Beltane                                                                                 Planting Moon

All of us are from somewhere.  We may love that place or hate it or be indifferent to it, but it remains the unspoken standard against which we judge our present condition.  I understand that military brats don’t consider themselves tied to any location and I hope for their sake that that isn’t true, because a person without a place is a terrible thing to contemplate, so called world citizens to the contrary.

At certain times of the year our old home place gets brought to mind and late May is one of those times for me.  The greatest spectacle in racing, the Indianapolis 500 happens on the Sunday closest to Memorial Day.  It used to be on Memorial Day.

Right now in Indiana everyone’s focused on the time trials, the days preceding the race when pit crews tune the cars and the drivers familiarize themselves with the track and the way their car responds to it.  The Indianapolis Star has an entire section of motor sports and in these weeks it will feature special interest stories leading up to the race itself.

As kids, we would all pour over lap times, engine design decisions, who was driving which car.  We could handicap an upcoming race like old railbirds at the Kentucky Derby. (among whom used to my grandfather, Charlie Keaton)   In the 1950’s the old car design, large tires with a soapbox derby look sported Offenhauser 4-cylinder engines.  It was 1963 when Team Lotus brought in a mid-engine car, which came in second, then dominated until blowing a gasket in 1964 and finally winning in 1965.  That was the first race the Offy’s hadn’t won since their rise to dominance.

It’s hard to describe how radical it was seeing this small car, low to the ground, racing against the older style Indy cars.  This picture shows Jim Graham and the first Lotus entered in the 1963 race.  It looked like a different animal altogether than the old roadsters.  They were almost instantly extinct, along with the Offenhauser engine.

Up until Team Lotus the Indy affair had been a US event, but Jim Graham’s success and the amount of money available to win soon drew many out of the European based Formula 1 racing circuit.  Now the favorite is as likely to be from Brazil as from Noblesville, Indiana.

It’s also a much faster race.  The year I was born, 1947, the Indy was won by Mauri Rose at an average speed of 116.3, a pole qualifying time of 120.0 and a total race time of 4 hours, 15 minutes.  Ten years later, in 1957, Sam Hanks won the race at an average speed of 135.6 and a race time of 3 hours, 41 minutes.  8 years after that in 1965, the year I graduated from high school, Jim Graham won in the car you see above.   Average  speed, 150.7, qualifying speed, 160.7 and a race time of 3 hours and 19 minutes, almost an hour faster than 1947.  In 1990 the average speed was an astonishing 185.9, a qualifying speed of 223.3 and a race time of just 2 hours and 41 minutes.

After that year, as the downdraft devices and the quicker engines began to reach higher and higher speeds, the track began to impose limitations aimed at lowering the overall speeds and reducing the possibility of high-speed, multiple car fatalities.  Safer car designs, cabin designs and suit designs have made the driver risk less now than in the much slower days of the 1950’s, but fatalities still occur.

Dan Wheldon, a two-time Indy winner, and winner in 2011, died that same year in a race in Las Vegas.  (above:  wheldon’s 2011 winning car)

This post is about place, about a place defining event and its embeddedness in my own life.