INDIANAPOLIS — Our fable starts with the late Gilles Villeneuve, winds around a picturesque Grand Prix course in the Netherlands, takes flight over the Atlantic and settles on the black dirt of an Indiana bullring called Gas City Speedway, with a kid named Logan Seavey snatching victory from the jaws of defeat and first-place prize money from the paws of a USAC sprint car rival named Kevin Thomas Jr.
Sound complicated? Racing is seldom simple.
A while back, someone in my social-media circle posted a 1979 video of Villeneuve, the shooting-star Canadian remembered for two things: winning six Formula One races during an era when his Ferrari team seldom had brilliant cars, and an all-or-nothing style that inflamed passions, pro and con.
The clip was from that year’s Dutch Grand Prix at the seaside Zandvoort circuit. Cameras picked up Villeneuve’s red 312T4 after it was pitched off the track by an exploded left-rear tire. He had been running second.
Fueled by rage or tenacity — when the subject is Gilles, everything is an argument — he hustled the car toward the pit lane, more than two miles away. He hadn’t gone far when its suspension began to disassemble itself.
“That rear wheel,” wailed BBC-TV man Murray Walker, “is dragging behind the car like a broken limb. And still Villeneuve motors on, determined to get back to the pits.”
The startled men from Maranello could only stare at the mess their driver returned to them.
The moment was Villeneuve’s career in a nutshell: a resolute driver, a gasping car, shrieking commentary and shocked onlookers. He was something else, this little Quebecois. But master or madman? Depends on the judge.
His team’s capo di tutti i capi adored him. “I look back and I see my loved ones,” said an aging Enzo Ferrari. “And among my loved ones, I see the face of this great man, Gilles Villeneuve.”
But there are those who insist that Villeneuve had no respect for the Scuderia and its mechanics, abusing their handiwork as he did.
Driver opinions, too, are mixed. Mario Andretti insists that Villeneuve had “car control like no other,” and Niki Lauda declared him “the perfect racing driver.” Derek Warwick differs, citing Villeneuve’s “outrageously dangerous” antics.
He’s been dead since 1982 — killed, perhaps inevitably, by a risk gone bad — and still the debate roars on.
My take? Racing needs tightrope walkers, those who dare.
Winning drivers tend to fall into two categories. One kind thinks, schemes and follows a strategy. The other kind steps out onto the high wire and doesn’t look down.
Some champions dance in and out of both camps, winning some days on brains and others on brawn; think of A.J. Foyt and Bobby Allison. Others skip along that wire until experience dilutes their bravery and makes them more complete; Andretti and Dale Earnhardt fit here. Then there are those who forever speed headlong into corners, not bothering to figure things out until they get there.
Which brings us back to Seavey and Thomas and their tussle at Gas City. Seavey, a Californian, is 23. Thomas, out of Alabama, is 29. I’ve never seen either one cruise; they are always on the throttle, up on that tightrope.
Yet each of them also knows how to finish: Thomas is annually in the mix for the USAC sprint car championship and Seavey owns a USAC midget title and four top-four finishes, one a win, in as many ARCA stock car outings.
The last time I’d seen Seavey was during June’s Indiana Midget Week, when a Lincoln Park Speedway midget flip left him nursing broken ribs. He sat out a few races, returned for a mid-July USAC sprint car weekend in Iowa and was back in form when Indiana Sprint Week opened at Gas City. There, he and Thomas were electrifying, spending most of the feature side by side.
In the middle of it all, Seavey led lap 18, Thomas lap 19, Seavey lap 20, Thomas lap 21 and Seavey lap 22. They were Philippe Petit and Nik Wallenda — look them up — on a dirt bullring.
On the white-flag lap, they barreled toward turn three with Seavey slightly ahead. A lapped car had the bottom lane occupied; Seavey entered the corner high. And here came Thomas, full of momentum, aiming to split them.
It couldn’t work, and it didn’t. Thomas and Seavey banged wheels, blasted through the cushion and slid off the track. Fearing what looked to be a certain Thomas flip, USAC officials waved the red flag; too quickly, it turned out, because both cars remained upright. And because the red was for Thomas, Seavey — who fled the scene after spinning — was given back his lead.
Yes, Seavey said later, the contact left him with a bent steering link. Yes, his steering-wheel alignment was now “a little bit sideways.” No, none of this concerned him. On the restart, he swatted away a Chase Stockon lunge and drove to victory.
In the packed grandstands — the words “social distance” are foreign to Hoosiers — people grinned, shook their heads, whistled. Acrobats can leave you short of words.
My friend Nigel Roebuck, the English Formula One columnist, once wrote of Gilles Villeneuve, “He, of all the drivers out there, was so clearly working without a net.”
Logan Seavey and Kevin Thomas Jr. dared that at Gas City. It was something to see.