It's May again, and here I sit in Indianapolis. I grew up here and fell in love with racing, and my father used to pull me out of school every year as a child to go to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. He wasn't a big fan, but he knew I had a passion for the place, and faithfully took me and signed my absentee slip from school.

I loved everything about the Speedway - the bright cars, the huge mass of people, the relative isolation of watching practice on the backstretch, the completely tasteless hot dogs - everything. I remember begging my dad to try to sneak us into the outside grandstands during practice so I could see more of the track at once. I looked forward to May more than I looked forward to my birthday and Christmas combined. May was special.

As I grew older, my enjoyment of the track didn't wane one bit. When I was working at Allison Transmission in Speedway, I would go in to work at 5 AM in order to get out of there at 1 PM so I could walk to the track and catch the last five hours of practice - every single day.

I am 27 years old, so while my heroes don't include the "old guard" of the Speedway, they do include Mario Andretti, Al Unser Sr., Gordon Johncock, Rick Mears, and many others. I could tell Andretti's STP Wildcat apart from Johncock's STP Wildcat by the shade of blue when the cars were travelling at 205 miles per hour. My least favorite words in the dictionary were "Mario is slowing down", but I heard them nearly every year. It was all a part of the Greatest Spectacle in Racing - the most intense, nerve-wracking, butterfly- inducing race in all the world.

It's all gone now. The month of May in Indianapolis is now like any other month. The incredible hype is gone. Sure, the city still hangs checkered flag banners from the street signs, and every once in awhile you'll see some business with a "Welcome Race Fans" sign out front. But now you can drive right by 16th and Georgetown on a practice day and not touch the brakes. The street vendors aren't open except on Pole day and Race day. Down in Greenwood, only twenty minutes away, the hotels advertise "Race weekend vacancies". For as many people as there are in this town, it somehow seems like a ghost town; a shadow of it's former self. The race goes on - full fields, some good racing, but no sense of the overwhelming tradition that used to encompass and define it. This devastation of the Motorsports Capital of The World is not due to waning interest in open-wheel racing, lack of sponsorship dollars for open-wheel racing, or lack of talent in the open-wheeled ranks. On the contrary, there is more interest, more sponsorship money, and loads of talent poised and ready to make the Indianapolis 500 the awesome event it once was. The only thing that stands in the way is personal interests. Track owners, presidents of sanctioning bodies, and owners of racing teams cannot seem to find the time or inclination to repair the burned bridges of the split.

And this fan has not been able to find the time or inclination to step foot back inside the track.