"16TH STREET SPEEDWAY LIVES AGAIN"
Published in 1997 Indianapolis 500 Yearbook ©
"The night was clear,
The year was 1959, Lloyd Price was singing his classic lyrics
on the radio, likable Ike's second term was beginning to wind down to its uneventful conclusion, and the old
16th Street Speedway was sliding downhill into the history books.
The 16th Street Speedway, directly across 16th Street from the south
end of the venerable Indianapolis Motor Speedway, had seen its finest hours as one of the most popular stops along the way
for the Golden Days of midget racing during the late '40s and the '50s. The '60s lay directly ahead, the age of Aquarius
if not the Offy midget, and the quarter-mile asphalt -- they called it "macadam" in those days -- race track would be
quiet when the noisiest decade in American history made its tie-dyed, long-haired, barefooted way across the starting
line of a new age in American history.
But, more than most dogs, it had had its day. The "Mighty Midgets" ruled
the national racing scene just about every day except Memorial Day, and they even had a monopoly on the night directly before
that 500-mile-marked holiday with the single-, double-, and even triple-headers of feature events at the 16th Street oval.
The legendary midget track, with its wide turns and their slight banking, saw its winner's circle filled with many of the
great names of midget racing -- Duane Carter, Bob Breading, Eddie Sachs, Ed Haddad, Art Cross, Shorty Templeman, and local
hero Leroy Warriner.
But an era had ended by the time 1959 and "Stagger Lee" rock 'n' rolled onto
the scene, and the final season at the 16th Street Speedway sputtered its way into the realm of legends with a smattering of
stock car and convertible races. Eventually, it would be replaced with a shopping center.
Now fast forward 38 years. The night was clear again, sort of, and the moon
was yellow, sort of -- leaves were just appearing, not tumbling down, however -- as a new 16th Street Speedway roared to life
with the sound of midget racing the night of April 26, 1997. The location wasn't the same, some three miles east on 16th Street
from the original site, and the shape and surface were certainly different, a circular quarter-mile of Indiana clay.
But the name was the same, and the crowd was large and eager for the mighty
sound of USAC midgets that could be heard as far as the big speedway to the west and downtown Indianapolis to the east. They
walked in steady streams toward the brick façade of what had been a baseball field for more than six decades.
Once inside the familiar confines of the old Bush Stadium, the April crowd
discovered that the ball-and-stick yard had been stripped away -- except for home plate -- and a dirt track shaped like a
fresh bakery doughnut installed.
The night was cool and the moon was a few days past full. And the seats were
a few short of full, too, but mostly those down front, where dust could fall like heavy rain and the 30-inch retaining walls
might impair the view. Those vacancies were more than made up for by the spectators who chose to stand along the top walkways
of the stadium where the Class AAA Indianapolis Indians had played until they moved downtown last summer to the newly built
Victory Field.
The old Indians' scoreboard was another keepsake from the place's baseball
times, flashing qualifying times and, later in the evening, race standings instead of runs, hits, and errors. The banks of
baseball-stadium lights, standing tall on metal towers like the glaring eyes of monster insects, helped wash the track in a
light as bright yellow as the moon in Mr. Price's musical classic from '59.
The public-address announcer harkened back to the old glory days with constant
comparisons of the unusual shape of the track to the lost Langhorne, Pa., mile. The mayor even made a short speech to make the
moment historic and official.
And the new 16th Street Speedway, financed by 500 speedway president Tony George
and operating on a three-year lease with the city, stormed dustily into the first chapter of its own history.
Some 50 midgets rolled out to give the new raceway its baptism, and, amid the dust
and the search for some semblance of a straightaway, they set the historians to recording every detail of the rebirth of an extinct memory.
The first to scratch his name into the fresh cement of legend was Jay Drake, the young
California driver, who was the first out to qualify and set the inaugural lap record of 12.104 seconds. The standard was set and, as the
track would prove the rest of the night, things were only going to get slower, not faster.
The first three heats were run with some raciness left in the new clay surface, but, by
heat four, the moist dirt had dried and started to show its black side as a single, slick groove developed. That made the 30-lap main event
mostly a parade, with those brave enough to try to forge another way around the track and the competition either staggering back or tumbling
down the track like the leaves in that number one song from '59.
