Angry Goes West: Day 2

By Mike Musto

RideLust.com

I have a confession to make ladies and gentlemen and it’s something that caught me totally off guard—I think I like NASCAR. Today I went to the Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in Indiana and was completely blown away by what I saw. For starters the sheer number of people there is staggering. We’re talking like 300,000 people or so—it was nuts. The grand stands were almost completely full, as was the infield and surrounding avenues that flanked the raceway. For whatever reason my GPS unit got us into the track via some crazy back entrance. We thought we were lost, or even early, but it just turned out that our little TomTom unit simply kicks ass.

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As Team Angry rolled up we received cheers from bystanders and the inevitable: “LIGHT EM’ UP!!” cat calls coming from onlookers. We were then motioned into a parking lot and given prime parking right across from the Speedway entrance. My advise—if you have a muscle car, drive it to a NASCAR event#&151do this and you’ll receive instant Rock Star status.

After parking and answering questions we bought some scalped tickets, and headed inside to watch the race. GREAT GOOGLIE MOOGLIE!! I was COMPLETELY blown away by what I saw. The grandstands and infield were almost completely full as were the pits and media tents – it was simply amazing. Then it happened… the cars came out, all 43 of them producing a collective 32,250 horsepower… are you kidding me? The sound of these things rumbling around the track was just unbelievable and then there was amount air these things move. As the cars went by on the first lap the wind rush was strong enough to toss 4 or 5 hats from the heads of their owners and the only way to describe the sound is to say it sounded like war… a full scale, kill everybody dead type war.

There are those who will tell you that NASCAR is just about going fast and turning left and some of you may actually believe that. That however, would be an unfortunate mistake. Watching these cars literally drift around the banked corners of Indianapolis Motor Speedway at 180 mph was an amazing sight and the fact that the drivers did this for 400 laps truly shows what tremendous athletes they really are.

Compared to my NASCAR experience the rest of the day was simply uneventful. We drove from Indianapolis, IN to Pontoon Beach, IL, had dinner at Denny’s and crashed. Today was one hell of education for this New Yorker…