HAMMOND, IN: When the Indy Cars visit the beautiful Chicagoland Speedway in Joliet, IL each fall, a spectacular show is virtually guaranteed, as history has shown. Amazingly, however, many of the “fans” in attendance don’t seem to get it.
As has become common practice among many of America’s super-speedways, buying tickets to individual races has become a thing of the past. Instead, race fans are forced to buy “track-packs” for big bucks, containing seats for all major events held at that speedway. In the case of Joliet, this means purchasing tickets for Indy Car if you only want NASCAR, and vise verse.
The good news: the place looks relatively full for all events. The bad news: the mixing & matching of two very different types of race-goers.
Personally, I enjoy NASCAR to a certain extent, but I’m an open-wheel guy. I’ve been following sprints, midgets and Indy Cars for my entire life, and usually watch stock cars mainly to see how the open wheel folks do in them.
To many gray-beards, the heyday of stock car racing was the sixties, when large numbers of Indianapolis 500 veterans would regularly compete in both USAC and NASCAR stock car races against the best tin-top drivers in the land. This was really something all race fans could get their teeth into.
But, those days are over. What we have now are specialized groups, featuring little-if any crossover between stock car and open wheel racers. Gone are the days when Mario Andretti, A.J. Foyt and Jim Hurtubise would run a sprint car race on dirt one night, and a stock car show the next afternoon. Today, it’s almost hard to believe that those days ever really happened.
As far as I can tell, today’s NASCAR “fans” are a new breed; a breed that didn’t even exist back in the day.
The best example of what I mean takes us back to the 2002 IRL race at Chicagoland. Several of my Indy Car friends and I were in the grandstand holding our collective breaths while Al Unser Jr. and Sam Hornish Jr. were involved in an amazing 220 MPH wheel-to-wheel dual for lap after lap near the end of the event. Suddenly, in the middle of all this, a large man dressed in colorful NASCAR regalia seated in front of us loudly proclaimed to his group, “Hell, my damn cooler is empty. I’m headin’ back to the car to reload!” I was astonished to see the entire group then proceed to gather their Dale Jarrett coolers and Jeff Gordon jackets and file out, just as Unser and Hornish screamed by, still wheel-to-wheel with only a hand full of laps to go! Wow…
I’ve also had a chance to observe NASCAR “fans” in their own world. At a Busch race at the Milwaukee Mile a few years ago, I was dumbstruck to watch hundreds of these folks crowding around the souvenir trailers while the cars were on their pace lap, about to start the race! Apparently, a short line at the Dale Jr. trailer was more important to them than the actual race itself.
Again, this year at Chicagoland, many of the “fans” seated around us for the Indy Car race really didn’t seem to know or care what was happening; mostly they were drinking heavily and standing up at all the wrong times. It’s really a shame that these NASCAR folks are forced to buy seats for the “stupid little Indy Cars” when all they really care about is buying Steven Wallace gear.
Hopefully, one day soon Indy Car racing will begin to recapture some of it’s former glory and be able to stand on it’s own with it’s own real fans. Until then, I guess we’ll have to be adrift in a sea of Good Ole Boy wannabees if we want to see the annual Indy Car Thrill Show at Joliet.
John AtlasMotorsports NewsThe Dirt Guy