Indianapolis 500 1997
The 81st Indianapolis 500 , held from May 25 to 27, 1997, was the second Indy 500 under the direction of the Indy Racing League (IRL) and, like the 1990 race, was won by the Dutchman Arie Luyendyk .
The race is considered the lowest point in history due to various problems caused by the separation from the "IndyCar World Series" and the IRL. The IRL had introduced a new rule according to which the 25 best-placed teams of the previous IRL season were automatically qualified for the race, provided they reached a minimum speed to be defined. That would have left only eight places for the mostly very numerous guest starters - and the IRL had no fixed starting field anyway. Two teams waived this right to start, but the problem remained that various cars were faster than these certainly qualified cars - the 33 fastest cars were advertised . After the actual qualification, Lyn St. James and Johnny Unser were not qualified, although they were by far not the slowest drivers in the field. So the rule was redefined at short notice, so that now the fastest 33 AND the 25 IRL core teams were qualified - for the first time since 1979 (then because of a similar problem) and for the second time since 1933, there were now more than 33 cars for the race qualified.
These 35 drivers combined an average experience of just two Indy 500 starts; a value that after deducting the four most experienced starters ( Arie Luyendyk and Roberto Guerrero had twelve each; Scott Goodyear and Eddie Cheever six each) sank to little more than one race. None of the 11 rookies had made a name for themselves in any major series before; in particular, not a single driver came from the competing CART series.
According to the rules, the weather caused the next problems - on the originally planned Sunday it was not possible to drive at all due to rain (on an oval it is not possible to use rain tires for safety reasons) and on Monday you only got to lap 15, until it again rained Even before the warm-up laps, the entire fifth row on the grid had been eliminated by an accident; including Kenny Bräck , who would win the race two years later . Two other cars gave up with technical problems before the start and Claude Bourbonnais , who had his only Indy 500 start in 1997, had a broken engine after 10 laps. Thus the field for the restart had already shrunk to 29 cars.
Initially, this was expected for the following Saturday, as there would hardly be any spectators during the week - there was a similar regulation in 1986 , when Sunday and Monday were also rainy. However, the decision was made to start on Tuesday, when the race could actually take place, and in the end it took until lap 28 to actually accelerate more than one lap at a time - before that there were two warm-up laps and two incidents .
The end of the race caused complete confusion: At the beginning of the 199th lap, Tony Stewart collided slightly with the outer wall and bent the suspension. The race was neutralized (as is usual in such a case), which would normally have meant the end of the race. But for the 200th and final lap, the race was reopened without any warning. The track technology was also obviously overwhelmed, because it took almost half the lap until the warning lights around the track went out. As a result, Arie Luyendyk retained the lead he had only a few laps ago and won his second Indy 500.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from May 20, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from July 25, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
