”Gentlemen . . .
We interrupt this automobile race . . .
”Start . . .
To bring you . . .
”Your engines.”
These commercial messages.
There they go around the Brickyard, at speeds of 200 miles an hour and more, for 500 grueling miles, some of the greatest names in sports: Labatts, Marlboro, K mart, Domino`s, Provini (that`s a veal), Playboy and the International Association of Machinists.
Those are the names-along with traditional auto-related products such as motor oils and additives-that will be emblazoned on the driving suits, the helmets and the cars of the 33 contestants in Sunday`s Indianapolis 500, the most celebrated, most attended and most promoted automobile race in all the world.
Did Parnelli Jones wear decals all over his suit and car? Did Bill Vukovich or Wilbur Shaw? No, they did not. Just look at the pictures. Maybe just something identifying themselves and their cars, but not ads for beer and cigarettes. In 1956, winner Pat Flaherty wore a shamrock decal on his helmet, not for money, just to celebrate his Irishness. He couldn`t afford to do that today.
”It`s the expense,” said Bob Laycock, the Speedway`s historian. ”It used to be you could get a (race) car for maybe $7,000. Now it`s maybe $175,000 for a chassis and another $75,000 for the engine.” Add the cost of other equipment and the people needed to service and maintain an Indy race car, and the tab approaches $1 million, Laycock said.
Automobile racers always needed money, and they always looked to sponsors to get it. Until about 20 years ago, though, those sponsors were related to the automotive world. They were the makers of spark plugs, motor oils or valves, not pizza parlors and beers.
”I think the big change came when Graham Hill`s car advertised American Red Ball Special,” said Laycock. ”I think that was in 1966. Since then all sorts of companies have used the race to advertise. It`s especially important to the cigarette companies because that`s about the only way they can get on television.”
That`s where just the right people are reached. Auto racing`s constituency is not huge; four percent called it their favorite sport in a recent Harris Poll, and television ratings for motor sports are in the single digits. But car racing fans are intense, active and loyal. ”Racing is an easy way to build an image among car enthusiasts,” said Mel Poole of Championship Auto Racing Teams. ”They are more brand loyal than enthusiasts of any other sport.”
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Even a culture`s most sacred rites are not immune from the perplexities of their age. The Indy 500 is still the biggest, richest, most celebrated auto race in the country. But like everything else, it isn`t exactly what it used to be. As have so many other pursuits, auto racing has become more esoteric, more crowded, more corporate, more crude, more corny and more of a television program.
Along with the population, the crowds have grown, with perhaps 350,000 now crowding into the Speedway. Even more of them than in the past are corporate executives using the 500 as a sales, marketing or motivational gimmick. Even more of them than in the past engage in behavior tasteless enough to dismay the average garage mechanic of a generation ago.
And in one of the world`s nice little ironies, an event that honors the automobile has had to make some adjustments for television. It is television`s minor but noticeable revenge against the one invention that upset the world even more than it did. The car, after all was ”the single most important force for change in 20th Century American life,” in the words of James Flink, author of ”The Automobile Age,” a highly regarded history of cars. Without the automobile, there would be no suburbia, mass production, motels, drive-in theaters, supermarkets, back-seat drivers, back-seat seductions or many other aspects of civilization as we know it. Still, on the day the world`s fastest cars are in the spotlight, they also serve as props for beer ads.
Not that the Indy 500 is nothing but a moving billboard. It is that, but it`s also a mighty event, a patriotic celebration of the superiority of American know-how, fun for the whole family, an exhibition of wretched excess, a reunion for car buffs, a wild and crazy spectacle, a test site for new technology, an observance of ”America`s love affair with the automobile” and a measure of the skill and courage of 33 men.
Well, that`s what it likes to think it is. But like any event that has acquired symbolic significance, the big race has also acquired its own mythology, and like all mythology some of it is true, some of it is half-true and some of it isn`t true at all.
