Zak Keefer

zak.keefer@indystar.com

The idea behind the whole thing sprouted in a world of dirt roads and big dreams. America was restless at the turn of the 20th century, a curious and defiant and ambitious nation chasing the most human of desires: more. Life was speeding up. America wanted further. America wanted faster. So Carl Fisher gave it to them.

It started with six words. He was furious that day, sulking on the side of one of those dirt roads, somewhere outside the tiny town of Dublin, Ind., sometime in the fall of 1908. Fisher's car had broken down on the way home from Dayton, Ohio. Tire failure. Again. And that's when his friend, Lem Trotter, asked the question that would change auto racing forever.

“Why don’t you build that track?”

The man had a point. Fisher had talked for years about constructing a massive testing track to show off the nation’s new phenomenon — the automobile — but had yet to follow through. His goals: Spark interest, stimulate advancement, sell some cars. The problem was finding the right slice of land. French Lick, the site Fisher initially proposed, wouldn’t do. Too hilly. So a day or two after their disastrous trip home from Dayton, Fisher and Trotter drove out a few miles west of Indianapolis and got out at the corner of Crawfordsville Pike. They gazed out at 320 acres of flat-as-can-be farmland. Fisher was sold.

He lured three businessmen by the names Newby, Wheeler and Allison to join in. They forked over $72,000 for the land. The Pressley Farm became Indianapolis Motor Parkway. A speedway was born.

Built to serve as an automotive testing ground — Come see how far our cars can go before blowing up! — it instead became an automotive proving ground. But not without a few casualties. The deaths piled up in those early years, mostly due to the track’s shoddy surface, and the calls came, one after another, for Fisher to shut the place down. “(These races) are an amusement congenial only to savages and should be stopped,” wrote The New York Times. “There is abundant legal warrant for doing so.”

Only Fisher wouldn’t blink. He improvised. He repaved his 2.5-mile oval with bricks and dreamed up “the grandest grind ever,” an exhaustive competition set for Memorial Day weekend 1911 that promised to test man and machine like nothing else on earth. Indianapolis would host a 500-mile race.

In a country ripe for amusement, Fisher’s race became an inimitable spectacle. It became an ode to America's rebellious past, yet an embodiment of the forward thinking it was founded upon. It became the relentless pursuit of progress. The speed was alluring, the danger real, the drama unrivaled. It was deadly. It was exhilarating. It was addictive.

It became a celebration of American ingenuity, of American audacity, of American triumph. It became an American original. It became 33 drivers scoffing at their own mortality — “a most barbarous form of excitement” was how The Times put it. No matter. This is a country that loves cars, loves building them and fixing them and racing them. This is a country that loves the Indianapolis 500.

Fisher’s track became a cathedral, the birthplace of American motorsports, a Midwestern melting pot. His 500-mile race became an institution, held at the same time on the same day at the same place every year, a toast to summer and sunshine and pork tenderloins and light beer and fast cars. It became the style of Sid Collins and the booming baritone of Tom Carnegie; the courage of Bill Vukovich and the power of A.J. Foyt; the guts of Rick Mears and the guile of Mario Andretti. It became “a nnnewwww trrrrracccckkk rrrrecordddd!” and “Back Home Again in Indiana” and “Gentlemen, start your engines!” and a bottle of milk and the Borg-Warner Trophy and kissing the bricks. It became so damn cool.

It became that spine-tingling roar that arrives just after noon on the last Sunday in May at 16th and Georgetown, about 33 cars tearing down the most famous straightaway in motorsports at 220-and-change while the hair on the necks of a quarter-million stands straight up. It became the dad who brings his young son to his first 500 so they can sit in the same seats in the same turn he and his father sat in, and his grandfather sat in before them, and his great-grandfather before them, there because there’s no place on the planet they’d rather spend the Sunday before Memorial Day than the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, baking in the sun, radio on, goosebumps coming.

“There was nothing else like it,” says Donald Davidson, the track’s venerable historian. “It just took off. There was Christmas, there was Easter, and there was the Indianapolis 500.”

America wanted further. America wanted faster. So Carl Fisher gave it to them. The Indianapolis 500 became a race, sure. But it became more.

It became iconic.

***

“The way to sell cars is to race them.” — Henry Ford

No, Carl Fisher couldn’t have seen all that was to come. Not some-400,000 fans packing his speedway during its mid-1980s peak. Not a Dutch driver named Arie Luyendyk burning around his oval at more than 236 mph. Not the innovations his track would pioneer, from the first seatbelt to the first use of four-wheel drive to countless engine overhauls. It changed everything. He changed everything.

