Oilpressure

Welcome to the Month of May! It’s odd that we have a race coming up this weekend, four days into May – and it’s not at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Personally, I don’t care for Barber being run in May. Call me old-school, but I think any IndyCar track activity in May should be reserved for IMS. I’ll have a Barber Preview up here tomorrow, but today we will focus on welcoming the Month of May.

This day is also the anniversary of this website. Oilpressure.com debuted sixteen years ago today – May 1, 2009. At the time, I thought it might last six months to a year. This month I will post my 3,000th article, since that very first post back then. Recently, I made the reluctant decision to step back from here. Many of you know the reason why. But I’m not going to start the month going down that rabbit hole of negativity. I remain hopeful that that situation will eventually resolve itself.

In the meantime, my wife Susan and I are still fortunate enough to be credentialed for the Month of May. Although I’ve cut back on my schedule here, that does not apply for May. I plan on posting every weekday this month, up until the Monday after the Indianapolis 500. Susan and I also plan to be at the track all three weekends in May. To those that are wondering – yes, there will be another trivia contest this year. For your planning purposes, it will run on Wednesday May 7 and the answers will be due back to me on Tuesday May 20.

May is a magical time for race fans. It has been a part of my family for most of my life, dating back to 1964. My father was a car guy, and he was always intrigued with the Indianapolis 500. He was finally presented with an opportunity to go the 1964 race. I was five years old at the time, and was deemed “too young to go”; so I was left behind with my mother while my father and two older brothers went to the race. I was not happy.

I still have vivid memories of listening to that race on the radio. I did not fully comprehend the impact of the happenings of Lap Two, when Eddie Sachs and Dave MacDonald were both fatally injured. Nor did I recognize the odd name of the eventual winner – AJ Foyt. But I knew I had been left behind and I was missing something big. I made it my goal to whine and pout enough to be included the next year. I succeeded.

That summer, I absolutely devoured the printed race program that they brought back with them. Color pictures were few, but the back cover had a color photo of the 1963 winning car of Parnelli Jones – Ol’ Calhoun. I thought the shade of blue on the nose of the car was so distinctive, that I immediately fell in love with that car. To this day, it is probably my all-time favorite car.

My father and brothers returned from the race as AJ Foyt fans. They were already well-aware of Foyt, since he had also won the 1961 race. I didn’t want to fall in line with them, so I picked Parnelli to be my favorite driver – just to be different.

When you are five years old, it takes a long time for the calendar to come around again. After 20% of my life had finally gone by, it was May of 1965. We had tickets in Stand J, down low in Turn Four. As short as I was, I had to stand on the seat to see a lot. We could not see the cars being pushed into position from our seats. The first time I ever saw a race car was when the field came around on the Parade Lap. I will never forget the splash of colors, meshed with the sounds of those engines and the smell of the exhaust they were emitting. For a six year-old kid who had been dreaming of this day for a year – it was overwhelming. I was on sensory overload.

When you build something up in your mind for a year, it usually doesn’t live up to the hype when it finally arrives. That was not the case with me and the 1965 Indianapolis 500. It lived up to and exceeded my expectations. I was hooked. Imagine my disappointment when I learned the next winter that I would be left behind for the 1966 race. It wasn’t just me, but my two brothers were left behind also. My father opted to take his father and his identical twin-brother instead; leaving my mother and all three of the kids behind. I was crushed, and I believe both of my brothers were too. It didn’t help when my grandfather and uncle came away from that 1966 race only mildly impressed. They never had a desire to ever go back and they didn’t.

1967 began a six-year streak for me that really cemented my memories and passion for the Indianapolis 500. We got tickets in Stand A, just south of the entrance to Gasoline Alley – for our entire family. My father’s best friend also bought a slew of tickets with us, so many of their friends could sit with us. The Indianapolis 500 had become a gathering place for family and friends of my parents. That was also the year that we started making the trek up to IMS two weeks earlier for Pole Day. Some of my greatest memories of IMS came from those trips to Time Trials, as we called it back then. That was also the year my family started taking The Indianapolis Star for the entire Month of May, because practice actually started on May 1 in those days. The paper arrived two to three days after the fact, but with no internet or SportsCenter or cable – it was all news to us.

The Month of May became the fabric of my childhood. My brothers got older and went off to college. I was getting older too, becoming a disgusting teenager. Like all families, ours was getting scattered and fragmented as we all pursued different interests and hobbies. But we always had Indianapolis to look forward to. That was the one thing we all shared. Even as we were all pulled in different directions by simply getting older and growing up, we always had the Month of May.

