Too many last laps

 All day long the tears and tributes flooded the interwhatsis, and it was like being flung to a place where the living present merged with a living past. Names upon names, all of them evoking this day or that ...

Mario and Michael and A.J. and The Captain. Chip and Juan Pablo and TK and Dixie.

James Hinchcliffe. Graham Rahal. Alexander Rossi. Tony Stewart. Even the Haas F1 team from the other side of the pond.

Robin Miller is gone, 12 days after he came back to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for what almost everyone understood was a last look around at his best-loved place. And so the tributes from racers past and present flowed, and there's a hole in motorsport now only memories can fill.  

For me, it's a hole in my months of May, mostly.

I'm retired now, and I haven't so much as stepped foot in the Speedway since 2018. But I covered May at Indy for 40 years, and I can't conceive of that month and that place without Robin Miller. It is simply beyond my ability to imagine.

This is because he was as synonymous with Indy as many of the drivers, first for the Indianapolis Star and later for various national entities. Everyone knew him, and he knew everyone. Which will happen when you first gain entry to the place at 18, stealing beer from fans' coolers to slake Jim Hurtubise's thirst.

After that, Miller tried his hand at racing himself, driving snarling mean-hearted USAC midgets. Then he traded a firesuit for a typewriter, and got crosswise with some folks more than once because that typewriter was sometimes too honest.

Along the way, though, he became IndyCar's fiercest advocate. And occasionally its conscience.

I didn't know Robin well, but I know a lot of the guys who worked with him, and I know the regard in which they hold him. They'll tell you he was fearless and loud and profane and flat-out hilarious. They'll tell you the Library of Congress couldn't hold all the stories he knew, and that he never tired of telling them, holding court in the media center surrounded by boxes of donuts and bags of candy he freely dispensed. 

They'll tell you he was a journalistic throwback, one of those guys who could smell something fishy from a mile off and knew how to unearth it.

Hell, he even dressed the part. Or maybe you had to be there in the '80s when Robin used to traipse into the claustrophobic old Speedway media center in quasi-parachute pants.

Thing is, he was larger than life among our tribe in a way you hardly ever see anymore, and now that his self-described "last lap" is done, it's worth noting there have been too damn many last laps lately. Bobby Unser went in early May, the month of his legend. Bob Jenkins, the voice of IndyCar for so many years, followed just a couple of weeks ago. And now Robin Miller.

That's a hard summer of mortality going on its head. And if you're of a certain age, that makes it a hard summer of understanding that the past, however lively, is still the past, and that time is getting along.

With the hammer down, and all four tires below the white line.