Sullivan Revs Up In Indy Booth

With the inexperienced field for Sunday’s Indianapolis 500 ready or not, everyone is wondering what kind of race it will be. The speculation is that Arie Luyendyk, the only Indy 500 winner in the race, will speed away from the rookie-infested field and there will be more crashes than the safety crews can keep up with.

Danny Sullivan, the 1985 Indy 500 winner, hasn’t made up his mind about what will happen in the race. The political dispute in IndyCar racing has left the Indy 500 starless: Most of the top drivers will race in Michigan on Sunday. Most of the drivers racing at Indy are members of the new Indy Racing League.

“As we sit here, no one has any idea what to expect,” Sullivan, an ABC Sports racing analyst, said Thursday in a trailer in the ABC compound at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. “Seventeen have never gone 500 miles, they’ve had very little practice and a few have only a few IndyCar races. They don’t know what to expect around other cars. They haven’t run in traffic and they don’t know how to set up the cars.”

Sounds like a catastrophe waiting to erupt.

Another factor to watch, Sullivan says, is the performance of the crews. Like the drivers, most of the crews have little Indy experience.

Sullivan will be working his first Indy 500, with Paul Page and three-time Indy 500 winner Bobby Unser. Page has perhaps the toughest announcing job in sports television, calling both the IndyCar series and the IRL for ABC Sports.

“It depends on whose race you do; you’re hammered by the other side,” said Page, an Indianapolis resident. “They all want you to carry their arguments forward for them. I don’t think that’s my job. My job is play-by-play.”

Indy’s new rival race, the U.S. 500, will be on ESPN on Sunday at 11 a.m. PDT from Michigan International Speedway. The familiar IndyCar names are in the U.S. 500 - Al Unser Jr., Michael Andretti, Emerson Fittipaldi and Paul Tracy.

Bob Varsha will do play-by-play on the U.S. 500 with Scott Goodyear, an injured IndyCar driver, serving as the analyst. Goodyear is an expert on the 2-mile oval; his two career victories were at MIS.

For those seeking a hat trick Sunday, the Coca-Cola 600 NASCAR Winston Cup race from Charlotte, N.C., is on TBS at 2 p.m. PDT.

DeLuca joins ESPN

Len DeLuca, a key operator in the CBS Sports programming department, has moved to ESPN as a senior vice president for programming development. In 16 years, DeLuca helped CBS acquire college basketball and football properties.