Rainy day tales

They say it's going to rain all over the Indianapolis 500 tomorrow, and, man, I hear that and immediately pour myself another cup of coffee. Rain and Indy and coffee, see, are wired together in my brain in some weird half-assed way. Most things in my brain are wired together in weird half-assed ways, but let's get specific here.

Let's talk about rain at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Let's tell a tale or two, while we wait to see if the AccuStormTrakFutureCast nerds get it right this time.

If you were a media grunt there, which I was for 40 years, rain at the Speedway made you crazy, or at least crazier. IMS was larger than life itself when the sun shone and the breezes were soft and the sky was a cerulean bowl ("Aaaand there you go with the fifty-buck words again," you're saying). But when it rained, through some strange wrinkle in physical law, somehow it contracted.

Got smaller than the inside of mom's old spin dryer, the place did. The sky would go black, precip would first darken that 2 1/2-mile ribbon of asphalt and then turn it into the world's largest moat, and, up in the media center, fidget mode would hit Defcon-1.

 We'd all, yes, go get more coffee. We'd stare at the Green Blob From Hell on the radar ("Look, it's engulfed Sacramento now!"). Then we'd go get coffee again.

Someone would repeat, for the 1,239th time, the same tired weather-dude line: "It's raining now, but it looks like we've got a window over Terre Haute". Someone else would pop an umbrella and venture down to Gasoline Alley, returning with the breathless news that it was even raining on good old A.J., and he was pretty damned mad about it.

After awhile, because the drivers were bored, too, IMS staff would bring a few of them into the Chris Economaki Conference Room. The Frost/Nixon interview, it was not.

"So, how about this weather?" we'd ask the drivers.

"Yeah, boy, it's somethin'," they'd reply.

And off we'd go to hammer that nugget into our rain-delay stories. And hit the coffee again.

Anyway ... on with the rainy day tales. Or tale.

The one that always leaps to mind is not 1997, when it took three days to get the race in, or 2007, when the skies opened right after Dario Franchitti took the checkers and his wife at the time, actress Ashley Judd, went splashing barefoot through the pit area on her way to Victory Lane. No, for pure memorably apocalyptic weather, I always come back to 2004.

Buddy Rice won from the pole that year for Bobby Rahal and David Letterman, and it was a mess of a day from the jump. The start was delayed two hours by rain; then there was another long rain delay 27 laps in. Finally Rice took the checkers and headed not for Victory Lane but one of the Formula One garages, because another dangerous storm was closing in.

This one was pure loveliness: Not only was there wind and rain involved, but it had an F2 funnel cloud embedded in it. And here we were, the Assembled Media, gathered in the worst possible place we could be, the IMS media center in the Tower Terrace complex just north of the pagoda.

It was on the fourth floor, first of all. And the entire front of it was glass. Windows ran the length of it in back, and overhead there were, I don't know, 120 or so TV monitors (more glass!) arrayed in neat ranks from the head of the room to the back. 

It was as if the whole joint was waving its hand and shouting "Hey, F2 funnel cloud! Over here, dude!"

Little wonder that, as the storm approached, we were instructed to move downstairs to the protected second floor. You know what happened next, right?

Heads popped up. Then, almost as quickly, they bent back over their laptops. You could almost hear the unspoken refrain: "Screw THAT. We got early holiday deadlines."

Some would call that dedication. Others would say it was more evidence that none of us was the sharpest knife in the drawer. 

In any case, the storm passed just south of the Speedway, where the funnel cloud tore up that side of the city. And I headed home that night through a violent cloudburst, lightning stitching the sky and the rain coming down so hard it took me an hour to get back to my hotel -- a trip that had been a 20-minute drive early that morning.

Here's hoping that doesn't happen tomorrow. But if it does, I know what I'll be doing up here in the Fort.

I'll be going for more coffee.