For all the patriotic panoply, for instance, there will hardly be an American machine in the race. Even the Chevrolet engines are made by the Ilmore Engineering Co. of Brixsworth, England. The Cosworths are British, also, as is the Lola chassis, some of them containing Buick engines that were made in the U.S.A.
Back in the days when the drivers didn`t wear too many advertisements, most of the races were won by cars powered by the Offenhauser engine, which despite its German name came from Los Angeles.
But this should not be a lament about the decline of American technological superiority because it is doubtful that any such superiority ever existed. ”I don`t think American technology ever dominated the automobile,” said Flink. ”Our genius is basically in the production of autos. We excelled in the production of technologically good cars for a mass market.”
Furthermore, the connection between auto racing and improving the cars that people drive on the highway is tenuous at best. Long gone are the days when Henry Ford and Louis Chevrolet learned more about cars by racing them, or when Adolf Hitler, who never learned to drive, promoted auto races as part of his effort to promote his favorite car, the Mercedes. (Hitler probably never knew that it was named after Mercedes Jellinek, the daughter of its inventor and the granddaughter of a rabbi.)
As long ago as 1965, John B. Rae wrote in ”The American Automobile”
that there was ”no longer a pretense that (racing) was a method of testing cars.” Flink said ”racing does pioneer some things,” but noted that racing cars ”have gotten more remote” from other vehicles, whose improvements come from the auto industry`s proving grounds and computerized design systems.
Flink also doubts that Americans really have that much-discussed ”love affair with the automobile,” and some statistics support his conclusion. Less than one percent of auto travel, for instance, is undertaken for pleasure, according to a U.S. Transportation Department study.
”I don`t think there are a lot of car buffs,” Flink said. ”Cars have become utilitarian. People look at them in functional terms. They want them to have air conditioning, a tape deck, automatic transmission, a nice-looking exterior.”
The typical American`s relationship with a car does not resemble a love affair as much as a one-night stand. The consumer wants something that is attractive and comfortable and that will provide some superficial pleasure without demanding any real understanding of its inner workings. Like the three young men in the current Chevy ad who joke about not knowing what torque is, most Americans use cars without loving them. Were that not the case, more people would buy cars with standard transmissions.
Even racing fans are not necessarily tinkerers with engines, changers of carburetors or soupers-up of hot rods. ”I`m not really a car buff, I`m a speed buff, a noise buff,” said Chuck Patterson, a 54-year-old businessman from Lansing, Ill., as he sat in the Speedway`s infield during last weekend`s qualifying runs. ”I`ve come down here every year for probably 25 years. I just enjoy the idea of the cars, the drivers, the sound.”
Patterson`s response was typical of fans both here and at the Charlotte Speedway in North Carolina last week during the running of The Winston stock- car race. What racing fans like are the speed, the competition, the spectacle.
And the drivers. Even the hucksters cannot extinguish the power of this contest among brave and skillful men, some of whom have won the devotion of people all around the country.
”I really like Dale,” said Wayne Boulware, a 29-year-old from Whitmire, S.C., who travels with his wife and another couple to stock-car races all around the South. He meant Dale Earnhardt, one of the leading stock-car drivers, whose name and picture were on Boulware`s T-shirt. ”I just like the competition,” Boulware said. ”That`s why I like NASCAR (stock car) racing better than Indy style. It`s more competitive.”
But Indy fans have their favorites, too. ”Everybody loves A.J. and wants him to get his fifth,” said Todd Grebe, a 21-year-old junior at Indiana University who will root for A.J. Foyt to win the 500 for the fifth time Sunday.
For many, Foyt is a sentimental favorite because at 54 he`s the oldest man in the race and because he won the first of his four Indy 500s back in 1961, before four of the drivers in Sunday`s race were even born. A.J. will be in Car 14, an orange-and-black Lola with a Cosworth engine, none of which will be as evident as the name of the tobacco company helping to pay for it all.