(From the May 2016 Issue of Road & Track)

THE INDIANAPOLIS MOTOR SPEEDWAY opened to the public on June 5, 1909. Seventy-five days later, on August 19, the place hosted its first car race. It was a Thursday. And then people began to die.

Picture the Speedway as it is now: 2.5 miles, four corners banked at just over nine degrees, concrete walls, and catch fencing. Now neuter the walls, nix the catch fence, and replace the asphalt with crushed rock and tar. That's Indy, brand-new.

On the 19th, a man named Wilfred "Billy" Bourque was driving in a 250-mile race when he spun in Turn 4. Bourque's car hit a ditch in the infield and rolled, killing both him and his riding mechanic. Two days after that, during a 300-mile race, Charlie Merz blew a tire. He crashed his National through trackside fencing, killing his mechanic and two spectators. Shortly after, a Marmon hit a pedestrian bridge on the track's north end.

The Speedway is generally seen as the creation of an Indianapolis businessman named Carl Fisher. He and his wife, Jane, were at the track that weekend.

"Every minute," she would later write, "held dramas of tragedy, mutilation, and death. Cars skidded off the buckling macadam and burst into flame. I watched Carl's face grow whiter."

Cars race through the dust and smoke during the first Indianapolis 500, in 1911. Ray Harroun's winning Marmon Wasp averaged 74.6 mph. IMS Archives

Eyebrows were raised. The tar surface was almost immediately replaced by 3.2 million bricks, thought to be safer. In 1911, the track hosted the first Indianapolis 500, a 200-lap event dreamed up as a gimmick to draw crowds. Attendance rose annually. The bricks were eventually replaced by pavement. Speeds climbed, from just above 70 mph in 1911 to over 230 in the mid-Nineties. And as late as 2015, drivers were still crashing, still getting hurt.

Why do we keep going back? Tradition is part of it, but not all. The Speedway is a font of bravery and pomp, an irreplaceable piece of our culture. This year marks the hundredth running of the 500, a rare and hallowed pastime in a relatively young country. And if you head to Indianapolis, you can stand on the earth where that race began. Where it happens this year. And where, if we don't screw things up, it will live on.

On a sunny fall day in 2015, we took a photographer and a small crew to Indy. With the help of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway museum and a few friends, we gathered five Indy 500 cars from various eras. Their differences represent the arc of the race and the automobile, but also a good chunk of what has always made Indy appealing. On a deserted track, I met each machine at respectful speed. In the process, we got an unprecedented look at the soul of America's fastest tradition.

It was a hell of a day.

Richard Pardon

THE CARS ARE ROLLED OVER FROM THE MUSEUM in the dawn hours. A pickup truck towing a Watson. Two guys pushing a Miller, its spindly wheels jittering across the pavement. Then this unbelievable golden light as the sun rises, spilling over the stands on the back straight. It dapples into the garages like melted butter.

The best and most evocative of our grand old racetracks seem to exist in spite of their surroundings. Indianapolis is no different. It's located in Speedway, Indiana, a suburb of Indianapolis, the last place you'd expect to find a coliseum. Climb to the nosebleed seats and look a block west, you see houses. This is likely the only racetrack on earth where the people who live next door do not moan about noise, crowds, or congestion.

Louis Meyer won the 500 as a rookie in 1928, in a Miller 91 much like our test car. IMS Archives

The morning we arrive, the trackside catch fencing is missing. The grandstands on the front straight—staggered and steep, like a 1920s baseball park—lack their famous flat roof. The Speedway is in the middle of Project 100, a massive construction and remodeling effort aimed at the 2016 500. It means significant change for a place that prides itself on staying the same.

But this is not a unique moment. The Speedway was built in 1909 as a proving ground for automakers. Buildings have come and gone, stands have grown, safety features have been updated. The only constant has been the geometry and bank of the competition surface. And so you can stand in Turn 1 and squint into the place's early days. You see bricks and space and a zillion other things, a way of life long gone.

And when someone lights off a Miller straight-eight, it all bursts into Technicolor.

