Columnist Ron Kantowski: Indy 500 has been drained of its magic

Monday, May 16, 2005 | 9:30 a.m.

Ron Kantowski is a Las Vegas Sun sports writer. Reach him at ron@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4088.

It's time for the Beach Boys to amend the lyrics to "Fun, Fun, Fun." You know, the part that says "She makes the Indy 500 look like a Roman chariot race now."

That's not saying a lot these days.

Change it to "Daytona 500," and maybe you'd get the analogy.

By now, if you're one of the few who are still following what used to be the "Greatest Spectacle in Racing," the Indy 500 and Indy-car racing in general took a turn for the worse in 1996 when Indianapolis Motor Speedway chief Tony George formed his own series with the once-beloved 500 as its center piece. Ostensibly, if you believe the rhetoric, this was done to protect the sanctity and traditions of the 500, which had become the domain of the now rival and equally irrelevant CART series and its talented drivers with funny-sounding names.

Now, with the exception of Las Vegas resident Paul Tracy, the best CART teams and drivers have either defected to George's Indy Racing League or have returned to cherry-pick Indianapolis.

But what was it that Neil Young said about the needle and the damage done?

George's decision to start his own series was like putting a valve in the tires of open-wheel racing and letting all the air out. Maybe it would have happened anyway, but since the split, NASCAR has lapped Indy-style racing in popularity. Lapped it about a dozen times.

And as for those traditions that George promised to protect, well, they've just about gone the way of the Offenhauser engine, if Sunday's pole day qualifications on ESPN2 were any indication.

ESPN2 -- I guess that right there says a lot.

When I was growing up in Indiana, Pole Day was almost as big as the race itself, as crowds of more than 200,000 turned out to watch the world's fastest and bravest drivers pursue a "new ... track ... record," as the husky voiced public address announcer Tom Carnegie used to (and still does at age 85) bellow.

Each qualifying run was crucial, as each car was allotted only three qualifying attempts. In many years, there were more than 100 cars on the grounds so just being among the 33 fastest was a big deal. I can recall more than one driver breaking into tears upon securing a 10th-row starting spot.

Now, there are barely enough cars to make 10 rows. Last year, there was no "bumping," the process that begins after the field is set when the slowest qualifier is surpassed or bumped by a faster car (at least there are no promoters options or owners points at Indy), because there were few, if any, unqualified fast cars back in Gasoline Alley.

Watching an unqualified driver let it all hang out during a banzai last-minute qualifying run was one of Indy's most endearing traditions. So in an attempt to manufacture some drama for those acres of spectators disguised as empty seats, Indy changed its hallowed qualifying rules this year, allowing each car three qualifying runs on each of the four days of time trials or as many as 12 overall.

So much for the real drama of making every lap count, as pole cats such as Tom Sneva and Rick Mears used to do.

Heck, with 12 qualifying attempts and fewer cars, you could probably put your old man's Country Squire station wagon in the middle of the eighth row at today's Indy.

Had rain not postponed Pole Day on Saturday, maybe the new qualifying format, with its 11 qualifiers per-day limit, would have achieved the drama it was expected to produce. But with the 22 fastest cars getting in on Sunday, Pole Day nail-biting was minimal.

Tony Kanaan, a talented Brazilian but hardly a household name outside of the fast crowd with which he runs, was the third car out and posted the day's fastest qualifying time. Nobody came close to overtaking him as all that drama race officials predicted never materialized.

Sure, there were some decent stories, such as Danica Patrick flirting with becoming the first woman to earn pole position, and wouldn't that have gotten under the sidepods of curmudgeonly A.J. Foyt. But as for electricity, as as much as it pains this native Hoosier to say it, there seemed to be none.

So Pole Day wasn't Fun, Fun, Fun like I remembered it as a teenager.

It's more like a Roman chariot race now.