It's the Month of May!

Will Power, shown here, has dominated the road course
races over the last three years. He has won three straight
races, and now has all of the momentum heading to
Indianapolis. Can his success spread to the ovals, too?
(Image courtesy of IndyCar.com)

For the first time since road and street courses returned to the IZOD IndyCar Series, I can honestly say that I've LOVED each and every grand prix leading up to the ovals. Since the Dallara chassis took over in 2003 (a season which was 100% ovals), the IndyCar Series has been all about the ovals. The road course racing during that time has been, in a word, ugly. With a car designed to go at top speeds and make four counterclockwise turns, racing on road courses just did not provide a quality product. Yes, races still were alright, but nothing special. The circuits (especially Sao Paulo) were designed with an old chassis in mind. The only place these cars could pass was on a long straight heading into tight turns (usually hairpins). They still tried racing on natural terrain circuits like Barber Motorsports Park. The result: 60 laps of single file parading. But then it'd be time for the ovals, the "real racing" of the series. Cars could actually demonstrate their speed now, what the Dallara chassis was designed to produce. Road races were essentially just a filler around the ovals.

Great side by side racing through all of the 2011 Indy
Grand Prix of Alabama. Great racing going unnoticed.
(Image courtesy of motorworldhype.com)

However, with the introduction of the DW12 chassis, all of a sudden the tables have turned. The first four races this year, all on road/street circuits, have been astounding! Cars can actually maneuver around the circuits, not just make passes by using an extraordinarily long straight to gather speed and then outbreak into a corner.  The Honda Grand Prix of Alabama at Barber went from a boring parade to 15 turns of pure excitement!  All four tracks now have new lap records after such great performances by the drivers and the new car. And now we head to the ovals, specifically the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Pole speeds at Indy have been 225-229 mph over the past three years. During the last practice, only three cars were able to eclipse the 218 mph mark at the Speedway.  So from how it's looked so far this year, the ovals (only four on the schedule) are setting up to be fillers around the road races!

That being said, it's still May. It's still the Indy 500. It's still the Greatest Spectacle in Racing. It always has been, and always will be.

The size of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is incomparable.
The Rose Bowl, Kentucky Derby, Yankee Stadium, Roman
Coliseum,the entire Wimbledon Campus, and Vatican City
can all fit inside the track in Speedway, Indiana.

The month of May has a special place in the hearts of all IndyCar fans. 95 runnings of the race makes it the oldest and most revered of all races. The 500 has a special place in the hearts of all Indiana natives, too. Race fan or not, farmer or city-slicker, all Hoosiers join together for an entire month full of festivities.

Television and media cannot properly portray the greatness and the tradition of the 500 and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Until you have been there, physically been a part of the festivities, you cannot fully understand what Indy means - to the drivers, to the fans, to Hoosiers...to everybody.

IndyCar (and all open-wheel racing...actually any racing not called NASCAR) gets absolutely no help from sports media outlets. ESPN controls what is and is not shown. There were two days last year where the IndyCar Series was the top story on SportsCenter: One was Dan Wheldon's pass on the final lap to win the 95th Indianapolis 500. The other was Dan Wheldon's passing in the season finale at Las Vegas. The only way IndyCar is "news worthy" for sports, beyond the Greatest Spectacle in Racing, is death. Similarly, other great sports like Formula1, soccer, lacrosse, horse racing, and any college sport beyond football and basketball get little to no coverage and an extremely low fan base. That's because the powers that be do not give those sports a fighting chance because somebody decided 8 hours of NFL draft coverage for three straight days and broadcasting all 162 MLB games in a year is more important.

Well, here's my attempt to show help show the world the greatness of the IndyCar Series - A series whose ratings are skyrocketing (up nearly 50% in viewership from last year) when its biggest competitor (NASCAR) has been declining for four straight years and yet still gets the coverage.

Over the Month of May, I will be posting daily reports on the Greatest Spectacle in Racing. Last year I spent each day chronicling some of the greatest finishes in the history of the Indianapolis 500. I think it's safe to say that last year's finish tops them all.

This year, my focus will be on the winners. There have been 18 drivers with multiple Indy 500 victories in the 95 year history of the race. Each of these multiple-year winners of the 500 will be analyzed and immortalized in the upcoming 27 days here on the 360 Sports Network. Further, I will try to share with you, the fans, some of the great traditions and the legacies of the Indy 500 and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

It still will be no substitute for the real thing - no substitute for actually being there. But maybe, hopefully, I can help everybody else see the Indianapolis 500 the way I do.

These last two videos I personally took from our seats in the NW Vista (between turns 3 and 4) at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. My family has had tickets for the Indy 500 since 1976, never missing a year. I've been to every race since I was two years old. These videos, both from the 2011 race, show just a small piece of the greatness of each Memorial Day weekend. The first has the 33 cars in the "parade lap" in the traditional rows of three: personally my favorite image of the race. 

The second video shows the last four laps of the race from our seats (sorry I get a little shaky at the end, I got excited and stopped watching through the viewfinder!) as Dan Wheldon became the first driver to win the Indy 500 by leading only one lap. Again, just a small piece, but hopefully these images (however jumpy they may be from my poor camera work) help paint a better picture of what Indy means.