Guaranteed diminishment

 Roger Penske is 86 years old now, so perhaps the past lies closer to the surface for him than the present these days. Your pile of days gets so high, that tends to happen.

So, yes, could be he's re-living 1995 -- the year May at Indianapolis slapped him around just to show it could do it to anyone, even Roger Penske.

Failed to make the show that year, Penske did. Came with the wrong setup, never got it right, failed to qualify for the 500 a year after Al Unser Jr. and Emerson Fittipaldi dominated for the Captain, with Little Al ultimately winning. It was the story of the month that May.

Thirty years later, the Speedway and IndyCar are both part of Roger Penske's empire. And now the Captain, along with Speedway CEO Mark Miles and IndyCar president Jay Frye, are mulling a revamped series membership structure that would grant active full-season teams certain guarantees -- including, perhaps, guaranteed starting spots in the Indianapolis 500.

The latter being something Penske has advocated for since before he bought the Speedway and series, overwhelming opposition be damned.

 I don't know how much 1995 colors that advocacy. But if it does, he's reliving the wrong year.

He ought to be reliving 1996.

Which was the first year of the infamous Split, when Tony George launched his Indy Racing League essentially because he thought the ruling body of the sport, Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART) had gotten too big for its britches. CART, obviously did not agree. And so that May there were competing 500-mile races on Memorial Day weekend, one for the fledgling IRL guys at Indy and one for the CART guys at Penske's track up in Michigan.

Not long thereafter, George came up with the idea Penske now thinks is A-OK: Guaranteed spots in the 500.

Twenty-five spots would be reserved for IRL regulars. Eight would be open to anyone else who wanted to try to qualify. CART, including Penske, howled mightily, as did virtually everyone else in the racing community.

The opposition was so universal, in fact, that the 25-and-8 rule didn't last long. And yet now IndyCar and the Speedway might be contemplating the same basic thing?

Lousy ideas tend to have a long shelf life, and this was one of Tony George's lousiest. And nearly 30 years haven't scrubbed any of the lousy off it. It stunk like roadkill then, and it stinks like roadkill now.

That's because, as Roger Penske knows better than anyone, no event lives off its past the way the Indianapolis 500 does. There are 113 years of past to draw from, after all. And for 112 years of those years, with a handful of exceptions, the field was has been 33 cars  -- the fastest 33, as the Speedway has long promoted it.

It might make business sense to mess with that, and in truth business interests have already messed with it and gotten away with it. There are two races at Indy in May now, after all. There's only one weekend of qualifying, and its very structure has undergone radical changes in the last decade or so.

But race day has always been where the messing around stops. And race day belongs to, yes, the fastest 33 cars, determined by the nerve and will of 33 drivers.

Guaranteeing spots fundamentally changes that, which is why it was met with such universal disdain when Tony George tried to do it. And it's unnecessary, besides. The reason everyone, including Roger Penske, remembers what happened in 1995 is because it almost never happens. And that's even more true today than ever.

Imagine a scenario, for instance, in which Penske or Andretti or Rahal-Letterman-Lanigan or Ganassi or Arrow McLaren fails to put a car in the field. Or, hell, even Ed Carpenter's team or Dale Coyne's or A.J. Foyt's, or any of the ten full-series teams.

It's virtually impossible, because hardly anyone gets bumped from the field anymore at Indy. The way qualifying, and IndyCar, is structured these days, there isn't even an official Bump Day. It generally comes down to two or three or four drivers -- and if, as was the case with Graham Rahal last year, those drivers are series regulars, the team itself almost certainly has already put another driver in the field.

So for what do you need guaranteed starting spots?

A good question in 1996. A better question in 2024.