Indy sells in

(In which the Blob reposts something it wrote for its former employer, the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette,  explaining why Roger Penske buying the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is a good thing, and does not mean it will become Penske Motor Speedway or that Penske is guaranteed to win the 500 every year from now until judgment trump. Although he pretty much already does that.)

Begin with the photo, on this seismic day.

Like all photos it stops time in its tracks, but there is a timelessness to it that seems only to exist at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. It’s in black-and-white, but the sky, you can just tell, is bluer than blue. Puffy white clouds ride it. It’s a lovely May afternoon in 1946, 1947,  men in fedoras and topcoats striding past the vendors outside Gate 5.

Tony Hulman had owned the place no more than a couple of years when that photo was taken, and considerable history still waited to unspool. The Speedway hadn’t killed Bill Vukovich yet. Seven-year-old Mario Andretti wouldn’t see America for eight years. A.J. Foyt Jr. was a brash kid tearing up jack down in Houston, Texas.

And Roger Penske?

Roger Penske was 10-years-old. He wouldn’t set foot in the place in the photo for four more years.

Today he owns that place, or at least his entertainment company does. For the first time in 74 years, the Speedway no longer belongs to the Hulman family. And if there is a certain queasiness that attends that – a sense that some great invisible page is turning out there in the cosmos – there is also this: At least it’s Roger Penske.

If the Hulmans were going to hand the keys to someone who wasn’t named Foyt, Penske was going to be the guy. He first came to Indy as a teenager in 1951. He’s been putting cars in the Indianapolis 500 since 1969. And his drivers have won 18 500s since.

He owns the joint, if anyone actually can. And now he OWNS it, too.

And if you’re asking yourself here how this cannot be a massive conflict of interest, yourself has his mind right. Of course it is -- or least has the potential to be.

Here’s the thing, though: It’s not all that unusual an arrangement in motorsports, which has always been somewhat indiscriminate about its bedfellows.

Penske’s company, for instance, both owned and raced at Michigan International Speedway for 26 years, and also owned racks in Rockingham, N.C., Nazareth, Pa., and Fontana, Calif. In 1999, that side of his business (Penske Entertainment) merged with International Speedway Corp. – which owns a fistful of NASCAR tracks, and which was founded and is still affiliated with the France family.

Which also founded and runs, well, NASCAR.

It’s all shamelessly incestuous, in other words. But if that raises legitimate concerns because it is, after all, Indy … it is, after all, Indy. It is motorsports’ most precious heirloom. And who would you entrust with that heirloom more than Roger Penske, who not only understands the weight of its history but has contributed so much to it?

It’s why he called both Foyt and Andretti before closing the deal, because their names are as synonymous with the Speedway as his. It’s why he finally moved on the deal to begin with, because he couldn’t bear the thought of some clueless outsider getting his mitts on the place.

Maybe he’s seen that photo, too, that stopped eternal instant. And understands, as few others do, just how eternal it is.