(Photo credits: Greg Huey lower/Joe Watts above) – There is no doubt that ratings for the 2015 Indy 500, the 99th running of the contest will be higher than they have been in years. How could they not be? There has not been this much attention paid to Indy 500 qualifying and practice sessions or Indy cars themselves in years. Yes, it has been brought on by a spate of nasty crashes, management decisions, and ultimately a rising toll of limping drivers, but is there truth to the old PT Barnum saying that, “there’s no such thing as bad publicity?”

The ever shrinking inner-circle of fans that love Indy car racing are lighting up series management, lighting up Chevrolet, and basically eviscerating everyone involved with the series over the last few weeks at the speedway and how the cars have performed. The greater public, however has been exposed to more Indy highlights than they have in the last five years combined. Perhaps this is bringing people to understand that these cars are blindingly fast and yes, very dangerous. That’s the type of thing that makes John Q Sixpack tune in on May 24th because after all, if a few cars are wrecking when on the track in small groups, what in the hell will happen when 33 of them get out there and start running at over 220mph, churning up the air, and rolling inches away from each other at speed. His guess is as good as ours and so long as everyone walks away, we’re good with it.

There is some irony in the Indy series having so much trouble at the one venue and at the one race where it can really shine but I’m not sure all of the hate is warranted, especially when you put things into a historical style perspective. Increasing speed and experimenting with ways to do such has led to wrecks, broken cars, and broken people since racing first started. The series really wanted this new aero package to give the cars the ability to set new speed records at the historic track and the thought was that these new records could spark more public interest in Indy car racing. We can’t blame them for the logic and we also cannot blame Chevrolet for their cars taking flight. We have a strange zero-tolerance policy for failure of any sort in the world anymore when the reality is that in racing, failure is a given. There is far MORE failure than success in any form of racing you can imagine with the Indy 500 being the king by a wide margin.

Smokey’s “pod car” was a huge bust but we lionize it. The turbine cars came close to winning but never did and they’re legendary. The Novi V8 was a failure of the highest order and yet I’d saw off an arm to sit in a car that has one in the nose, and the list goes on. These were all things that flat out did not work and in the case of the pod car, got wadded up hard. There were far darker failures as well. Mickey Thompson’s entry that was driven by Dave McDonald had a massive fuel tank that essentially enveloped the driver. McDonald wrecked the car and the inferno killed him as well as Eddie Sachs during the race in 1964. I DO NOT want to see anyone get killed. That is not my aim at all and not what I am arguing for. What I am arguing for is a change in tone from lots of the people reporting on this year’s race because it generally sucks.

Never in racing history has there been a “given” on anything and yet the talk about how it is so shocking or embarrassing or unexpected that these radical new changes to the aerodynamic package of the cars didn’t work the way that they were drawn up is pervasive. The tone seems to suggest that it is just so easy that there’s no excuse for it not to be working perfectly. The attitude is everywhere in the media because it seems to be written by people who lack even a cursory understanding of what evolution in motorsports looks like. It is ugly, it is dangerous, and you are seeing it and have been for the month of May as these cars hurtle around that track. Robin Miller is the greatest guy who has ever reported on this type of racing and he continues to be, so I am certainly not calling him out, but the rest of the lot? Wow.

Yes, we live in a world where things can be simulated to a degree that is literally mind boggling, but no matter how “smart” we get we’ll never know exactly how something is going to work until the rubber hits the road. This is why racing, especially the freaking Indy 500 was so damned great for so many years. Ideas! Failure! Success! But now there is no room to fail. Now there is shame if you try something and it does not work or you are unable to reset records every year, etc.

So what should the story from the 2015 Indy 500 sound like? How about, “Racing is friggin’ hard”. Let’s start there. Let’s start by actually acknowledging from the comfort of the media suite that the collective brain power and computational power tied in with the near super human skills of the drivers have run into something that thew ’em all for a curve. Not only that but they have met this challenge and are working to beat it! Think it takes balls to get into one of these cars when each day more and more of them wreck? It takes HUGE balls. (Yes, I am including female drivers in this statement as well.) Think there are some really smart guys and girls working to make the cars faster, more stable, etc, and take something away from the wreckage? Hell yes there are. This is experimentation and learning at 220mph. This is the stuff that we should love about racing. The confrontation of some sort of physical obstacle and the creative means used to overcome it. Move the wings, add wings, add power, whatever it is, people are busting their asses 24 hours a day to figure it out.

I’m no Indy car fan boy. The only race I watch each year is the Indy 500 but I am pretty well versed in the history of the cars, people, and mentality of the racers that have run Indy for a century and it is annoying to see brilliant people taking on huge challenges painted as buffoons. These are not freaking soap box derby cars here, kids. This is big time stuff.

I’ll be watching on 5/24…will you?