Indy and American Dreams

Let’s see … Is it possible to rank the significance of a Nextel Cup race? The Daytona 500, NASCAR’s annual Super Bowl of stock-car racing, clearly is No. 1. Teams spend an entire winter prepping for the greatest of all American races. Even a United States president, Ronald Reagan, thought the 500 was worthy of his presence in 1984.

The pecking order after that, however, is open for debate. Anyone who is involved in making a 3,400-pound, full-bodied race car go fast will tell you the Brickyard 400 — err, the Allstate 400 at the Brickyard — is right up there. The 600-mile race at Charlotte deserves a podium finish, as does the old Southern 500 at Darlington, which had been on every driver’s to-do list.

But the Brickyard is the Brickyard. Indianapolis Motor Speedway, a gargantuan facility steeped in motorsports history that deserves its own zip code, is a race every driver — Brian Vickers and AJ Allmendinger included — is gunning for. So big is Indy that a winning driver, his team and entourage kneel down to smooch a three-foot-wide stretch of dust-covered bricks at the start-finish line. That public show of affection is displayed nowhere else on the Nextel Cup circuit.

Does that make Indy No. 2 on the list of biggest NASCAR races? Whatever your opinion might be, BV loves the place. In three starts, twice he has rolled off from the fifth position, and he finished third in 2005.