Leavin' 'em flat

And now we have the answer to the question we've all been asking, the question that has been on the lips of every reasonably sentient being for, oh, eight months or so now: "Does 2020 have to ruin EVERYTHING?"

Why, yes. Yes it does.

And so to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway yesterday, five laps to run, late afternoon shadows pooling deep along the main straightaway. Takuma Sato in front; Scott Dixon, who owned this thing for virtually the entirety of the day, trying desperately to muster one last run at him. And then ...

And then the back end steps out on Spencer Pigot in the middle of turn four, and he slaps the outside wall and pinwheels back across the track to score a direct hit on the attenuator at the end of the pit wall.

The attenuator disintegrates as if a bomb hit it. Pigot's car, too, scattering debris across the entire width of the frontstretch. Out comes the yellow.

And out it stays, as Sato putters under the checkers and Dixon, deprived of his last shot, putters across the yard of brick behind him -- all the while wondering loudly on his radio why the hell they didn't red-flag the race and give the Indianapolis 500 the finish an Indianapolis 500 deserved.

And 2020?

Well, you know what it was doing. Chortling away somewhere in the eternal, having 2020-ed everything up once more.

Bad enough it threw a pandemic at us that pushed the 500 to the unnatural confines of late August and forced race officials to run it in front of empty grandstands. Oh, no. 2020 had to 2020 it to the very end, depriving Dixon of one last chance to win a race he'd led for 111 laps, and Sato the joy of  legitimate run beneath the checkers.

So unfair both to Dixon and Sato in that regard, but especially so to Sato. You win the Indianapolis 500, you should do it by holding off a five-time series champion beneath the full-throated bellow of the usual Indy Mass O' Humanity. But to do it under yellow, before all that yawning emptiness ...

Yeah, it's still the 500. Yeah, it was still the second 500 victory for a driver who perhaps has never gotten his due outside his Japanese homeland. But what a lack of proper tribute.

And here you can ask, and should ask, what Scott Dixon was asking as the yellow fluttered and everyone puttered around this ancient place: Why no red flag?

For the answer, you have to go back to that pit entrance attenuator, which Pigot shredded. Race officials say it would have taken too long to repair it. And to be sure, you can reasonably figure the race would have been stopped for a good hour or hour-and-a-half, maybe longer.

But there would have been plenty of light left to finish five laps at speed. And Dixon would have gotten his shot on the restart. And if there was a broadcast window issue ... come on. You're not gonna push back other programming to air the end of the Indianapolis 500?

Look. I understand the issues. I understand Pigot left a hell of a mess to clean up. I understand IndyCar doesn't do red flags to set up artificial finishes. I also understand Dixon probably wasn't going to get it done anyway; tires go away fast at Indy, he'd been out there on his awhile, and Sato actually was running faster than Dixon when Pigot did his deal.

But finishing under caution at Iowa or Kentucky or Texas is one thing. Doing it in the 500 is entirely another.

And, yeah, sure, it wasn't like it was the first time it's happened. It's happened, in fact, 16 times since 1940. Yesterday was the third time it's finished under caution in the last nine years.

But it felt different this time, somehow. Likely that was because this 500 already had been cheated of so much, and already was strange in a way no 500 had ever been on 104 runnings. So the whole business felt even more flat than it would have anyway, and you felt bad for Sato and Dixon and the whole lot of them.

You can blame race officials or Spencer Pigot or whomever you want for that. Me, I just blame 2020.

You suck, 2020. You really, really suck.