Richard Pardon

Harry Miller was America's Ettore Bugatti. In the 1920s and '30s, his cars rivaled the legends of Europe in sophistication and beauty. The best were 140-mph jewels, graceful and potent, built in a small shop in a still-uncrowded Los Angeles.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the genius. Miller designed and produced twin-cam, unit-construction (block and head in one casting), supercharged engines when much of America thought a 100-mph airplane was fast. Because he was part artisan and had a fetish for detail, his machines were gorgeous and powerful when most race cars were weak and ugly or strong and uglier. Miller and his chief designer, Leo Goossen, gave us one of the first successful front-drive race cars, one of the first successful four-wheel-drive race cars, and 12 wins in the 500 between 1922 and 1938. Also the bones of the engine—the Offenhauser four—that ruled Indy from the 1950s to the 1970s. (An Offy is basically a Miller eight seen in a fun-house mirror.)

In its early days, the Indy 500 was open to road cars. They often did well. But Millers took the race from production-based horsearound to a thoroughbred war zone. By 1927, a Miller sat in 24 of the 33 slots on the 500's grid. In 1929, a curious Ettore Bugatti bought two Millers in Europe and had them dismantled, so his men could learn something. (One of those is now in the Smithsonian, a place not in the business of collecting cars, which should tell you something.)

Richard Pardon

The Indianapolis Motor Speedway museum has six Millers. As with many ancient race cars, their histories have been muddied by time and entropy. The 1926 Miller 91 that the Speedway lent us for this story wears the livery of Louis Meyer's 1928 500 winner, but it is not that car. The Speedway's car currently sports a post-World War II restoration with an excess of gloss—Miller the man preferred flat finishes and understatement—and the front axle from a Miller 122.

But it is still a Miller. If it were painted polka-dot and riding on four cheese wheels, I would still cross oceans to drive it.

The museum's 91 is an early Miller, and thus simple, even for the marque. The 90.2-cubic-inch (1.5-liter), 150-hp straight-eight uses a centrifugal supercharger around a foot in diameter; it pokes through the firewall ahead of your knees, shaped like a giant snail shell. The engine is a jeweler's model of what you expect. The radiator grille is narrow as a skateboard.

To get into the cockpit, you stand on a rear spring, then thread your legs straight down, through a maze of castings. It doesn't seem like there's room, and then, somehow, you're in, frame and metal bits touching your skin. Your first time in, you tend to just sit there and think about that.

Richard Pardon

The leather-covered seat feels like a dining chair, upright and short. The brake pedal only affects the rear wheels; a lever outside the cockpit, on the right, operates both front and rear brakes. The updraft carburetor sits over your legs. After a push start, the supercharger kicks out a painful, high-pitched scream. My kitchen mixer sounded identical when I put too much meat in the grinder attachment, right before the drive gears exploded.

I blip the engine with my right foot. It has to be done slowly, as the carburetor isn't designed for low rpm. Most of our support crew winces or plugs their ears. A Speedway employee leans in.

"That's normal."

I look at the tach, then back at him.

"Really. Rev it to 3500. They spun them to seven in period, and went 140 mph on board tracks." The wooden speedways, part of the early Indy ladder, that once dotted the country. Imagine a steeply banked oval made of nailed two-by-fours. Boards came loose, flung guys to their death. "There was a white line at the top of the track, and if you went over it, you were dead."

The Miller's clutch is obnoxious, a telephone game of mystery. It acts like it wants you gone. The wheel has a gap in the bottom so you can reach the shifter, but it's so close to your chest, you have to swing your legs out to change gear. This is a "crash" gearbox, no syncros or dog rings to help you shift. It's also a bloodsucker. I learned to drive stick in a car with a crash box; they're difficult, but not impossible. This is something different. I keep expecting a bearing or something to come flying out of the tailshaft and threaten my mother.

Richard Pardon

The car darts into Indy's corners, stable but not. The shocks and tires are manic and only settle down north of highway speed, at which point the car ghosts around the track, begging for throttle. The chassis doesn't so much obey steering commands as fall into them. After a lap or so, I put my eyes down the track and think. About speed, how the steering is geared, how you move the car with your hips. (Turn 1, sashay. Turn 2, rumba.) After a moment, it clicks.

