August reveries

 Bill Elliott old-man crabbing. There's your memory for this morning.

 NASCAR comes back to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in August this  Brickyard Weekend for the first time since 2006, and straight away I remember Bill Elliott sitting on the stoop of his trailer and crabbing about the heat. He was in the sunset of his career by then, Elliott was, and there he was mopping sweat off his brow and talking about how he wouldn't miss the bleepity-bleep heat -- and how he knew he was getting on in years because it wore on him in a way it never did when he was young.

Meanwhile I was mopping sweat off my own brow and thinking: I'm right there with ya, Awesome Bill.

The heat is what always comes back to me when I remember the Brickyard 400 in those years, the heat and the smell of gasoline and the ear-splitting blare of muscled-up stock cars. It got hot at Indy in May, too, of course, but it was different in August. Then it rose up from the baking concrete -- all that pavement turned the place into a griddle when the mercury leaped -- while that good old Hoosier humidity lay over everything like a collapsed tent.

You sweated a lot, in other words. Which is why sweating is one of my foremost tactile memories of the Brickyard, other than the nap-inducing Tournament of Roses parade racing that made NASCAR and the fabled Indy oval such a poor fit.

(A secondary memory: Legendary motorsports writer Ed Hinton sitting in the media center with his head thrown back, snoring away in the middle of the race one year.)

I banged the drum for years to move the Cup race to the road course, and they finally did, and now NASCAR at Indy is wild and crazy and a hell of a lot of fun in a way it never was on the oval. I understand the drivers who still pine for the oval, because like them I'm appreciative of its unmatched history. But the Verizon 200, which is what they call the Brickyard 400 now, at least will never put you to sleep.

Dwindling crowds and revenue -- and the oppressive heat -- pushed IMS into moving the race around, first to late July and then to September expressly because officials figured it would be a tad cooler then. Now they've brought IndyCar into the mix, because NASCAR alone no longer can carry the weekend and no longer figures to.

Love the idea, frankly. It turns an event into a Great Big Event, brings to town two very different fan bases, gives the Alex Palous and Scott Dixons and Pato O'Wards a chance to hang with the Chase Elliotts and Joey Loganos and Kyle Busches. Likely will never happen, but how cool would it be to see a Brickyard crossover, with one of the IndyCar guys running both races and one of the NASCAR guys doing the same?

I'd sweat a few more gallons in August to see that, by golly.

OK. So maybe I wouldn't.