“I don’t think Carl Fisher had any clue as to what he was creating,” says current IMS president Doug Boles.

And to think: The man was just trying to sell a few cars. Now his track is 107 years old. It has been abandoned, expanded, renovated. The first Indianapolis 500 was in the books before the Titanic set sail, before both World Wars. Fans who didn’t arrive by train that day did so by horse. Thousands of hitching posts lined the outskirts of the speedway. Bookmakers took wagers on whether drivers would win, lose or die.

The 100th running arrives May 29. Fans will get updates on the race leaders from their iPhones.

Say this much for Fisher: He was a visionary. He knew if he put on display these marvels of machine, interest in the automobile would surge and business would boom. In the early 1900s, Indianapolis was home to dozens of auto manufacturers large and small, from Marmon to Cole to Overland (Stutz and Duesenberg would come quickly). What Fisher did was plant a stake in the ground. By building the largest track in the country, he was stating it loud and clear: Indianapolis, and not Detroit, or Cleveland, or Chicago, was the motor capital of the world. Now it had the race to prove it.

Yet the miracle a century later isn’t that the Indianapolis 500 was born. It’s that it survived.

First, it was saved by the bricks. The mixture of tar and asphalt that blanketed the speedway in its infancy was such a disaster it nearly cost the track its livelihood. After five deaths in a 1909 race there, according to Charles Leerhsen’s 2011 book, “Blood and Smoke,” America’s newspapers were ready to bury the idea of auto racing altogether. Indy was to blame. “This is the final straw,” wrote The Detroit News. “The blood of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway has probably rung the knell on track racing in the United States.”

Families of the victims claimed Fisher was culpable in the deaths. A young driver out of Texas, Tobin DeHymal, told The San Antonio Light that Fisher’s speedway was “a total and complete failure.” And for a while there it sure seemed like it was.

Fisher remained stunningly undeterred. The appetite was there; the arena simply needed modification. Enter: 3.2 million bricks. Fisher commissioned a repaving of his speedway in the winter of 1909 and announced plans for a 500-mile race, a grueling competition that would last most of the day but still get the paying customers home in time for dinner.

It did just that. The inaugural 500 was a roaring success, despite the fact that it took all of 13 laps for the race to claim its first fatality (a 44-year-old mechanic named Samuel Dickson). “I’m tired,” race winner Ray Harroun said after puttering to victory in six hours, 42 minutes. “May I have some water and perhaps a sandwich, please?”

And so it went from there. A year later, they named the town Speedway — because what else were they going to call it? Just as Fisher imagined, technology improved, thus the cars improved, thus the racing improved. Speeds rose. Popularity climbed. Legends were scripted. Lives were lost. Traditions were born.

In 1924, the race is heard on the radio for the first time. In 1927, former driver and World War I flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker buys the speedway and saves the 500, pulling it through the depths of the Great Depression. In 1936, Louie Meyer gulps buttermilk in Victory Lane. By 1938, most of the oval is covered in asphalt, save a stretch along the front straightaway.

Then, in 1941, the speedway goes dark.

Then, in 1945, Tony Hulman saves it.

***

“We’re like the circus. We only come around once a year, so you better not miss us.” — Tony Hulman

By 1945 Fisher’s cathedral was ready to die. It had been silenced four consecutive years by World War II. It had become a crumbling, dilapidated, weed-infested ghost town. It was set to be gutted and turned into a shopping plaza.

And that’s when Anton Hulman Jr. of Terre Haute bought the speedway, saved the speedway, and turned the Indianapolis 500 into the Greatest Spectacle in Racing.

“If Tony Hulman doesn’t invest in the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1945, we’re not here today, simple as that,” Boles says.

More than anything, Hulman sold the 500. He drove around the state each spring, his trunk loaded with posters, spreading the gospel of speed. He reminded Hoosiers about the Memorial Day Classic they’d fallen in love with all those years ago, and told them it was back, and that it was better than ever. He wanted Indiana — not just its capital city — to buy into the race for good.

Indiana did. When it came to recreation in postwar Indiana, there was high school basketball … and that’s about it. No Colts. No Pacers. Hulman’s revival of the 500 established it as a cultural touchstone. It became the unofficial start of summer, a tradition to pass from generation to generation. Most significant, for Hoosiers, it became theirs.

He enchanted race day with traditions that live on 70 years later. In 1946, James Melton sang “(Back Home Again in) Indiana” for the first time. By the mid-1950s, no race started without Hulman’s iconic command: “Gentlemen, start your engines.” The Indianapolis 500 was entering its golden era.

