With today being Super Bowl Sunday, it is the largest day in American sports in term of television viewers, commercial budgets, gambling and salsa consumed.
The Seattle Seahawks and Denver Broncos, once division rivals, find themselves playing in my home state of New Jersey for the NFL championship but that is not what this post is about. You will hear enough about Peyton Manning, Russell Wilson, Richard Sherman, Champ Bailey, John Elway, Pete Carroll, John Fox and Paul Allen during the marathon pre-game show.
While being far from the mind when you think motorsports in the United States, Denver and Seattle each have there own bit of IndyCar history, granted it isn't all that extensive.
Let's start with the Emerald City, or more specifically close to the Emerald City. While a city just a little further south, Tacoma, featured the early days of AAA championship car racing with a street course and then a board oval that brought the like of Teddy Tetzlaff, Earl Cooper, Eddie Rickenbacker, Louis Chevrolet and Indianapolis 500 winners Dario Resta, Howdy Wilcox, Tommy Milton and Jimmy Murphy to the Pacific Northwest, the closest IndyCar has ever been to Seattle was on October 19, 1969 in Kent, Washington.
The former Seattle International Raceway (now Pacific Raceways) played host to the national championship in the form of two, 99-mile races around the 2.2-mile road course and the event was named the Dan Gurney 200. It was the third doubleheader that season with IRP and Donnybrooke Speedway (now Brainerd International Raceway) hosting the other two.
Mario Andretti had won seven races including the Indianapolis 500 that year as the championship was pretty much in the bag for the Italian-American. Gurney won pole for the first race of his namesake with Andretti starting second and Al Unser starting third. Andretti won the first 45-lap race over Unser and Gurney, needing just a little over an hour to do so. Sam Posey finished fourth in race one, at that time his best career finish. Canadian John Cannon finished fifth. He is the father of current IndyCar engineer Michael Cannon. Michael will be chief engineer for Justin Wilson in 2014 and has previously worked with EJ Viso, Tony Kanaan, JR Hildebrand, Ed Carpenter and AJ Allmendinger.
The grid for race two was set by race one results. Andretti started on pole but was pasted by Unser who won the second 45-lap event that day. Andretti came home in second and would go on to handily win the championship that season. Posey started fourth but would end up finishing third, bettering his career-best finish in one day. It was the only podium of Posey's career. Gurney came home in fourth in race two with Bobby Unser finishing fifth after starting sixteenth on the grid.
That was the last time IndyCar raced in the state of Washington. CART would return to the Pacific Northwest with races in Portland and Vancouver, both highly successful in their day. But the split, preparations for the 2010 Winter Olympics and decrease in sponsorship dollars led the demise of both events. Pacific Raceways is the home to the NHRA's Northwest Nationals. The closest IndyCar gets to the Puget Sound is Sonoma, over eight hundred miles away.
The city of Denver and IndyCar's relationship is similar to that of IndyCar and Seattle. Both were second fiddle to a city further south when it came to IndyCar as the national championship was a staple at the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb for many years. Both started with the early days of AAA. On July 5, 1909, Eaton McMillan won a 20-lap, 290-mile street race in Colorado's capital. It was the only start of McMillan's career.
The next race in the Mile High City wasn't for another forty-two years as AAA headed to Centennial Park, a one-mile dirt oval. Tony Bettenhausen won the 100-lap race from pole position with Henry Banks finishing second from thirteenth on the grid. Banks led a string of seven consecutive finishers who started outside the top ten. Jack McGrath finished third ahead of Joe James, Bobby Ball, Fred Agabashian, Manny Ayulo and Rodger Ward. Johnny McDowell started eighth and finished ninth with Sam Hanks rounding out the top ten after starting eighteenth ahead of Bill Vukovich. Bettenhausen would go on to take the title that year.
The following year Vukovich started on pole and won over Chuck Stevenson and Ball. Hanks started fifteenth this year but came home fourth. Buzz Barton rounded out the top five ahead of McGrath, Neal Carter, Banks, Ayulo and Jimmy Reece. Stevenson would go on the win the title that season by thirty points over that year's Indianapolis 500 winner Troy Ruttman and fifty points over Hanks.
