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Rahal and I suited up in our leather helmets and goggles, and the museum provided Bobby with a long leather duster to wear. In this outfit, Rahal looked slightly satanic, like Professor Fate, while I looked more like a fish starved for oxygen.

We climbed into the tall car and settled into a pair of bucket seats—possibly made from real buckets. Mine was quite comfortable—if a bit upright—mounted just a few inches rearward of the driver's seat. Bobby sat behind a big wooden steering wheel with a screen stone-guard in the shape of a huge monocle hovering in front of his face. On the right, outside of the bodywork, he had twin levers—one for shifting and one a pawl-release lever for the parking brake. His foot pedals were a center-mounted accelerator flanked by a left-side clutch pedal and a brake pedal on the right, operating rear drums only.

I performed my one duty, which was to switch on the dual 6-volt exciter coils with a large brass Bosch switch of the Jules Verne school, and then a mechanic spun the engine with a hand crank. The engine started with a loud, hollow roar and dark oil flowed into the oil-level sight glass in front of me on the varnished wood instrument panel.

Rahal found 1st gear, skillfully managed to engage the rather abrupt clutch without stalling the engine and we were on our way down pit row.

Every time I come to Indianapolis and have a chance to get out on the track I'm amazed at how narrow it looks. Especially for modern, 200-plus-mph race cars sorting themselves out to take a line though a corner. Maybe it's just the contrast between the circuit and those sprawling grandstands, but it looks like a 2-lane country road flanked by some kind of celestial amphitheater. Not much banking, either. Close walls, painted white. The whole place says, "Good luck with your steering, pal." You see at once that the road is the real job here; none of the rest means anything.

As we accelerated onto the back straight, Rahal shouted that 1st gear sounded a little busy, so he shifted into 2nd with a firm, deliberate motion and we surged to a relaxed—if slightly illicit—45 mph. You could hear those big old straight-cut industrial gears dropping into place. No slick paddle shifters here; changing gears was a big decision in those days, like moving your sofa to a different room.

Soon we were motoring along grandly behind that bellowing big four, tails of the leather hood straps fluttering in the wind and the tall 34 x 4½-in. Firestones spinning on wood-spoked artillery wheels with just the faintest hint of runout. Two big siamesed exhaust pipes dumped their smoke and noise into a crude canister-like muffler on my side and the exhaust note was somewhere between Early Farmall and vintage airplane—the kind where the co-pilot leans over the side to drop a small bomb on a hangar full of Fokker triplanes. Marvelous big-inch sound, a nearly perfect balance between ripping and roaring. Small droplets of water appeared around the brass cap on the radiator, then blew away in the wind.

Bobby and I looked at each other, grinning through our goggles. He looked demonically happy, and I felt the same way. I half expected to look back and find Tony Curtis, hunched over the wheel of another car, shaking his fist at us.

Suddenly it was time to come in, so we burbled down pit row, eased to a stop and I turned off the big Bosch switch.

When we got down from the car, Bobby said: "Well that gives you a whole new respect for these drivers. Imagine 500 miles in this car, flat out—on bricks."

He took off his goggles and helmet and sat down on pit wall to look at the National. "What I love about these cars is that—unlike modern cars—they aren't perfect. Which is why they have such great romance. In this era you really saw a man's intuition and creativity at work, so you got all these different designs and ideas on how things should be done. Not that they were all good; some people paid the price for bad ideas."

"Is this the oldest race car you've driven?" I asked.

"Oh, yeah, by a long way. A long way."

"What's the next oldest?"

"A 1968 Eagle Offy, but not driven in anger. On slicks—in the rain—at Goodwood. I guess the oldest sports cars I've driven would be a 1955 D-Type at Lime Rock, and a Le Mans winner at Goodwood. I also drove a C-Type briefly."

"Do you have any vintage cars of your own?"

"Oh, yes."

A dozen or so, as it turns out, the oldest being a 1961 flat-floor E-Type. There's also a 1964 Elva-, 1966 427 Cobra, 2002tii, 1979 Beetle convertible, 1981 Moke, 1971 Porsche 914-6, 1970 Chevron B16, 1967 47 race car, a couple of Brabhams and Lolas and a 1998 Reynard Indy car. And then he's got the 1986 Indy Pace Car from the year he won the 500.

Rahal ran at Indy every year from 1982 to 1995—except when he failed to qualify in 1993—and he was usually running at the front. He managed to pull off a 7th, 6th, 5th and a pair of 3rds, and he finished 2nd behind Arie Luyendyk in 1990, the first year I came to the race.

I asked him if he looked forward to running Indy when he was a driver.

"Well, the cars just kept getting faster during the years I drove here. My qualifying speeds went from something like 194.8 that first year to—what?—227-something in 1994. Everything kept getting better—tires, aero, engine power. So every day that you drove out of here, the grass was a little greener and the sky was a little bluer."

And the best thing about Indy?

"Well, it was good to finally get in your car and have everyone stop talking to you. And you knew that if it was your day, it was going to change your life forever. And it did."

As we left the Speedway that afternoon, the sky darkened and our predicted storm moved in, announcing its arrival with great cracks of lightning followed by torrential rain. But by then our car was warm and dry back in the Hall of Fame Museum and my brief career as a riding mechanic was safely over.

My hat is off to Mr. Martin, who sat in that chair for 500 miles of real racing. I suspect he found—as Bobby Rahal did later—that the grass was a little greener and the sky a little bluer when he left the Speedway on that Memorial Day evening in 1912.

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