The Indy 500 Made Me Understand The Appeal Of Racing

Car enthusiasts can really be divided into two categories: people who like road cars themselves, and people who like racing. If it wasn’t already obvious, I fall into the former. Racing never appealed to me, and it’s not because I don’t like sports — I’m an avid football, baseball and basketball fan, but for whatever reason, I just never got motor racing. At least, that used to be the case. Now, after being a spectator at some of the world’s most historic and important racing events, I finally get it.

At the beginning of this year, I had the opportunity to check out the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona IMSA race in Florida. Like a fool, I stayed at the track for all 24 hours, and I’d say I was up for about 23 of those grueling hours. That experience certainly piqued my racing interest, but it wasn’t until I went to the Indianapolis 500 in May that the whole thing clicked for me.

Full Disclosure: Honda flew me out to Indianapolis, put me up in a lovely hotel, fed me and took me to the Indy 500. I also went on a tour of Honda’s factory in Indiana and got a CR-V to cruise around in. It was a busy weekend.

The first thing that strikes you about the Indy 500 is the sheer scale of the Speedway. I went to Penn State for college, so I’m no stranger to being around 110,000 spectators at a sporting event, but this whole experience made that seem puny and trivial by comparison. I mean, hell, there were around 350,000 people. That’s more than one in every 1,000 Americans. The size of the crowd is like nothing else, and so was the passion for the sport.

To fit that many people in one place, you need a lot of room, and that’s something the Speedway has no shortage of. From the inside or the outside, the 2.5-mile track feels like it goes on forever. Finding out that the inside of the Speedway is big enough to house every Big Ten football stadium hardly seems possible until you’re in it. The fact that there’s part of a golf course, a lake, a whole-ass museum and a music venue inside the Speedway — and none of them are even close to each other — really puts this kind of scale in perspective.

Something I always enjoy, especially in a world as cynical as ours, is people earnestly enjoying something they’re passionate about. Indy delivers that in spades. The entire city stops and refocuses on the race for pretty much an entire month, and it gets even more extreme once you’re in or near the Speedway. People from near and far, decked out in their favorite driver or team’s merch, coming together to cheer on what is undoubtedly the greatest spectacle in motor racing, is a serious pleasure to be a part of. Of course, the fact that it’s Indiana means you’re going to find more than a few questionable-at-best outfits referring to the guy who happens to be our President right now and the people he beat along the way, but what can you do? They’ll learn one day.

Lest we forget the most important part of any race — the race itself. I’m sure you know by now that this year’s 500 was a bit of a mess to start. There was a long delay, a yellow flag on a formation lap and a yellow flag on the first lap. Needless to say, it was a slow start, and I was starting to think this whole deal wasn’t for me. However, once the racing got going, it was such a rush.

Watching those little (F1 could learn a thing or two about vehicle size from IndyCar) twin-turbo V6 open wheelers buzz around the track was hypnotic and enthralling. The sounds, the smells, the entire aura surrounding the track were all enough to get me hooked long before the race’s 200 laps were over.

Because all of the cars are pretty much identical, save for either having a Chevy or Honda powerplant, the real difference-making comes down to the driver. How fabulous is that? It means there’s so much brilliantly close racing and leader changes that you’re constantly on the edge of your seat. I loved it.

Since going to Indy (and thanks again to Honda for letting me tag along), I’ve dived head-first into auto racing. I’m keeping up with IMSA, Indy and Formula 1 at this point. It’s hardly leaving me enough time to be pissed about the New York Yankees being terrible disappointments, the Jets killing my soul and the Knicks killing my mind.

While Indy was certainly fun, F1 seems to be where my heart really is. Maybe it’s because I love drama and messiness or maybe it’s because Brad Pitt’s movie did something to my brain chemistry. Regardless of a specific reason for staying interested in racing, the Indy 500 is what got me interested in the first place.

I don’t know if I’ll be going back to the 500 with Honda or another automaker next year, but I can almost guarantee that if no one offers to take me, like so many others, I will make the trek down to southern Indiana to watch the greatest spectacle in racing. It’s a community I was excited to be welcomed to and a community I’m happy to now be a part of.

Andy Kalmowitz / Jalopnik