It was that way until the winter of 1973. I was the only child still living at home, and my father sprung it on me one day that he had not renewed our 500 tickets and we would no longer be going. I was 14 then, and I considered myself way too cool to let him see how much it bothered me, but I was crushed. As it turned out – 1973 was a good year to miss; with the rain, the postponements and the fatalities. To this day, I still don’t know what made him decide to give up his tickets; but the events of May in 1973 cemented to him that he had done the right thing by doing so.

I did not return to the Indianapolis 500 for twenty years. Even though the 1972 race was the last one I attended as a child, I always kept up with it. Shortly after the 1991 race, my wife (at the time) and I were returning from a trip to Chicago to visit friends. While driving through Indianapolis, on a whim I suggested we stop and see the track I had not been to in almost twenty years. We toured the IMS Museum and took the bus tour that went around the track. It was a detour that changed my life. The bug bit me and bit me hard. By the time we got back home late that afternoon, I had already decided that we were going to attend the 1992 race.

There was no eBay or StubHub in those days. I saw an ad in a racing magazine with a toll-free number for Circle City Tickets in Indianapolis – which is still around, by the way. Unbeknownst to my wife, the following winter, I called and ordered two tickets pretty high up in the Tower Terrace, halfway between Gasoline Alley and the Yard of Bricks. I paid an exorbitant price for them, but I didn’t care. I figured this would be my only chance as an adult with two young kids to ever go to the race. My wife exploded, once again re-emphasizing one of the many reasons why she is now my ex-wife.

I was approaching 34, but there was a surprisingly high number of drivers in that race that I saw driving in my childhood. AJ Foyt, Mario Andretti, Al Unser and Gordon Johncock had all driven in my very first race back in 1965, yet they had all qualified for the 1992 race. I was also there when 1992 starter Gary Bettenhausen drove as a rookie in 1968. Tom Carnegie was still on the PA, just as he had been throughout my childhood. The unmistakable pungent smell of cigar smoke wafted through the air, bringing back those childhood memories. It was certainly a familiar and treasured link to my past. Before the green-flag flew on that cold morning, I had already decided that this was not going to be a one-off event for me. I was going to rekindle this part of my childhood and create my own adult memories from IMS

The next day, I tore out the page of my program to order tickets for the next year. I filled it out and enclosed a check for two tickets and dropped it in a giant cardboard box set up in the lobby of the museum. Things were real high-tech in those days. This would establish me on the annual ticket list, even though new orders were only allowed to buy bleacher seats inside Turn Four.

The following year in 1993, I took my father instead of my wife. He was 66 at the time – the same age I am now. Although he had given up his tickets twenty-one years earlier, he still had a place in his heart for the Indianapolis 500. I had a friend with USAC, who got us into the garage area on Race Morning. I’ve told this many times, but one of my favorite IMS memories was when he was standing there looking out to the stands from the garage area on Race Morning. A tear formed in his eye and his voice quivered as he said “I never thought I would ever stand in Gasoline Alley”. Less than a year later, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer – the same disease that struck my wife almost five years ago. He passed away in six months, less than 18 months after that Race Day in Gasoline Alley in 1993.

Except for a seven-year span from 1996 through 2002, when I had no interest in watching the IRL tarnish the Indianapolis 500 – I have attended the race regularly since 1992. This year would have been my 24th in a row, but I don’t count the COVID year. Doug Boles said we can, but they ran a race and I wasn’t there – so I don’t count it. Overall, this will be my 35th Indianapolis 500 in-person. I know there are some people that can double that amount, but it’s still a total I’m proud of.

Most importantly, the Month of May is still a magical time for my family. My mother passed away almost five years ago. My two brothers and I are spread apart in three different states. I am the only one that stayed in Tennessee. Now that our mother is gone, we three brothers no longer see each other very often. But one thing we know we’ve still got is the Indianapolis 500 – much like it was when we were growing up. We all have tickets together in Stand A, very near our seats during the 1960s. Susan’s son, Eric, has attended the 500 with us each year since 2004, when he was 14. He turned 35 yesterday. As you see, the Indianapolis 500 is the one constant in all of our lives.

So, today we celebrate the arrival of another Month of May. Yes, it’s nice that Oilpressure.com is still going sixteen years after it started; but May means so much more to all of us. It’s the glue that holds us together.

George Phillips

This entry was posted on May 1, 2025 at 4:02 am and is filed under Indianapolis 500. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.