Speeds soared. Engineers experimented. Cars evolved. Interest swelled. Held off local television until 1986 — to this day the race is never broadcast live in Indianapolis — the romance of the radio added to its unspeakable allure. Fans from all over the world tuned into the IMS Radio Network to hear Sid Collins and his crew.

“I remember getting letters from fans in Antarctica and, once, from a priest who was hiding out in the Congo but found a way to listen to the race on a transistor radio,” says Paul Page, Collins’ hand-picked successor. “They all told me our broadcast took them back home.”

Soon the speedway was flooded with the fearless, drivers addicted to speed who drove their roadsters and rear-engine creations like bats out of hell and risked everything for glory at Indianapolis. They became immortal. Vukovich. Ward. Sachs. Parnelli. Foyt. Rutherford. Andretti. Al Unser. Bobby Unser. Mears. Eventually the racing season was carved in half: There was Indianapolis, and there was everywhere else.

“There are a bunch of beautiful racetracks all over the country, but let’s be honest, everyone has one favorite,” says A.J. Foyt, the race’s first four-time winner and the driver considered by most as the best the speedway’s ever seen. “Tradition is something you just can’t buy.”

Foyt’s story is the story of his era. He first heard about the 500 as a youngster working on cars in his father’s garage in Houston, the radio turned to Collins. It sucked him in. Indy became his dream. Seventy years later, Foyt puts it this way: The biggest thrill of his decorated career wasn’t any of his four victories at Indianapolis, or his record 35 starts, or his 555 laps led.

It’s the first time he qualified.

“No question,” the 81-year-old says. “Back then there were 50-75 cars just trying to make the field. And they were the best drivers in the world. I remember thinking, ‘I can’t believe this. I can’t believe I got a spot.’”

The same can be said of Bobby Unser, the kid who’d plug his ear to a radio that sat on a stack of tires in his family’s garage in Albuquerque, N.M., and listen to Collins. He never imagined he’d be good enough to race at Indianapolis. Then, in 1963, 14 years into his racing career, he got his shot.

“When I drove down Georgetown Road and saw the speedway for the first time, I almost crapped my pants," Unser says now with a hearty laugh. “I couldn’t believe anything could be that big! It was too big to be real.”

He shook off the nerves and won the 500 three times.

***

“Racing is like warfare. It accelerates the evolution of ideas.” — Dan Gurney

It kept getting bigger. And bigger. And bigger. Teams would compete year-round just to earn enough cash to have a crack at Indy. More than 50 cars would try to qualify. Pole Day, narrated by the beloved Tom Carnegie, ballooned into an event itself, drawing upwards of 100,000 fans. In the waning hours, as the last few rows were decided, drivers would hop from car to car and from team to team, desperate for a spot in The Show. The drama was real. The spectacle grew.

“It was the ultimate,” recalls the oldest living winner, 82-year-old Parnelli Jones. “The height of automobile racing. And I don’t just mean in the United States. I mean the whole world.”

It became the largest single-day sporting event in the world. It became a party. It became a ritual. It became that iconic sound, the sound a car makes when it darts down the homestretch and toward the yard of bricks at 220 mph, the soundtrack to speed and May and Indianapolis. It became the agony of losing by .043 of a second (Scott Goodyear, 1992) and the ecstasy of a last-second pass (Sam Hornish Jr., 2006).

Win at Indy, and your name lives on forever.

“I’ve said this a million times,” Foyt explains. “I’ve won races all over the world, but if it wasn’t for the Indianapolis 500, none of you would’ve ever heard of me.”

He's probably right.

Above all the 500 is a survivor. It survived shoddy surfaces and demands it be stopped. It survived two World Wars and a great depression and three different ownership groups. It survived the messy open-wheel racing split of the 1990s, dipping attendance numbers and stalling speeds.

It still carries immeasurable appeal. The 500 is an event woven tightly into the fabric of a city and state, a one-of-a-kind impetus that, according to Visit Indy, annually pumps in $100 million into the Indianapolis economy.

Now a city celebrates the 100th running of its race. It began with tire failure and Carl Fisher’s disastrous trip home from Dayton. With six words from Lem Trotter. With 320 acres of flat-as-can-be farmland, a 2.5-mile oval and a new phenomenon — the automobile.

America wanted further. America wanted faster.

So Carl Fisher gave America the Indianapolis 500.

Call IndyStar reporter Zak Keefer at (317) 444-6134. Follow him on Twitter: @zkeefer.