So, the 1997 Indianapolis 500. Thinking about that race takes me back. It wasn’t just another Sunday for me, not really. I was trying, really trying, to get back into Indy car racing around then, but man, what a confusing time it was.
You see, everything felt fractured. It wasn’t straightforward like it used to be, or even like it is now where you can find information so easily. Back in ’97, we were right in the thick of that IRL/CART split. What a mess that was. It felt like you had to choose a side, and no matter who you rooted for, you felt like you were missing out on half the sport.
Trying to Make Sense of It All
I remember flipping channels, trying to piece together who was racing where. The Indy 500, the big one, was an IRL race. And yeah, Arie Luyendyk won, and there was that whole thing with the lights at the end, Scott Goodyear. Drama, for sure. But a lot of the names I’d grown up with, the teams I followed, they weren’t there. They were off in the CART series.
It was frustrating, to be honest. Here’s what I recall feeling back then:
- It was hard to get excited when you knew many top drivers weren’t competing.
- The “tradition” of the Indy 500 felt a bit… well, diluted.
- You’d read bits and pieces in the newspaper, maybe catch a segment on sports news, but it wasn’t the same unified buzz.
I remember talking to my buddies about it. We’d sit around, and someone would say, “Did you see the 500?” And the conversation would inevitably turn to who wasn’t there. It was a constant backdrop to any discussion about the race that year.
So, when I think of the ’97 Indy 500, yeah, I remember Luyendyk’s win. But mostly, I remember it as a symbol of that whole era of division in American open-wheel racing. It took a long, long time for things to even start feeling normal again. I was just a fan, trying to enjoy some racing, and it felt like the powers-that-be were making it as difficult as possible. It really soured things for a while for a lot of us.
I still watched, of course. Tried to keep up. But that ’97 race, for me, is always linked to that feeling of things being broken and a bit disappointing, even with the on-track action. Just sharing what I went through trying to be a fan back then. It wasn’t always easy.