Two Races, One Mess

Nobody really won. Nobody got away clean. Nobody should have been surprised.

The 500 in Michigan began with a crash. The 500 in Indianapolis ended with one.

There’s no point trying to assess which race was hurt worse. Fate smiled on neither. In a sense, just having two on the same day guaranteed both would lose.

From Victory Lane, where he stood on the fringe of a crowd Sunday afternoon celebrating Buddy Lazier’s stirring win, Indianapolis Motor Speedway president Tony George didn’t bother to turn his head to see the ambulance make one final trip down the front straightaway. If he had, he would have seen it carrying Alexander Zampedri, one of three drivers injured in a last-lap crash.

But someone looking for omens might have imagined a second patient inside - the sport of Indy-car racing itself. The one that the drivers and owners and power brokers at both races spent years nurturing. The same one they’re now trying to tear in two: George with his rival Indy Racing League, the Championship Auto Racing Teams circuit’s owners and drivers with their rival 500-mile race.

“I believe if they could have been here,” winning owner Ron Hemelgarn said, referring to the faction at the U.S. 500 in Michigan, “we would have beaten them, too.”

Of course, that conveniently leaves out the fact that Hemelgarn had never turned the trick before. In 19 previous trips to the Indy 500 with 32 different cars, the best he managed was a 10th-place finish in 1984.

Talk IS cheap. But half-truths from guys with axes to grind are pretty much what you get in squabbles like these. The keener, calmer voices get stilled right about the time the last compromise falls through. And so when someone asked Lazier whether he was worried an asterisk would appear alongside his name in the log of great drivers who have won the Indy 500, Hemelgarn jumped in.

“Anybody that would say this wasn’t a good race, and a very competitive race would be an ass,” Hemelgarn said.

Despite that, Lazier is a wonderful story. His father, Bob, ran in the 1981 Indy 500, finishing 19th, and never made it back. The son passed the driver’s test here in 1990, but got bumped from the starting grid on the final day of qualifying. He was knocked out after just one lap the year after that. He didn’t make it to the end in his two other starts, in 1992 and 1995.

Then his luck turned even worse. Two months ago at Phoenix, racing in an IRL event, Buddy Lazier hit the wall going 200 mph. He broke his back, fracturing vertebrae in 16 different places.

But driving meant so much that Lazier not only rehabbed the back in time to make this race, but he drove in almost continual pain, despite a specially engineered seat.

Speedway boss Tony George, while not gloating the way Hemelgarn was, was not above cashing in on a good angle, either.

“He’s a very good representative of the kind of opportunity we’re trying to create,” he said. “My only disappointment from the whole month is that there are so many guys walking around with the same capabilities and desire… . I’m just a little disappointed that we can’t make more opportunities for those guys.”

Don’t be.

This race, while entertaining for stretches and competitive at the end, wasn’t exactly a showcase for the drivers. Only nine cars were running at the end. There were 10 yellow flags, four accidents and a few knuckle-headed maneuvers. Not surprising, some of the guys who mouthed off - Eliseo Salazar comes to mind - were responsible for some of the biggest glitches.

But ranked strictly from a driver’s standpoint, the U.S. 500 was no model Sunday drive, either. And the tendency was to be even less forgiving, because the racers were supposed to be better and the backdrop so much less so.

“I was a little nervous for everyone,” George said. “Someone had to be.”

And will - for some time to come.