Tony’s ‘curse’ voids Indy 500’s final drama
It was altogether fitting and proper that Dario Franchitti won the 2010 Indianapolis 500. He drove the best race, had the fastest car all day, and might have won a dominant race had it not been for so many yellow caution slowdowns, which force a diminished-speed, single-file order. However, the race was still plagued by the dark cloud that Tony George has forcefully pulled over the legendary Indianapolis Motor Speedway, preventing it from ever attaining the magic it used to have, or the full drama it so richly deserves.
George was in charge back in the 1990s, when the Indy 500 was a fabulous event, the biggest single sports attraction in the world, every year. They would pack 400,000 people into the Speedway, with about 275,000 of them in seats all around the 2.5-mile oval, and the rest partying like crazy in the infield and every other standing-room area available. You had to reserve a room almost a year in advance, and pay a doubled or tripled rate with a three-day minimum, to secure a hotel spot. The whole event took literally an entire month of May to organize, promote, and hold two weekends of qualifying. The first day of qualifying, in fact, might have qualified as the second largest sports attraction in the country every year, because well over 100,000 would show up to watch drivers circle the track one at a time, for four lonely but high-pressure laps.
But because CART, the Championship Auto Racing Teams, had evolved into a far bigger and more popular season series than the old USAC series, CART drivers and teams would take a couple weeks off from their own schedule and come to Indianapolis to dominate the Indy 500. All of the CART races were bigger than all the USAC series except for Indy. So the CART teams wound up having the most clout when it came to rule changes. It didn’t matter how good CART was, the Indy 500 was the biggest race in the world.
When Indy 500 and CART racing were at their pinnacle, Tony decided he was tired of the bigshots from like Roger Penske and Chip Ganassi and a few others coming to the track and dominating the race against the host race teams. Although CART’s rules were more progressive, Tony George rebelled — basically against CART, but also, in a way, against his own institution. He declared new rules that would allow the previous year’s CART cars, but specifically outlawed the already-built new cars. He knew full well that CART teams had sold off their year-old race cars and already built new cars with their costly changes. Tony was right on about one thing — the cost of racing at that level was out of hand.
So Tony George declared his rules, which effectively eliminated the CART teams from participating. CART owners realized they were being locked out, and formed their own 500-mile race on the same weekend as the Indy 500, at Michigan International Speedway in Brooklyn, Mich. Tony whined that CART was boycotting Indy, and some of the lesser-informed media types bought it, so the split became a chasm.
Tony George trumpeted that his Indy Racing League would be for U.S. drivers, driving U.S. cars; for guys who grew up on the Sprint car and other dirt-track ovals. Sounded good, but high-speed racing had gone far beyond that charming, albeit neanderthal, notion. Racing at over 200 mph required the precise touch of drivers who had grown up learning how to race in high-speed go-karts and open-wheel formula cars, not the heavy-handed, rough-hewed guys who could horse a bounding dirt-track sprint car through a four-wheel drift on an oval.
One of those expensive CART rule changes was to reconfigure the cockpit, encircling it with a padded, horseshoe-shaped device around the sides and back of the cockpit. Designed in concert with doctors, the theory was to prevent a driver’s helmeted head from moving far enough in any direction to strike the side or rear of the cockpit in the case of a severe impact. Regardless of the impact, a driver’s head couldn’t snap more than about a half-inch to either side or the rear before it would come up against that cushioned collar. Typically, while the engines and the aerodynamics in the quest for speed got all the headlines, the high cost of making the dangerous sport of 230-mph auto racing as safe as possible.
Carrying out its end of the hassle, CART held its own race at Michigan International Speedway’s oval, on Indy 500 weekend. The 500 had the name and the fame and the history and the tradition, but the Michigan race had more advanced and wealthier teams, faster cars with higher technology, and better drivers. I went to MIS for what should have been a better and more significant race. Once there, I interviewed car-builders and doctors involved in the CART updates for a story I wrote for the Minneapolis Tribune, to disclose the underlying reasons for the cost increases that led to the difference between the two groups.
A botched start prevented CART’s “U.S. 500” from being a huge success. The narrower MIS track meant racers would start in two rows, rather than three. At the start, the two front-row cars got too close together, and neither wanted to give ground. They bumped tires, spun, and caused an enormous chain-reaction crash that wiped out one-third of the field — and all of the positive strokes.
That mess is all that’s remembered from that weekend, but a terrible tragedy before race weekend was the worst situation. Scott Brayton, a Michigan native and the top individual driver left at Indy, was fastest, and won the pole. In practicing for the race, Brayton’s car spun out in Turn 4, and as he fought for control, the car skidded into the outer wall. Brayton died. The official word was that he was killed when his head struck the concrete wall. I was at MIS, but I saw numerous video replays of the crash, which left me shaking my head, because the impact was not that severe, and the car was not that badly damaged. Then I saw one overhead view, which I never saw publicly shown again.
When his car skidded sideways, the overhead view showed Brayton’s helmet snapping severely to the right, about 6-8 inches, and whiplashed back. His helmet never struck the wall, negating first reports that he died of a skull fracture when his head hit the wall. Scott Brayton died of a broken neck because of the severe side-to-side whiplash. In effect, Brayton died because of Tony George’s command that cars racing at Indy would be forced to contain costs, which meant they didn’t consider the updated safety elements CART demanded on its new cars.
That’s a sad story, although very little was made of it. By race day, the media was back to stressing the Indy-CART split, and ridiculing CART for its first-lap crash.
