Indy 500 hits the bricks

Everything should have been just right for last Sunday's Indianapolis 500.\nThe weather was excellent for auto racing -- cloudy and cool. More and more of the best drivers continue to abandon Championship Auto Racing Teams for the Indy Racing League. Exciting rookie drivers such as Dan Wheldon and Tora Takagi, from England and Japan, respectively, have given the sport an ethnic diversity. Gil de Ferran's victory was about triumphal spirit, how failing to win would hurt much more than G forces on a broken back and then doing something about it.\nAnd the world's biggest white trash party was held on the infield, an invitation for any enterprising videographer wanting to start a Boys Gone Wild video line or, for that matter, start a new Girls Gone Wild series.\nMaybe ignorance is bliss when it comes to the Indy 500. The closer you watch, the more it has been de-starched like an old worn shirt.\nDon't get me wrong, open wheel racing is much better than stock car racing. NASCAR is so boring comparatively, racers as pin-up idols -- a new Coca-Cola commercial shows NASCAR fans ogling race car drivers including a final shot showing women admiring Michael Waltrip's derriere -- and good ol' boys, all culminating in the trading of hats and the winning driver saying something in such fractured Alabaman that it needs subtitles.\nAnd then there is restrictor plate racing, which doesn't create ideal racing conditions but ideal traffic jams.\nOpen wheel racing is about finely-tuned machines, exciting passes and more meaningful races. Stock car racing may be more about the Americana, but open wheel racing asks, "Why stop there?"\nSo the Indy 500, the biggest of the open wheel races, is usually worth watching. But not as much as it used to be.\nThe fall of the Chevrolets had something to do with it. While auto racing isn't so much person versus machine as it is person and machine versus person and machine, when one person's machine is so much better than the others, the person winds up with little say in the outcome. This year, the Japanese engines ran much better than the Chevys throughout May that those driving Chevys lagged far behind. Those car owners employing Chevy engines and chassis constantly were defending genuine GM parts in between desperate forays into the toolbox. Nobody driving a Chevy engine finished higher than Buddy Rice's 11th place.\nHaving a Toyota or Honda motor under the hood was a prerequisite to winning, and when that happens, the quality in racing declines. The others might as well put on their blinkers.\nIn fact, A.J. Foyt IV was driving so slowly that his grandfather and car owner A.J. Foyt was telling him through his radio that he was going to get run over out there. Sam Hornish Jr. said on several occasions he would wait and sidle up next to cars driving right behind the younger Foyt, celebrating his 19th birthday on race day, and then pass while the other would have to slow down to avoid Foyt.\nIt also hurt that the two drivers many fans most badly wanted to win didn't last long. Sarah Fisher and her Chevy motor blew out and crashed into the wall on lap 14. On a weekend where Annika Sorenstam playing on the PGA Tour drew major headlines, Fisher's presence at Indy is taken for granted. Unfortunately, so is her penchant for crashing as she's done it three times in four Indy starts. How good of a driver is she? At this point, it's just about impossible to tell. Without the right equipment, how can we?\nMeanwhile, Michael Andretti was done in by a bad engine, finishing 27th. He led 426 laps during his career, the most for a driver never to win. Racing in his final Indy 500, his career was a combination of bad karma and what sure seemed like a mental block. While his frequent engine problems might make it on to an episode of "When Bad Engines Happen to Good People," sympathy should only go so far with Andretti. The son of Mario Andretti, maybe the greatest American race car driver ever, Michael had the same types of problems his father did. Things would be going just fine before disaster would strike. Michael, meanwhile, would always drive well enough to take the lead but push the car so hard that it would quit on him as if he took the jinx against his dad personally.\nHad he won, it would have been so right.