Last weekend Paul Newman sat in the same room with his old nemesis Tony George, and they smiled and said nice things about each other, and Newman even trundled down memory lane a bit. Said his “favorite tradition” was that Indy sprawled across an entire month. Remembered that if you wanted to book a room at the crumbling old Speedway Motel beyond the second turn, you booked it for the whole month.
“We’re going to work hard to get it back to that,” Newman said.
And maybe they will. Someday.
Maybe someday Graham Rahal and Will Power and Justin Wilson, all the Champ Car refugees, will become names, stars, legitimate challengers to the same old IndyCar Series hierarchy. And maybe Indy will be Indy again, without any possible question the greatest race in the world, or at least the greatest race on Memorial Day weekend.
“We’re not living in the ’80s or ’90s,” George said in reference to developing new stars for a new circuit. “We’re living in today.”
And today is not yet tomorrow. Not yet.
There was Scott Dixon, who’d qualified fourth or better three of the five previous times he’d raced at Indy, sitting on the pole. There was teammate Dan Wheldon, who’d qualified in the top six in four of his previous five Indys, next to him on the front row. And there was Ryan Briscoe, who sits now in Sam Hornish Jr.’s old ride for Roger Penske, sitting next to him.
And after that: Helio Castroneves, Danica Patrick, Tony Kanaan, Marco Andretti, Vitor Meira, Hideki Mutoh.
“Obviously, we’re not going to be stupid and do something crazy,” said Castroneves, who stole the pole with an 11th-hour run last year, but didn’t opt to try Saturday.
In other words: The days of mavericks and cowboys and have-helmet, will-drive types strolling through Gasoline Alley looking for rides are over, even if Jimmy Kite was doing just that on Pole Day like some ghost-of-Indy-past. The operating costs are too gargantuan, the sponsor dollars too dear. No one’s going to take goofy chances or fliers on great ringing names from the past the way Penske did in 1987, when he hired three-time winner Al Unser Sr. off the street and Big Al went on to win Indy for him.
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