For several years, CART continued to run U.S. 500s, moving to the oval at suburban St. Louis. They ran it on the Saturday when the Indy 500 was on Sunday, so I covered both. I drove to St. Louis, covered the CART 500, then drove late into Indianapolis, where I had a choice of several rooms from whatever motel I stopped at. Gone was the three-day minimum, gone were the inflated rates, and gone was the demand for tickets.
Years later, CART faded, and so did the IRL, but the Indy 500 remained. Some top CART team sponsors informed their teams that they didn’t care about the rest of the season, they only cared that the team race at the Indy 500. Roger Penske went back, playing by IRL rules. So did Chip Ganassi. Those two naturally went on to run the whole season of the newly renamed Indy Racing League, and wound up dominating.
Tony George boasted about having won the war. But what did he win? His basic premise was U.S. drivers from U.S. teams, with U.S. built cars and engines, but the top drivers were coming from Brazil, Europe, Sweden, Canada, and all over the globe. The cars were designed and built in England. The engines were Oldsmobile and Infiniti, and then Chevrolet and Toyota, before Honda, the mainstay in CART, came back to the series too.
Honda engines proved so dominant that Chevrolet and Toyota pulled out of the series. You may or may not have noticed that all 33 cars this year and for the past several years were powered by Honda engines. Nobody blows engines any more, that’s how good the Honda engine technology is. So we have 33 cars that are essentially the same Dallara chassis, running the same Honda engines. It is spec racing at its best — high-tech, but all identical cars and engines. Crowds are a little better, but have not found their way back to making Indy a must-see event.
If you watched the 2010 race, it came extremely close to being the exact sort of fantastic finish that might have caused race fans to rediscover the Indy 500. Franchitti zipped into the lead on the first lap, and he led all the way, yielding only for a few laps when he’d make pit stops, then quickly regain the lead as later-pitting cars came in. Tony Kanaan was a hero, starting 33rd and working his way all the way up to second, and appearing to be Franchitti’s top challenger, along with Helio Castroneves, Franchitti’s top rival. Both Kanaan and Castroneves, however, dropped back before the final laps, needing late pit stops to avoid running out of fuel.
It might have been a humdrum finish, but in the last 20 of 200 laps, a new threat suddenly emerged. Fuel became a problem for Franchitti, too, who was informed by his crew to cool it, to slow down from his 220-mph laps to more like 205 to conserve fuel. He did it, reluctantly, because he had a large lead, and because he knew that if he dashed to the pits for even a splash of fuel, he would blow the lead and the race to Dan Wheldon, who had worked his way up to second, and was closing in. Wheldon’s crew was giving him similar warnings — slow down, or you’ll run out of fuel, but Wheldon said he checked his instruments, and believed he was not in danger, and could have gone harder. He followed his crew’s demands, but he didn’t slow as much, and was still closing in. As the final laps melted away, Wheldon trailed by only the length of the straightaway, and then by less.
As the cars hurtled into their last three laps, the drama was nearing the boiling point. Would Franchitti’s pace be sufficient to hold off Wheldon? If he increased his pace, would he run out of fuel? Would Wheldon also speed up, and did he also face the risk of running out of fuel? Incredibly, Wheldon’s crew stuck by their orders. Had he been turned loose — why protect second place? — I believe he would have overtaken Franchitti, or at least closed in enough to force Franchitti to speed up and run out of fuel.
Coming around to start the last lap around the 2.5-mile oval, the drama was riveting. It was at that precise moment that what we shall call “The Curse of Tony George” struck. Everybody was charging as hard as they dared. Back in the pack, someone named Mike Conway was making up ground, and started to pass someone named Ryan Hunter-Ray, when Hunter-Ray’s car ran out of fuel. When his engine sputtered, Hunter-Ray abruptly slowed, right into the trajectory of the charging Conway. Their cars bumped wheels, and the impact sent Conway’s race car somersaulting over the top of Hunter-Ray’s car and into the outer wall and catch fence. The car did what it was designed to do, disintegrating to absorb impact. Doing that saved Conway’s life, perhaps, although it also scattered chunks of its carbon fiber bodywork all over the track.
Back up front, starting their final lap toward possibly the most dramatic finish in recent Indy history, the yellow caution flag waved and the caution lights flashed all around the oval. Franchitti, clinging to a tiny lead over Wheldon, slowed down immediately, because a caution means single file, with no passing. Conway was lifted out of the wreckage that had been his car, and airlifted to a hospital with a broken leg, but he never lost consciousness.
Franchitti stroked it around the last lap and crossed the finish line, with Wheldon second. Later, Franchitti’s crew said he had 1.6 gallons of fuel left, which was enough to get him around one last lap at reduced speed, but it would NOT have been enough for him to finish at the increased speed he would need to hold off Wheldon. But Wheldon was justifiably frustrated, because his crew found he had more than enough fuel to go hard, as his onboard instruments indicated, and either win the race outright or push Franchitti and win the race when Franchitti ran out of fuel.
Instead of the ultra-drama we viewers had been promised, we were left with the anticlimax of Franchitti cruising slowly to take the checker under yellow. A deserving winner, based on the whole day’s work, but in an outcome that left a few million television viewers drama-deprived and cheated out of a dramatic finish. Tony George has relinquished power at the 500 now, but his presence remains, as The Curse of Tony George.
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About the Author
John Gilbert is a lifetime Minnesotan and career journalist, specializing in cars and sports during and since spending 30 years at the Minneapolis Tribune, now the Star Tribune. More recently, he has continued translating the high-tech world of autos and sharing his passionate insights as a freelance writer/photographer/broadcaster. A member of the prestigious North American Car and Truck of the Year jury since 1993. John can be heard Monday-Friday from 9-11am on 610 KDAL(www.kdal610.com) on the "John Gilbert Show," and writes a column in the Duluth Reader.
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