USAC Midgets BC39 | Indianapolis Motor Speedway September 2018
Going to this race with @the-kings-tail-fin was such a great experience, even though the weather cut everything but the A Main and the track prep and hot laps took an eternity--which feels even longer on cramped, temporary bleachers.
The racing, though? Sublime. The crowd? Fired up.
People talk about seeing races in person as being a full-bodied experience, and they’re not wrong--but when you’re up this close, in such close quarters with so many people, that feeling is amplified. You can smell the spent race fuel. You can hear the midget cars spinning around the track like angry little bees. And when the dirt dries out enough, you feel it smack into your face.
And the crowd! The crowd was amaaazing. The stands were packed; there were a lot of local folks rooting for local teams. I would imagine that spirit was all the more fervent with the memory of Bryan Clauson in the air. This was one of those moments where you feel really good about human nature, and the capacity of people to care--about each other, about others, about anything. People screamed their thrills with reckless abandon, and one of the guys behind us literally lost his hat celebrating the end of the race. And when cars crashed, it’s like nothing else--the feeling of an entire cluster of humanity all rising from their seats in aggregate, gasping in aggregate, waiting to make sure that the driver is okay. It happens so fast in such synchronization it’s preternatural.
It was too dark and too quick for my camera, but I think the crowd gives you a good sense of the mood, and I did get a nice shot of Ricky Rampage himself! <33