"HOLY HELL," I hear myself yell. "THEY SLID THESE THINGS AROUND THIS PLACE."

It bleeds from the Miller's pores, the way it's constructed: The 91 wants to be drifted, snatched out and caught, at speed. The driver, up in the air, treating the Speedway like a rodeo. Or maybe an ice rink. For 500 miles.

People have written books about Millers. The bible is a text called The Miller Dynasty, by Mark Dees. When I discovered it in high school, my mind blew up. American art and science, men feet apart and sliding, leather helmets. Then as now, it felt both distant and heartbreakingly real.

Richard Pardon

THE ENGINE LID HAS TO BE OPEN when you start it. It has to be open so somebody else can work the throttle, because of course you don't know what a fuel-injected Offenhauser needs to start, because of course you haven't driven one before, because this is 2015 and injected Offys don't fall off trees, even in Indiana, even at the Speedway.

But once, they ruled it.

No car has ever been a Car, capital C, this much. The gas pedal is shaped like the sole of a boot. The sway-bar ends are cast pieces big enough to use in a bar fight. The seat is deep and high-sided, like sitting in a baseball helmet, and upholstered in something that may or may not have been borrowed from Eisenhower's bowling alley. And the whole package dwarfs the Miller. The front tires could be hung on a dump truck.

There is a small, overstuffed pillow sewn into the right side of the cockpit. You're supposed to lean against it. It feels like an old couch.

IMS Archives

When the engine fires, the blat punches holes in my skull. The car carries its exhaust over a shoulder, inches from your head, like a soldier with a mortar, which is fitting, because the starter bung in the nose gives it a face like MacArthur chewing a cigar.

Millers were good at Indy, and everyone wanted one. As the Speedway moved toward a one-make grid, entries dropped. Tickets became harder to sell. In 1930, the race instigated what was later called the "junk formula"—changes like larger, production-based engines, intended to make the 500 more affordable.

Craziness followed. The 1931 500 had an entry list of 70 cars, double the previous year's. But the Depression was on. Miller's shop went bankrupt. The track, hurting for cash, began to crumble. World War II put the race on hold. Retired Indy hero Wilbur Shaw did 500 miles of test lapping in 1944 and compared the Speedway to "a dilapidated back house on an abandoned farm."

In late 1945, the track was bought by an Indiana grocer named Anton "Tony" Hulman Jr. Hulman, Shaw said, wasn't from the car industry, and was thus "free to do whatever was necessary for the good of the Speedway and racing in general." (Hulman's descendants still own the facility.)

With Shaw's help, Hulman spent money smartly, and the crowds and purebred machines returned. In 1952, oilman Howard Keck entered a car for young driver Bill Vukovich. It was built by California's Frank Kurtis and powered by a fuel-injected, 4.2-liter Offenhauser. The engine was offset to the left, with the driver next to the driveshaft, not atop it, so the car carried its weight relatively low. The whole thing resembled a 1950s F1 car, flattened.

According to legend, when Vukovich saw his car, he called it a "roadster." The basic design was successful enough that it was soon copied, filling the grid, and the 500 moved back toward being a one-make race.

Richard Pardon

In 1961, a roadster built by Floyd Trevis won the Indy 500. It did so with a record 139.130-mph average at the hands of the legendary A. J. Foyt. The Foyt who would win Le Mans in 1967 and the 500 three more times, a holy terror in a race car. Who was formidable well into the modern era, retiring in the Nineties. Who still runs a team at Indy. (I saw him there last year, tearing through the paddock on a golf cart, scowling.)

Foyt's Trevis now lives in the Speedway museum. When they rolled it out for our use, the unrestored, cracking paint and hand-lettered logos drew a silent crowd. The design is a copy of a roadster called a Watson, and a Watson's shape makes you think of warm Mays in the Fifties, the 500 broadcast burbling out of a small radio in a garage with an open door. Watsons are the quintessential "old" Indy car, Foyt's car is a heck of a Watson, and A. J. Foyt is one of the brightest firecrackers to have ever lived.

