Memorable Memorial Day racing

By DAVID GREEN

The first major holiday weekend of summer is always one of the biggest of the year for auto racing. This year, it was especially rewarding for those with eclectic motorsports tastes.

Even Coca-Cola 600 winner Kasey Kahne was juiced up by the thrilling Indianapolis 500 earlier Sunday, and Formula One -- the group which gave us a six-car farce of a U.S. Grand Prix last year -- provided some more unique gossip fodder by disqualifying pole winner Michael Schumacher at Monaco.

I know many race fans are anything but eclectic. They watch only one form of racing, and couldn't care less about any other. I think they're cheating themselves out of not only some great entertainment, but some context and perspective, as well.

Take Indy, for example. How can someone's appreciation of NASCAR racing be complete without an understanding of how the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and its 500-Mile Race were so instrumental in giving American automobile racing the qualities and characteristics that make it what it is?

Tracks such as Lowe's Motor Speedway feature turns identified as 1, 2, 3 and 4. That's really an artificial designation. There's one continuous, 170-or-so-degree turn at one end of LMS and another one very much like it in the other end. Why is each approximate half-circle divided into two parts? Only reason I can think of is the rectangular Indianapolis Motor Speedway, built in 1909, which truly does have Turns 1, 2, 3 and 4 -- four distinct 90-degree turns.

The building of IMS in the first decade of the 20th century helped influence American fans' preference for closed-course, oval-shaped tracks. In Europe, early auto races were held on roads and streets rather than purpose-built racetracks.

Fellows who built racetracks that are dear to the hearts of NASCAR fans were influenced by Indianapolis. H. Clay Earles and Harold Brasington both drew on their experiences at Indy when they built Martinsville Speedway and Darlington Raceway.

And why would Brasington schedule a race on Labor Day 1950 that covered 500 miles if not for the original 500-miler, Indy, which held the first Indy 500 in 1911?

Likewise, Indy-car fans should have an appreciation for stock cars, a genre which is truly a spin-off of Champ Car racing that dates from just the years just before the interruption of all racing activities for World War II. If they want a reminder of how the Indy 500 rose from its origins to become major league, they have no better example than NASCAR.

Even if they don't ever cultivate a taste for stock cars, they ought to have learned better than to be so arrogant in their disdain for the supposedly inferior form of racing. The arrogance reached a peak when IMS President Tony George went ahead with his plans to stage the inaugural Brickyard 400 for Winston Cup cars in 1994.

It's no surprise that the attitude of the CART camp now serves as a textbook example of the concept of hubris ("overbearing pride or presumption," according to one dictionary). It's a lesson those on the NASCAR side might want to keep in mind now that NASCAR is the supposedly superior form.