Kevin Doty got the worst of it when he tried third-running Kenny Irwin Jr. on the outside of
turn two. The ensuing tangle and wild flip by Doty's familiar number 50 brought the race to a grinding halt. Between reds and yellows, Brian
Gerster led every lap from the pole in his gray 61 midget, a frustrated Dave Darland unable to find any passing room even though he probably
had the muscle to get by.
Still, Gerster was in no position to complain about the round little track after his maiden
voyage around it. "It was really racy early," he said in the pits afterward, a smile still broadsliding across his youthful face. "The track was
heavier; you could really race on it.
"It got slick during the feature, and you can't pass on any track when it gets slick like that.
But I think it'll be pretty racy out there when they get it figured out."
The young USAC midget regular from Indianapolis found the oddball shape of the place challenging
but not daunting. "It's different, but what the heck," he commented after his historic win, the sixth USAC midget win of his young career. "It
wasn't horrible tonight, and it's sure to get better the longer they go."
Not everyone was quite so forgiving of the tight-grooved new track. "It's not very racy yet," said
Tracy Hines, who was leading the national point standings coming into the night. "Work still needs to be done; basically, you just follow the leader.
"They need to keep cutting it, wetting it until it holds the moisture about 12 inches down or so."
Hines, who was mired down behind the early leaders in the feature and gained fourth place at the
finish only through the attrition of Doty, Irwin, and others, wasn't exactly enamored with the peculiar configuration of the new track. "I don't
like the shape at all," the young driver from New Castle, Ind., said from the pits. "I kind of wish they had followed the old outfield when they laid it out.
"Then you'd have had a big sweeping curve and a couple of straightaways where you could set up to pass guys."
But even Hines wasn't ready to give up on the possibility of the new track becoming raceworthy. "Maybe," he
said, with a hesitant half-smile. "It wasn't bad early. I think it'll probably be a year before it's really good, though."
Tony Elliott, the Kokomo, Ind., veteran of just about every dirt track in the Midwest, stuck to the middle
ground when he evaluated the new track. "It's nice," he said afterward. "For the first time, it wasn't bad at all.
"Sure, it was a little hard to pass, but I think they did a heck of a job with it."
Elliott, who slogged his way to 10th in the 30-lap finale, didn't quarrel much with the circular look of the
track, either. "It's a different shape," he reported, with a nonchalant shrug of his shoulders. "Everybody'll have to get used to it, but it's not a bad deal -- I
like it."
Dave Cassidy liked it, too -- especially the large enthusiastic crowd, which he estimated at 13,000. "I was pleasantly
surprised," the president of the new 16th Street Speedway said. "I didn't expect an overflow crowd."
Cassidy admitted that he wasn't sure if the reinvented idea of a midget track on 16th Street would pan out or not. "I
was skeptical from day one whether we'd have a race track or not -- you never know," he said. "We didn't know if the shape would be right, whether it would be wide enough,
whether the walls should be 30 inches or not.
"But it did all work out."
The new speedway's president conceded that, at least in its first tryout, the track's racing groove proved a bit too
narrow. "I knew it was going to be very tight," Cassidy reported. "I didn't know if they'd be able to pass on it, but it didn't work out too badly."
Still, Cassidy recognized that the oddly shaped little track was a work-in-progress. "Sure, we're going to work on it
every week and try to make it better."
The track official noted that the new racing venue's 1997 schedule of about 25 dates would include -- in addition to the
USAC national midgets and the "Legends" cars that ran on opening night -- USAC regional midget shows, plus three-quarter midgets, "Dwarf" cars, and maybe an American
Motorcycle Association flat-track motorcycle event or two. "We've had discussions, but it hasn't come together yet," he said of the AMA possibilities.
But back to the immediate past. Cassidy said he was satisfied that the first night of midget racing under the yellow
Indiana moon had been successful. "I think it went very well," he said. "I think we got off to as good a start as we could."
The track operator pulled up short of comparing the new 16th Street Speedway's potential with the established mystique
of the old one, however. "No, I don't think we can ever equal it," he commented, his tone as clear as a '59 night. "It was something special, with its night before the
500 and everything, and it would be hard to come up to that.
"That was a time of its own. It was almost magic."
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(AUTHOR'S UPDATE: The 16th Street Speedway ceased operations after the 1999 season, due mainly to dwindling attendance.)
Copyright 1997 by Jerry Miller ©
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"And the moon was yellow,
"And the leaves came tumbling down . . . "