From paved-over farmland in hardscrabble Indiana and North Carolina to the opulent streets of Monte Carlo, this was once the most wondrous weekend of the year for automobile racing.
The Indianapolis 500, the world’s oldest 500-mile race.
The World 600 (now Coca-Cola 600) at Charlotte, the world’s longest oval-track race.
The Grand Prix of Monaco, simply the loveliest race in the world.
They all were occasioned originally by a dichotomous holiday: in the U.S. the somber Decoration Day (later Memorial Day) and in Europe the religious Ascension Day.
Times changed, greed soared and schism spoiled, and in the late 1990s the weekend lost its luster.
But it can be glorious again Sunday, depending on who wins where.
If Danica Patrick becomes the first female winner of the 500, Indy might gain only a tie for international headlines. Six hours earlier because of the trans-Atlantic time difference, England’s Lewis Hamilton could become first black driver to win Monaco — or any major motor race anywhere.
Should either or both happen, nothing NASCAR could do could make the 600 more than it was until a decade ago: a Memorial Day afterthought.
Not even a victory at Charlotte by Juan Pablo Montoya, who raced at Monaco last year and then defected to NASCAR this year, would do it.
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Because Montoya won the Indy 500 in 2000 and has won seven races in Formula One, a victory Sunday night would be only an interesting “crossover” victory. A victory by Patrick or Hamilton would transcend racing.
Stock up on as many snacks and beverages as you used to for New Year’s Day in college football’s old bowl system. This live-telecast transoceanic extravaganza will last from early morning (Monaco, Speed Channel) through midday (Indy, ABC-ESPN) into late afternoon and on into the night (Charlotte, Fox).
This might be Reawakening Day.
On the northwest outskirts of Indianapolis, industrialist Carl Fisher in 1909 built an extraordinary track, a 2.5-mile rectangle, and called it a “speedway.”
By 1911 Fisher had grown bored with mere 100-mile races and wanted something spectacular, extravagant in duration.
But he wanted his Midwestern patrons to be comfortable — to eat breakfast at home, to be back in time for supper and to commute round trip (by Model T, carriage and local train) in daylight.
He reckoned his race should last seven hours. Race cars of the time averaged about 70 m.p.h.
Seventy times seven equaled 490 miles. Fisher rounded it off to a nicer-sounding 500.
He called it simply “the 500-Mile Race,” and purists still do.
What gave it magnetism from the start? That first time out, a Chicago engineer turned daredevil, Ray Harroun, piqued the American lust for more speed, winning the race in only 6 hours 42 minutes 8 seconds by averaging a blistering 74.6 m.p.h.
Modern 500s are routinely run in slightly longer than three hours, and laps at 225 m.p.h.-plus have been common for decades. This on exactly the same track (except for the pavement) built with 70 m.p.h. in mind.
By 1929, on the Riviera, Europe’s Jazz Age rich, smitten with the Lost Generation writers of Paris, believed with Ernest Hemingway that “there are only three sports: bullfighting, mountain climbing and motor racing, all the others being games.”
So they organized a race through the streets of Monte Carlo for a “great prize,” a grand prix. From France and Italy on either side of the tiny principality of Monaco came thoroughbred racing cars, built nearly free of technical restrictions, and called Furmule Libre, or “free formula.”
Today the class of cars is known as Formule Un, or Formula One, and it remains unquestionably the most glamorous, expensive, sophisticated form of motor racing in the world.
By the 1950s, in the Carolina Piedmont below the Blue Ridge Mountains, a driven young stock-car promoter named Bruton Smith — he remains today, at 80, a major track owner in NASCAR — was bent on stealing thunder from the Indy 500.
If his race could not be better or bigger or faster than Indy, it would be longer: 600 miles. The title was gaudy and presumptuous: World 600. (Later, like much else in the South, it would be bought by Coca-Cola.)
The 600 thundered on for decades in the deep shadows of the 500 until 1996, when Anton Hulman George, known as Tony, third-generation scion of Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s owning family of the post-World War II era, fouled his family’s gold-rimmed dinner plate.
He locked horns with the barons of CART, purveyors of the best cars and drivers to Indy since 1979. Devastating civil war ensued. The 500 deflated, and it remains semi-comatose. The 600 skyrocketed. But through the wars of the New World, Monaco remained subdued and elegant, lovely beyond question.
And NASCAR roared to the fore of U.S. popularity.
Until, perhaps, Sunday.
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