When a car does 230 mph two feet from your face, you feel it. The sudden thwack of evacuated air. A whole-body muscle spasm. And above all, engine noise, whip-cracking into your core, there and gone in a heartbeat. Run, it all says. Because there is a surprisingly violent thing nearby, and since the dawn of the human race, surprising objects yowling directly into your colon have meant you are about to get eaten.

Or that you're on the wall at Indianapolis.

I went to the Speedway this year for Indy 500 qualifying. The 500 is a touchstone, but embarrassingly, I had never ached to see it in person. Or had any love for ovals. I got on a plane thanks to my friend Marshall Pruett, R&T's chief motorsport correspondent. When I texted him last winter and announced that we should hang out, he suggested 500 time trials.

"There aren't many fans," he said, "but that's the brilliance. We'll have the place to ourselves as fools crack 230 mph each lap. Standing two feet from cars tracking out in Turn 1 will change your perception of speed and safety forever."

Something shifted in my oblongata. "YEDGFRAPPA," I typed on my phone, which is what you write when your fingers are so excited, you can't assemble complex words, like "yes."

Like much of motorsport these days, IndyCar is in an odd spot. The drivers are fantastic, but the cars—one chassis (Dallara) and two engine manufacturers (Honda and Chevy)—are as compelling as old socks. Outside of the 500, no one's watching, even in historically popular stops. (In June, an estimated 10,000 fans dribbled into California's Auto Club Speedway, a 2.0-mile oval that can hold 68,000.)

Still, the sport's center remains unassailable. Four corners banked at just nine degrees and 12 minutes, and a 2.5-mile layout unchanged since 1909. Charming, view-blocking grandstand poles, like at Wrigley Field. Deaths and life-changing moments have echoed off those seats. If you aren't humbled on that ground, read more history.

Every big track has "photo holes," nonpublic gaps in the catch fencing for credentialed photographers. The last hole in the Speedway's Turn 1 happens to be inches from the end of the corner. Marshall, a former race engineer turned photojournalist, took me there. Never take your eyes off the track, he said.

Jonathan Ferrey / Stringer / Getty Images

"If things go wrong, you won't have much time to run. Less if you rely on your hearing for warning."

Sure, I said, but isn't there catch fencing?

"The fencing grabs whole cars, but the holes in it are about nine inches square. Two hundred miles per hour pulverizes things, and pulverized car parts fit through nine square inches."

I looked at the nearest stands, 20 feet back. Then the first cars came through and pulled my spleen out through my ears.

Indy in person is not Indy on TV. From the front straight, Turn 1 looks like a wall, but guys enter—235 mph in practice this year—without lifting, tire scrub shaving about 5 mph by mid-corner. It seems impossible, but it happens, lap after lap. And there is still palpable risk. When a driver gets a trimmed-out, low-downforce car visibly sideways in a crosswind and somehow saves it. Qualifying laps attributable only to cojones. Hot days where, if you can't catch a sliding car, you're in the fence.

TV removes the violence. After five minutes on the wall, you hate the cameras. If a driver's fighting understeer, the nose hop-scotching at the apex, he can get eerily close. The air is more violent with every mile per hour and inch; three laps in, you can ID the fast guys solely by sound and pressure. You keep your eyes up even when you don't have to, mesmerized. Trying, all the while, to remember the last time you met a road course and thought, This is the ballsiest thing I've ever seen.

At the end of my time on the wall, I turned to Marshall, dazed. "If you could somehow pipe this experience into people's homes, you'd make billions." He nodded, as if it were obvious. Another car tore by and ripped my lungs out through my nose.

By chance, the day after I got home from Indiana, an old club-racing friend called to catch up. As an afterthought, I mentioned the Speedway.

"Oval racing is boring," he said, dismissively. "Just a bunch of lefts."

I almost hung up.

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