important events take place that you cannot follow. Because some cars are laps ahead of others, it’s almost impossible to know who’s winning the race unless you bring oversized headphones to listen to the radio broadcast of the event you are watching. The largest crowd to watch a sporting event every year cannot see most of the sporting event.
But it’s been my experience that almost everything easy to mock turns out to be interesting if you pay closer attention. The Indy 500 features open-wheel racing, which is to say that the wheels of the cars are not covered by fenders, and the driver’s cockpit is open to the elements. Some truly amazing engineering is involved in getting these cars to travel more than 220 miles per hour around the two-and-a-half-mile course. The cars have to be fast, but not so fast that the g-forces in the corners cause drivers to lose consciousness. The cars have to be responsive, and predictable, and reliable, because while driving at 220 miles per hour, these open-wheeled vehicles are often inches away from one another. For more than a hundred years, the Indianapolis 500 has been examining a question that is of serious concern to people in the Anthropocene: What is the proper relationship between human and machine?
Today, the track is entirely asphalt except for a single yard of red bricks at the finish line, but when the first Indianapolis 500 took place on May 30, 1911, the track was paved entirely with bricks—3.2 million of them. The winner of that first five-hundred-mile race was Ray Harroun, who was driving a car that featured his own invention, the rearview mirror. In fact, many early automotive innovators were involved with the Indianapolis 500. Louis Chevrolet, who founded the car company, owned a racing team. His brother Gaston won the Indianapolis 500 in 1920 only to die later that year in a race at the Beverly Hills Speedway.
Indeed, racing cars is an exceptionally dangerous sport—forty-two drivers have died at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in the track’s history. Many more have been injured, some seriously. In 2015, IndyCar driver James Hinchcliffe nearly died after a crash at the Speedway severed a femoral artery. There’s no escaping the uncomfortable fact that one of the thrills of racing is how close drivers get to the edge of disaster. As the legendary driver Mario Andretti put it, “If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.”
But I do think car racing accomplishes something—it takes both the person and the machine to the edge of possibility, and in the process, we get faster as a species. It took Ray Harroun six hours and forty-two minutes to drive the first five hundred miles at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway; it took 2018 winner Will Power just under three hours.
That’s his real name, by the way. Will Power. Nice guy. Once I was standing by a valet stand next to Will Power, and when the valet showed up with my 2011 Chevrolet Volt, Will Power said to me, “You know, I am also a Chevrolet driver.”
But the Indy 500 isn’t really about going fast; it’s about going faster than everyone else, which reflects one of my top-level concerns about humanity: We cannot seem to resist the urge to win. Whether it’s climbing El Capitan or going to space, we want to do it, but we also want to do it before anyone else, or faster than anyone else. This drive has pushed us forward as a species—but I worry it has also pushed us in other directions.
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On the day of the Indy 500, though, I don’t think about what the race means. I’m not considering the ever-diminishing distinction between humans and their machines, or the Anthropocene’s accelerating rate of change. Instead, I am merely happy.
My best friend Chris Waters calls it Christmas for Grown-Ups. My race day starts at 5:30 in the morning. I make a cup of coffee, check the weather, and fill my backpack cooler with ice, water, beer, and sandwiches. By six, I’m checking my bike to make sure the tires are properly inflated and my patch kit is ready. Then I bike down to Bob’s Food Mart, where I meet up with friends and begin the beautiful early morning bicycle trip down Indianapolis’s Central Canal Towpath. Some years, it’s raining and cold; other years, the heat is overwhelming. But it is always beautiful, riding and joking with my friends and their friends, many of whom I see