Disappeared

 Alex Palou won another IndyCar race yesterday, this time at the Mecca, aka the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Won the pole for the Grand Prix of Indianapolis, then won the race after Graham Rahal, who started right next to him, led 49 of the 85 laps.

That makes three Ws in a row for the defending series champion, four in five races so far this season, and even Rahal admitted the other day no one can figure out how to beat him right now. Which of course means he's the odds-on favorite to win the Indianapolis 500 in two weeks hence.

You'd think that would be a great big attention hook for America's best racing series.

You'd be wrong, of course.

You'd be wrong, because apparently the only more dominant force than Alex Palou in IndyCar is radio silence. Or media silence, if you prefer strict accuracy over metaphor.

See, I went looking on ESPN's website for a story on Palou's latest triumph this morning, and I couldn't find one. Not on the main page. Not even on the racing page, where the results were posted but the headlines in the queue included "Harley-Davidson To Launch Series With Moto GP", but nothing on Palou's third straight win.

No headline. No file. In May, at Indy.

To be sure, you could find stories filed on a number of other sites, but the Worldwide Leader's snub seems especially troublesome. If it finds MotoGP more newsworthy than IndyCar at Indy in May, that's a problem, because it implies ESPN thinks IndyCar is even farther off the Sportsball public's radar than even doomcriers like the Blob assumed.

I have typed until my fingers cramped up that IndyCar is as competitive, talent-rich and bursting with saleable personalities as it's been in decades, but somehow that doesn't seem to matter. Truth is, it remains the most chronically disappeared major entity in the sporting world.

I find this exceedingly bizarre.

And, yeah, that undoubtedly owes much to my bias toward IndyCar, which is lifelong and survived even the late, unlamented IRL years. The sport's vanishing from the public consciousness didn't begin then, but it was certainly the kill shot. When a sport of kings --- the sport of the Foyts and Andrettis and Unsers and Mearses -- becomes the sport of Dr. Jack Miller the Racing Dentist and Brad Murphey the Racing Cowboy, you pretty much deserve to have the public show you its back. And IndyCar did that deliberately.

Thirty years later, it's still in a sense paying the price for that.

To their credit, the sport's boardroom jockeys tried to remedy that in the offseason, dumping an increasingly disinterested NBC for Fox. I remember sitting in my living room during the Super Bowl watching the rollout of a new set of Fox IndyCar promos, and being amazed that they actually featured some of those aforementioned saleable personalities -- Palou, Pato O'Ward, Josef Newgarden, others.  They even got Tom Brady to make a cameo in one of the Newgarden bits. 

 "Finally!" I thought. "Finally, someone gets it!"

And then ...

And then came Saturday. And one more indication that the sport still has a long row to hoe with the sporting public.

But, hey. The Big Five's in two weeks. The usual 300,000 humans will fill the most iconic racing venue in the world, millions more will tune in on TV, and IndyCar will once again get to boast that the largest single-day sporting event on the planet resides beneath its banner.

But for most of the multitudes who make it so?

It'll be the last IndyCar race of the season they watch.