I got one lap before most of the above sunk in and my heart tried to claw out of my chest.

Richard Pardon

I find myself wanting to learn to drift the thing at speed, loose and moving. Because something tells you that mortals could handle it.

The car isn't intimidating, not at the speed I drove it. At 80 mph or so, a roadster is ranging, a P-51 before loosing its drop tanks. There's a feeling of space at the wheel—a long nose, lots of air in the cockpit—that makes you think you're safe, when you're very clearly not.

It's not as if the packaging doesn't wake you up. My legs rest against the two-speed transmission. They cram in vertically, my feet almost under my knees. The gearbox is noticeably easier than that of the Miller. The Miller's brakes felt stronger. During photography, when I turn around to check distance on our camera car, I get a faceful of rear wheel and brake disc. The whole mess is right there, spinning, close enough to touch.

Seventy miles per hour in Foyt's car is about 3000 rpm. Below that speed in top gear, the engine spits and farts. Above, the fuel injection works so well you forget about it. After a few laps, I pop into the pits to talk with Richard Pardon, R&T's photographer.

"How is it?"

"Somewhere under here is a rage-drunk '55 Chevy."

"That bad?"

"It's the best thing."

Richard Pardon

A few more laps. I find myself wanting to run the hell out of it. I want to hit a road course and learn to drift it. Then go to an oval and try—just once!—to keep balance, loose and moving. Because something about the car says that mortals could handle it.

Maybe not crack off a pole lap, but handle it.

Assuming you didn't die in a minor crash.

Assuming the 75-gallon fuel tank over the rear wheels didn't make the car a sideways nightmare as it emptied.

Assuming you could keep on top of it for 500 miles.

After driving, I sit on the pit wall, watching the car cool. The grandstands are empty, as they have been all day. For the first time, I wonder how it feels when they aren't.

Richard Pardon

"IN A FIRE, PULL THIS."

My fingers find the handle for the car's fuel cutoff.

"Got it."

"No, really."

"I got it."

"No, really."

I am sitting in a 1964 Eisert Indy car. The car's owner laughs. I protest.

"What do you think I'm going to do? These aren't hot laps. There are construction crews here, for Pete's sake."

"Old race cars aren't supposed to catch fire. But you have to act like they're all looking to do it. Like, 'You in car! Need fire now?'"

He points to the Eisert's swollen belly, which holds almost nothing but fuel. A tank at each of my elbows, rising to my shoulders.

Richard Pardon

Welcome to the toothy world of the early mid-engine Indy car.

In 1960, a Formula 1 constructor named John Cooper tested one of his mid-engine F1 cars at the Speedway. F1 was almost entirely front-engine until 1958, when Stirling Moss won the Argentine Grand Prix in a mid-engine Cooper. The layout, which helps both packaging and handling, soon consumed motorsport, a trend that continues to this day.

In 1960, however, Indy was behind. Roadsters were still state-of-the-art. At Cooper's test, world champion Jack Brabham cracked off an average lap speed of just under 145 mph. The winner of the 1960 500, in a more powerful roadster, averaged 138.767 and went noticeably slower in the corners. Brabham and Cooper came back in 1961, ran the 500, and finished ninth.

Indy's mid-engine revolution: Gobs of power, a healthy dose of grip, and a drastic change in profile. Richard Pardon

The Speedway soiled its collective pants. Mid-engine cars began filtering into the 500. Two years later, Ford was ramping up its "Total Performance" racing campaign, which meant throwing Dumpsters of money at car racing in almost any form. For the 500, Dearborn called Lotus, which came to the '63 500 with Ford-powered, mid-engine cars derived from the Lotus 25 F1 car. Dan Gurney drove one, Jim Clark drove a second, and Clark almost won. For one reason or another, people at the Speedway still grumbled at the fact that the Lotuses had their engines in the "wrong" place.

