Bricking up the Brickyard

 Well. At least it wasn't boring.

But this cannot be what the poobahs had in mind, this first NASCAR Cup race on the infield road course at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The drivers hated the idea, for one thing; some of them bitched and moaned and said it was terrible they weren't going to race on Indy's hallowed oval, even while acknowledging that doing so was like watching grass grow. But the fans kept yawning and staying home, so ...

So to the road course they went Sunday. And of course it was an absolute (brick)-up.

The culprit was the chicane between the fifth and sixth turns, which started coming apart as the race went along. With five laps to go William Byron ran over the damaged curbing and set off an eight-car pileup that red-flagged the race ... and then seven more piled up in the same place as soon as the green dropped again  ... and then Chase Briscoe ran through the grass and spun out leader Denny Hamlin ... and finally AJ Allmendinger stepped through the open door to take the checkers.

Allmendinger led only two laps. But it was the right two.

"Survival of the fittest," he said.

That was one way to put it.

Another was, "The hell was THAT??"

Still another was, "Why didn't they just build a ramp between turns 5 and 6? Couldn't have bent up more sheet metal than they did."

In any event, the Verizon "Look Out!" 200 at the Brickyard was half the Brickyard 400, but twice the mess. And it makes you wonder a couple of things, whether or not it makes the organizers wonder them or not.

One, maybe the racing gods hated the idea of abandoning the oval, too.

And two, maybe trying to run three major events on the road course in one weekend wasn't such a great idea after all.

It's as yet unclear whether IndyCar, Infiniti and Cup all qualifying and racing over the same patch of asphalt across 72 hours was just too much for the road course infrastructure to handle. But it's absolutely clear at least one part of that infrastructure failed.

And you can deduce from that a couple of other things.

One, this could well be the last time you see IMS try the IndyCar/Infiniti/Cup tripleheader.

And two, we perhaps haven't seen the last of the Brickyard 400, even if it is the spectator equivalent of a medically induced coma. Given Sunday's fiasco, and how vocal some influential voices (Kevin Harvick, Austin Dillon, etc.) were about abandoning the oval to begin with, it's not at all hard to envision Roger Penske and the IMS brain trust scrapping the "Look Out!" 200 and going back to the oval.

Hey, it looked great on the drawing board ...

That sort of thing.

And if the fans don't come back?

Then they don't come back. Not even Roger Penske gets everything he wants all the time.