Thirty-eight years after Vukovich victory, CART returned to Denver for a street course around the Civic Center. Teo Fabi started on pole in his Porsche but crashed out on lap seven. Al Unser, Jr. won his fifth win of the season and third of what would be a fourth race win streak that included Toronto, Detroit and Vancouver. Danny Sullivan finished second with Bobby Rahal third. Mario, Michael and John Andretti took the next three positions ahead of Rick Mears. Scott Goodyear was eighth with Didier Theys ninth. AJ Foyt rounded out the top ten with Wally Dallenbach, Jr. finishing eleventh, his best career finish in IndyCar. Al Jr. went on to win the title that season by twenty-nine points over Michael Andretti.
The following year, Al Unser, Jr. started third and won the second and final race on the Civic Center circuit over Emerson Fittipaldi and Michael Andretti. Eddie Cheever and Scott Pruett rounded out the top five with Willy T. Ribbs finishing sixth from thirteenth on the grid, his best career finish. John Andretti, Rick Mears, Colorado-native Buddy Lazier and Tony Bettenhausen, Jr. rounded out the top ten. While Little Al was able to replicate his Denver winning efforts, he wasn't as fortunate in the championship as Michael Andretti took his only career title that year.
CART wasn't done with Denver. Eleven years later the series returned but this time on a street course around the Pepsi Center. Let's just say this track was not the best layout in the history of American open-wheel racing. The first two races were won from pole position by Bruno Junqueira with the Brazilian leading all one hundred laps in 2002. 2004 saw Sébastien Bourdais win from the farthest starting position a winner ever came from on the Pepsi Center circuit, second, beating Paul Tracy and Junqueira. In 2005, we were set for another pole-sitter winning but The Thrill from West Hill, Tracy put it in the wall while leading, handing the win to Bourdais for a second consecutive year.
The final race in Denver occurred in 2006 and was the best race the city ever saw. The race saw six lead changes, after the previous four races had produced a combined seven. AJ Allmendinger, with Michael Cannon as his engineer, was able to pull away from the field but the key battle was for second between Bourdais and Tracy.
In the final corner, on the last lap Tracy made a move to the inside but locked up his tires and slide into the Frenchman, taking them both off the podium and out of the race. The two heated rivals would famously come face-to-face exchanging shoves before cooler heads prevailed. Junqueira finished second, as he went four-for-four on podium finishes in Denver. He missed the 2005 race due to a broken back in that year's Indianapolis 500. Thanks to Bourdais and Tracy coming together, Dan Clarke would pick up his first career podium from thirteenth on the grid driving for HVM Racing.
Despite their shaky history with races, the states of Washington and Colorado each produced champions and Indianapolis 500 winners. Tom Sneva is by far the best driver to come from Washington. Three championships, thirteen wins including the 1983 Indianapolis 500 and not to forget mentioning being the first man qualify over 200 mph and 210 mph for the Indianapolis 500 along with three poles for the race are all on Sneva's résumé.
But The Gas Man wasn't the only Washingtonian to win a race. Joe Thomas won two races in fifty starts from 1913 to 1931. Both his wins came in 1921 on board tracks in California, one in Beverly Hills and the other in Fresno. Thomas made three starts in the Indianapolis 500 and finished all five hundred miles on two occasions. In 1920, he started nineteenth and finished eighth and in 1922 he started seventeenth and finished tenth at Indianapolis.
While the family is associated with Albuquerque, New Mexico the Unser family originated in Colorado and is the birth place of Uncle Bobby and his nine-time Pike Peak Hill Climb winning brother Louis. Bobby Unser won two championships, thirty-five races including three Indianapolis 500s in his career. But he isn't the only Coloradan with a decorated career. Vail's own Buddy Lazier is best known for his 1996 Indianapolis 500 victory with a broken back along with the 2000 Indy Racing League title and eight career wins. Lazier competed in last year's Indianapolis 500 and finished thirty-first. The third and final champion to come from the state of Colorado is Buzz Calkins who won the first IRL race in Orlando in 1996 and split the title that year with Scott Sharp.
Of the seven other Coloradans to win in IndyCar, five of them share the location of their victories, the Pike Peak Hill Climb. Louis Unser won the race twice when it was a championship round. The others winners include George Hammond, Keith Andrews, Bob Finney and Wes Vandervoort.
Van Johnson's only win was at Langhorne in 1959 in his sixth career start. He would lose his life at Williams Grove a month later. Jaques Lazier is the most recent Coloradan to win an IndyCar race (Chicagoland 2001).
There you have it. An exhausted history of IndyCar in Washington and Colorado. I hope you not only enjoy this but the game later tonight.
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