In '64, three Lotuses showed. One set fastest lap. In '65, Clark started on the front row and won easily. The 500 was officially dragged up to date.

It was a weird time. By 1965, only a handful of roadsters made the 500's start. Mid-engine Lotuses and Lolas dappled the grid, as did more international talent. In just three years, the race's average speed had gone from just over 140 mph to just over 150.

Which brings us to the Eisert. We'd originally aimed to use Clark's 500-winning 1965 Lotus for this story, but we discovered at a late hour that the car was unavailable. So we called R&T contributor and vintage-race-car specialist Colin Comer. Comer owns the Eisert, and he was happy to help.

The Eisert's Chevy V8 is a modified Corvette block. It sounds like a street car gone ape. Richard Pardon

The Eisert never qualified for the 500, though its original owner did try. In many ways, its story says more about the race in that period than does Clark's winner. In grand old-Indy tradition, the Eisert was built on trend: The design was a mishmash of a Lotus 18 and a Lotus 24 (F1 cars), assembled by a well-meaning but small privateer team. The car's fiberglass and aluminum panels covered a steel space frame. Power came from a fuel-injected Corvette V8, destroked to 302 cubic inches and making 485 hp. The sum total resembles nothing so much as a Formula Ford with a gym addiction and a propensity for vaporizing tires.

For a minute, this was how ordinary people aimed for Indy. The 1960s were the last time a nonwealthy driver could show up at the 500 with a relatively simple car and budget and have a hope of qualifying. A short while later, with the advent of aluminum monocoques, turbocharging, and aerodynamic downforce, the money compounded, and the everyman path all but evaporated.

The Eisert's V8 sounds lumpy, but not exotic. Tentative nips at the throttle produce big, whapping leaps on the tach. I catch an epoxyish whiff of race gas—the car originally ran on methanol—as it fire-hoses into the engine's open trumpets, a few feet behind my head.

The package feels oddly familiar. I used to vintage-race a Sixties Formula Ford, an Alexis Mk 14 that was basically a copy of a Lotus 51. (Notice a theme?) The Eisert has the same torpedo nose and straight-arm, G.I. Joe driving position. But after climbing out of a roadster, the track is another thing entirely. My tailbone seems buried in the pavement; the walls loom taller. The nose is lighter, darting off center. The steering wheel and frame dance separately. I'm basically lying down, much less exposed than in the Watson.

Richard Pardon

The stakes seem illogically higher. I wore an open-face helmet for photography and couldn't stop thinking about my chin. How it would feel to grind it down on a concrete wall.

Still, it's easier to picture a fast lap. If the Watson leads with its jaw, the Eisert pivots around your hips. You steer it with your wrists. It's obvious why an entire sport woke up one day and went, "Yup, this."

And if someone asked me to slide it around Indianapolis, I would change the subject.

Comer's Eisert was brought to the track by Don Hoevel, a former IndyCar tech from Illinois.

"David Hobbs used to tell a story," he says. "Someone asked him about his favorite corner. Turn 1 at Indy, he said. 'You're out there all bloody month of May, just bangin' around, and you go through 1 over and over. It's just a corner. Race day, they don't tell you . . . the people in the stands, the shadows—it just closes up. It becomes a tunnel.'"

And some guys go in, I thought, and don't come out.

Richard Pardon

IN 1973, ROAD & TRACK called the 1972 Indy Eagle "the fastest circuit-lapping automobile in history . . . faster than any record ever set by its peers, faster by huge chunks of speed, a completely new standard of car."

I've never driven anything like this, but such is progress that the Eagle feels familiar. It fits the cartoon stereotype of Race Car: fat slicks, tight cockpit, big wing. An odd kind of normal, after the other cars here.

Another private owner, a Californian named Philippe de Lespinay. For 27 years, de Lespinay was the informal graphics man for Dan Gurney's All American Racers. He designed the white Olsonite livery on the car you see here. As a thank-you for all his work, in 1986, Gurney gave him a disassembled Indy car. This was it.

