty cautious. "The second day we started running hard through the corners, but I noticed that we still weren't trying to prove anything in traffic. It takes a little while," he concludes. "It makes you realize you really could get hurt doing this kind of thing."

After Sneva's crash, the race begins an anticlimactic slide toward a rain-shortened conclusion. Dallenbach, who has maintained his lead, drops out 36 laps later, claiming his air intakes have gotten clogged with litter from the wreckage, causing him to burn a piston. Some drivers have other theories about what has caused the burned piston, but it is a sad end to what has been one of the most spectacular, come-from-behind drives in the history of the race.

The sky darkens radically, the wind begins to whip up hot-dog wrappers and dust devils in the infield and, within minutes, the 500 has been transformed into a hydroplane race. The checkered and red flags appear simultaneously and cars spume rooster tails trying to make the start-finish line. There are multiple and relatively harmless spins and crashes, cars sliding, looping lazily down the straights, up the pit lane and through the corners. It is Bobby Unser's good fortune to be leading when the sky splits open and, in a delicate ballet with his now tractionless tires, he creeps toward the start-finish line. There are 26 more laps that will never be run and theories and arguments by and for Rutherford and Foyt that, had the race run its full course, they certainly would have won. It is the luck of the draw. It's made heroes and corpses without discretion.

Back in my motel room, I fix myself a drink and watch the rain pour down onto the policemen channeling the postrace traffic onto 16th Street. I notice that the hair on the back of my arms has been singed. It balls and crumbles off like melted plastic. This whole month in Indianapolis seems like an abruptly ended dream. Two weeks from now, most of these drivers will be racing at Milwaukee and it won't much matter who has won today. The race has been important only because 350,000 paying spectators and millions more by their radios and TV sets have, by agreement, made it so. But now it is all over and another agreement is in force. The following day's sports section will carry the news that the Golden State Warriors have beaten the Washington Bullets for the National Basketball Association championship and the cover of Sports Illustrated will carry a picture of Billy Martin, "Baseball's Fiery Genius." 1 have an autographed picture of the winner for my son and I'm beginning to get drunk.

The next morning, there's a photograph of Sneva's crash on the front page of The Indianapolis Star and I recognize my own figure, fleeing ignominiously from the flames. On my way to the airport, I drive past the Speedway and all I can see is litter, two feet deep, in every visible tunnel, passageway and concourse, more than 6,000,000 pounds of it. I stop for a red light and notice one more thing: the corpse of a huge tomcat lying next to the chain-link fence. Someone has considerately propped its head up on a crushed beer can and crossed its paws in repose. There's my story, I thought. After 25 years of listening and dreaming, I've seen my first Indianapolis 500 and this is the one picture that will stick. Another great event chronicled in trash, another discarded container.