Originally Posted by Shuffle
Speedway is my hometown. I haven't lived there since elementary school, but my sister moved back and she's still there. We grew up a block or two from the track, and used to charge people to park in our yard and driveway every year (for those who don't know, there is no general parking at IMS, and most of the 300,000 attendees have to park somewhere offsite and walk to the track). We often had a lemonade and water stand for all the people walking by, but really made the most one year when we were at the race, and my parents disappeared and I sold all their beer and water for $5 a bottle/can. Not bad for a little kid and that was great mark-up back in the day.
Speaking of which, does anyone know if they still let you bring in coolers with all of your own food and drink?
Your whole post is good but this is not quite accurate. The track was built and founded by Indianapolis businessmen Carl Fisher and James Allison in the early 1900s. They had a couple other minor partners named Wheeler and Newby. I'm not sure what any of them did except Allison, who had his own transmission company. Allison Transmission still has a huge factory in Speedway, and I think they bought a lot more land a few years ago across from the track. I'm going to guess without looking that Fisher was in the automotive business too.
Anyway those guys basically built Speedway, which at that time was on the outskirts of Indianapolis. All of the schools and a bunch of streets there are named after them. At the top of the market right before the crash in 1929, they sold out to Eddie Rickenbacker, who had become famous as the most successful fighter pilot for the U.S. during World War I. After the war, Rickenbacker got into auto racing himself, and then founded his own company, before going on to buy Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Unfortunately for him, he bought IMS at the top of the market, and I'm pretty sure he lost money by the end of the Depression and World War 2. The race was cancelled for a few years in the 1940s, and the track was locked up and became dilapidated over the course of the war. Rickenbacker was going to scrap the race and sell out to land developers, until the Hulman-George family bought everything in 1945, and they've owned it ever since.
This is where you really hit the nail on the head. For most of the 1900s, Indy was at the cutting edge of technology and automotive development. Manufacturers and engine makers competed against each other, and invested significant amounts of money into R&D. I think that is what F1 fans will understand the most. Yes Indy offered the chance at racing glory and prestige, but it was also a proving ground for companies who would then later sell their cars or parts to the public at large.
During Indy's glory years, the diversity in car designs, engine specs, and the like, were one of the major things that contributed to the popularity of the race. There were years where some cars had front engine designs, some had rear engine designs, some had riding mechanics, some didn't have riding mechanics, etc. There was always a nutcase or two who would bring a fast but dangerous car that many of the veteran drivers thought would never be able to stay on the track. A good example was Dave MacDonald, who had won something like 100 drag races in California with corvettes, and came to Indy in 1964 driving for Mickey Thompson, who had designed his own cars. Thompson's cars were known to be fast but very difficult to control, and indeed MacDonald jumped out to the early lead, but within a few laps lost control of the car and caused a major accident, killing himself and another driver. Despite incidents like those, the speeds kept increasing year after year, technology kept improving, and danger was just an accepted part of the sport. The drivers even got out of the car after several hours covered with oil and dirt, and looked like they had just been in a race! Spectators and garage junkies could always relate to stuff like that.
But as you mentioned, by the 1980s and 1990s (if not before) technological edges had become much smaller and more costly, and companies just didn't receive the same ROI when they poured all kinds of money into the sport. You know, maybe many of them were even losing money.
I think ultimately what happened was that Champ Car coasted on for awhile past that point based on driver personalities and prestige. Once the long-time popular drivers moved on and the next generation came up, it was turning into more like what F1 is now...just one or two teams dominating the race technologically and there was the fear of drivers just purchasing seats and wins and prestige.
Tony George's motivations are open to debate, and I think any notion of keeping the race "American" is/was severely misguided; however, there was definitely a legitimate concern centering around the competitive and financial aspects of American open-wheel racing at the time. George was the one who founded the IRL and broke away from CART (not the other way around), and maybe he was just on a power trip and wanted to wrest away control from the teams, but there's probably a lot of truth to the fact that he felt the solution to Indy Car's imminent problems was to keep it American and keep foreigners out. Again, severely misguided, but that was the decision he made.
The IRL/CART split basically ruined the race and the sport. CART never addressed the sport's existential problems I just described, and minus the crown jewel of Indianapolis, they went bankrupt within 10 years. The Indy 500 suffered too. There were some years in the late 1990s and early 2000s where most/all of the racers were second rate. There were guys like the rich dentist who only just ran Indy all year, paid for his own ride, but it was 30mph off pace, and 50mph slower than the Champ Cars had just been, maybe more. The racing sucked and the drivers were not that good or well-known. Still, George made money just because of the race's prestige, but he then used the money to bankroll the other IRL tracks, which all lost money year after year. Frankly, the sport turned into a joke.