Richard Pardon

The Eagle bursts into a thrummy, complex-sounding idle. At idle, the engine—an Offenhauser—feels sleepy, a beat behind the pedal. From outside, it looks like a government version of the roadster's motor, with the exception of the melon-sized turbo scaffolded off the back. The assembly may as well be a neon sign: Turbo Lag to Eat Your Face.

"Get into and out of the throttle in a straight line," de Lespinay says. "If you get into it in a corner, you will find the wall. If you get out of it in a corner, you will find the wall."

De Lespinay is a French expatriate. His accent turns "wall" into wohl. Someone asks if the car will spit fire, for photography. "Yes, but only if you rev it to 7000 at full throttle and dump the boost—off the gas, pop!" (Pohp!) "A four-foot flame. I have pictures of this, on the engine dyno."

Richard Pardon

Indy in the 1970s was a land of gains. Lap speeds exploded upward, thanks to the evolution of grippy slick tires and downforce-producing wings. And the Offenhauser found a second life in turbocharging, partly because it was so durable, and took so well to abuse. Amazingly, the engine was still competitive, despite having roots in the 1920s. (In a nice bit of symmetry, Miller genius Leo Goossen designed the '72 Eagle's twin-pump oiling system. The changes he made that year gave a measurable power increase, because Leo Goossen the senior citizen was still Leo Goossen, engineering stud.)

In 1972, an AAR Eagle blew Indy's lap record to pieces—196.0 mph, a 17-mph gain. All because of wings. Richard Pardon

If you fall into the wide, comfy Eisert, you install yourself in the Eagle. You aren't getting out unless you have help or time, and reducing one of those variables takes a lot of the other. Similarly, if the Eisert is a bulked-up Formula Ford, the Eagle is a period F1 car gone Incredible Hulk. The rear uprights could anchor an aircraft carrier.

"The gears," de Lespinay says, pointing to the Weismann four-speed, "they are this big." His fingers make a circle the size of a coffee can.

But the key was downforce. Wings were prevalent in road racing by the early 1970s, but Indy regulations of the time required a car's aerodynamic devices to be one with the bodywork. In 1971, the McLaren M16 featured a legal "body" rear wing that bent the rules. In the hands of Peter Revson, the car raised the Indy 500 one-lap qualifying record—then three years old—by an incredible 7.4 mph, to just over 179.

In 1972, the rules changed, making separate wings legal. Gurney's shop, driven by designer Roman Slobodynskyj, produced a car of careful details: radiators in the sidepods for improved balance and aerodynamics (now de rigueur, but then uncommon); a wing as high and far back as the rules allowed, seeking clean air; and a wheelbase half a foot over the minimum, for stability. The engine was a semistructural member, and Gurney said its output pushed the envelope of Offy possibility. At a time when most F1 cars were still winged cigars, the Eagle appeared single-piece.

Chiefly, it worked. On 500 Pole Day that year, Bobby Unser, driving for Gurney, blew the record to bits. He qualified at 195.940 mph—an improvement of more than 17 mph. It was a gain not seen before or since.

Richard Pardon

Unser called the Eagle's advantage "incomprehensible." Slobodynskyj said he hadn't tried to reinvent anything, just make "as good a car as possible." An ignition failure took Unser out of the race he was leading, on lap 31. Gurney's phone rang off the hook, and everything at the Speedway changed again.

At 5500 in a straight line in third gear, the Eagle's Offy is asleep. It's off cam and boost, thrumming along. It doesn't make a particular noise, more a collection of whooshes and stirrings. During photography, I run the car to redline in first and second. Power builds in a surging, almost unsettling wave, the throttle sharpest up top. Redline is 10,500, and the car seems sluggish until 7000. The engine acts as much like the roadster's Offy as this magazine acts like an elephant.

De Lespinay exercises his car regularly, and he's driven it at speed on an oval. After I park it, I ask him about throttle lag when the turbo has a full head of steam.

Power builds in a surging, almost unsettling wave, the throttle sharpest up top. Redline is 10,500, and the Eagle seems sluggish until seven grand. The engine acts as much like the roadster's Offy as this magazine acts like an elephant. Richard Pardon

"It's there with small throttle changes—200 to 300 rpm. You know, I have the balls to get it to 200, 210 mph. Those guys ran them up to 245—you realize what an achievement it was. All the power you'll ever need, you just have to use it."

One of Hoevel's guys later asks if the Eisert has anything in common with the Eagle. The two cars feel so different, you could fill a book with the answer. The Eisert is a broad-stroke device, the Eagle, a narrow brush. You start to see how Indy laps became less sliding, more precision flying. And how drivers became able to gauge the Speedway in inches, not feet.

Call it roll stiffness, aero, suspension advancement, whatever, but the Eagle is the first car in this outing that feels like raw science. And if I'm being honest, that's why the thought of a lap at speed gives me the creeping yips.

Richard Pardon

THE LAST INDY CAR TO CHANGE EVERYTHING was yellow, the color of its sponsor. The paint had a touch of pearl, which helped it pop on television. Even on YouTube, in footage of the Indy 500 that it won, the car glows.

The official name was Chaparral 2K, but someone nicknamed the car "Yellow Submarine," and it stuck. You can interpret "Submarine" in a lot of ways, but I've always pictured the car doing the impossible—driving beneath air. The Chaparral was the first Indy car designed to take advantage of ground effects: Underfloor tunnels induced low-pressure areas that essentially made the entire body an upside-down wing. Colin Chapman's 1977 Lotus 78 pioneered the science in Formula 1, but when the Chaparral debuted in 1979, the idea was new to Indy cars. That it came in the form of a blazing eyeball vacuum was just gravy.

The leap cannot be overstated. The Chaparral was so good, so far above the pack, that it pushed its most famous driver to a mental space he'd never seen. Johnny Rutherford used our test car to win the 1980 Indy 500. "At Indy that year," he said, "we had quickest time on every day but one." The cars he'd driven before "only let you go so far. The Chaparral … really put you into a nervous situation. The edge of the universe was a lot shallower in the 2K."

Richard Pardon

Chaparral founder and Texan Jim Hall designed the 2K in concert with Englishman John Barnard; he's admitted that the Sub is almost a copy of the Lotus 79, which built on the 78's foundation. (In a nice parallel, the Chaparral's 2.6-liter Cosworth DFX V8 is a turbocharged adaptation of the DFV V8 that both powered the Lotuses and dominated F1 for years.)

But the Chaparral lit off a revolution. After, Hall said, practically every Indy car was the same in essential layout and concept.

Al Unser used a 2K to qualify third in the '79 Indy 500. "When they came down to take the green flag," Hall said, "everyone backed off for Turn 1 except Al. It was the most amazing thing you ever saw. He stretched 100 yards in the first turn, 100 yards in the second." The race ended with a gearbox failure, but the next year, Rutherford won. Two years later, the rest of the grid had caught up. The Chaparral was uncompetitive, but the tide had turned.

Richard Pardon

And then they start the sucker, and my head melts down. The Yellow Submarine is about to move again and I am going to be in it and what is that noise in the background oh Jesus giggling it's you stop giggling you tremendous dork.

From the cockpit, the Sub feels less important than it is. My hips are too wide for Rutherford's plastic seat, so the Speedway staff removes it, strapping me directly to the riveted-aluminum tub. The underside of the composite bodywork is unfinished; you can see the tiny fibers that hold it together. The manifold-pressure gauge is partially blocked by the thick steering wheel. The Pennzoil logos are hand-painted; you can see the brush strokes, feel their ridges when you touch the paint.

As on the Eagle, the pedals sit ahead of the front wheels. Anything you drive into, your feet hit first. But the older car's engine bay is less dense, and its aero bits are tacked on by comparison. And where the Eagle appears blatantly old, the 2K skirts the question. It isn't of the modern era but seems to flirt with it.

Richard Pardon

The contrast was sharpened, in part, because we had a modern Indy car on hand. We borrowed a 2015 Dallara from Chip Ganassi's Indianapolis shop for photography; during a spare moment, I climb into its cockpit, threading my feet deep into the carbon tub. You wear a car like that like a suit. It reminded me of the 1990s CART cars I've seen—MIL-spec connectors, engine bay like a NASA clean room. Compare that with the Chaparral, where the blowoff valve sits atop the engine lid like a sentinel. Certain parts of the car seem accidental.

"The engine makes nothing below 8000," one of the mechanics tells me. The 2K's tires have age-cracked sidewalls and no one present can remember when that complex Cosworth was last apart—museum cars lead an easy life—so I don't rev it over 7000. But with a quick shift and the V8 making just a hint of boost, it does the F1-Cossie noise: WARAAAOOW*crack*BARAAAOOOW.

The first time it happens, my hair stands on end.

In 1980, Johnny Rutherford used this car to change Indy forever. We can but hope it will change again. And keep changing, indefinitely. Richard Pardon

The Chaparral's gearbox is a giddy mind reader, a Weismann four-speed with a tiny composite shift knob. The lever feels as slick and brainless as the boxes in the other cars were difficult. I circle the track in third gear, low rpm. Even at that speed, I feel like a weight on a string, screwed if the string breaks. Also an impostor, shuffling through doors that other guys ran through while threading a needle. Rutherford's fastest lap the year this car won was 190.074 mph. Squinting through the windshield, howling around, tracking out inches from the wall, you can almost imagine that speed. You can also almost imagine the feeling in the instant when it disappears.

The 2K was both the first modern Indy car and the last earthshaking vision in the 500—just as the Lotus 79 was in F1. "Every race car since," R&T motorsport correspondent Marshall Pruett once told me, "has been a Yellow Sub, a Lotus." No great leaps, just evolution best explained by an aerodynamicist.

Part of this parallels motorsport in general. Experimentation has been squashed by restrictive rules and politicizing everywhere from club racing to F1, but it's particularly galling at Indianapolis. In the 36 years since Rutherford first flung the Sub around the Speedway, there have been great drivers and heroic moments, but none have carried the weight of a revolution.

If that seems hard to believe, it's because no one in their right mind would say that we're done. That we've reached the end and solved for Race Car, finally out of ideas.

Richard Pardon

I WENT BACK OUT AT DUSK TO SAY GOODBYE. They let me drive one last car, anything from our little group, a few final laps as the sun fell. I have no idea why this was offered, but when opportunity presents itself, you do not ask opportunity if it has lost its mind. You just walk to pit road and pretend to not be five hundred kinds of geeked.

The Miller felt like the only choice. The safety and construction people had gone home, so the track was empty. The smell of fuel danced up from my feet. The skies melted into pink. The car seemed to warm up and canter.

Earlier that afternoon, we were joined by a young Indy driver. We needed an extra hand, so he drove the roadster for a photo. After, a museum staffer asked if he would have raced it in period. No, he said, incredulous. "I like modern technology."

Richard Pardon

I do too. But you know what? I would've come here when the Speedway was just bricks. I would've driven a roadster, a Miller, a turbo Offy. I'm not saying I would've been fast, but I would have strained and put everything out there, a shot at making the show. Not because I have a death wish. Not because I have enough talent to hang a Dallara on the pole. (I don't.) But because there's a deeper idea that's always hovered around Indianapolis. Something beyond the history and risk and challenge.

As a people, we don't have a lot of shared totems—things we know we can come back to, where a collective memory can gild a good moment, or elevate a tame one. And while the Speedway hosts races other than the 500, it truly wakes just once a year, with the jet flyovers and the teeming crowds and a feeling on the ground so special, time in the stands should be mandatory for anyone with a brain and an American passport. That vibe sits outside the disappointing cars and the rules and the wings, powerful in its own right.

I watched the sun set from inside the Miller. After a few minutes, the grandstands disappeared. I was left with just a cockpit and a pair of hands. Something in me begged to keep going—to see how far I could press.

That pull is everything. It's us, chasing a better, smarter version of ourselves. Like the Indy 500 itself, it can't be explained, just witnessed. It's in four corners and Indiana. It's about to kick off for the hundredth time. Long may it run.