INDIANAPOLIS — It never fails. You feel one way when you walk into the track and, hopefully, another when you walk out.
Eldora Speedway, on the western edge of Ohio, plays with your emotions. Driving there, past cornfields and through small towns, you are skittish with anticipation. On the journey home, if all has gone well, there is great relief. And between the arriving and the leaving, there are moments of fear and worry.
If you don’t feel them, you are not human.
Driving south on State Route 118 after the 40th 4-Crown Nationals, the relief was genuine. Midget and sprint car wrecks destroyed five cars, but Mitchel Moles, Buddy Kofoid, Chance Crum, Robert Ballou and Dallas Hewitt walked away.
So the ride out of Darke County toward I-70 was a calm one, free of the stomach churn that sometimes plays co-pilot on that trip.
I love the joint for reasons that are not easily explained, but I’ll try anyway.
When it comes to big, fast Eldora, your imagination blends the things you’ve seen and the history you’ve studied. A 1974 photo of Jan Opperman, nose broken and bloodied by a flying rock, smiling through his discomfort after a USAC win; Joey Saldana at the 2011 Kings Royal, being helped to an ambulance with five fractured ribs, a punctured lung and a smashed wrist; and maybe the most notorious Eldora spill of them all, the one that sent word beyond the greater Midwest — beyond the world of racing, for that matter — that this was no place for the timid.
It was April 3, 1966. Johnny Rutherford, the reigning USAC sprint car champion, was sitting in Wally Meskowski’s brand-new sprint car, and he was none too happy about it. He’d have preferred Meskowski’s older car, a proven piece, but it was occupied by Wally’s latest hire, young Mario Andretti.
Midway through the feature, both drivers were struggling.
“Wally came out to the edge of the track,” Rutherford said, “and motioned me to run lower.”
Obeying orders, Rutherford dipped to the bottom of turn one. Immediately, he recalled, “Mario drove right by me on the outside.”
Rutherford was incensed. He’d already been losing ground to the lead pack, which included eventual winner Arnie Knepper, Roger McCluskey, Don Branson and Jud Larson. Now, he’d handed a position to his own teammate.
On the next lap, noticing that Meskowski was still stationed trackside, Rutherford took one hand off the steering wheel and threw his car owner the finger. Seconds later, on the steep banking of turn two, “Mario’s car kicked up a rock or a clod,” said Rutherford. “It hit me right square between the eyes.”
Knocked silly, he reflexively backed out of the throttle. With his rear tires no longer spinning madly over the choppy surface — Eldora was always rough in the springtime — his car “hooked a rut, did a reverse spin and started flipping.”
The Meskowski No. 1 car vaulted over the guardrail, then dropped into a deep ravine hugging the modest stream that eventually widens to become the famous Wabash River.
“It was 60 feet from the guardrail to the ground,” Rutherford estimated, “and I’d been 15 or more feet above the guardrail, going end for end.” The crash-landing left him with two badly broken arms. To this day, he cannot straighten the right one. But it could have been so much worse. The car nosed into soft ground rather than shallow water, and settled on all four wheels.
“If it had landed upside down,” said Johnny, “I’d be just a fond memory.”
For weeks he lay hurting in a Dayton hospital, with a severe concussion, a face that was “one massive bruise” and those shattered arms, one of which required nine surgeries to clear a persistent staph infection.
Graphic photos of the incident ran in Life magazine, which had a circulation of about 10 million. There, in stark black and white, was the cartwheeling sprint car carrying its fully exposed driver into the dangers of that ravine. You can imagine the average reader recoiling in horror.
Eldora had obtained a degree of infamy it has never shed.
It can be brutal, and it does not discriminate: It will slap the best of them. In 2001, flirting a bit too recklessly with Eldora’s cushion sent USAC hero Dave Darland to the emergency room with a brain bleed. In 1994, the same transgression halted a career that seemed destined to take Page Jones to the top of American motorsports.
But there is another side to that coin: Mastering that same cushion made legends out of Jack Hewitt, Jac Haudenschild and, more recently, Kyle Larson.
Eldora’s make-you-or-break-you character is part of the attraction. It has to be.
Conquer her, and she can make you somebody. Just don’t get too fresh.
I walk into Eldora the same way I walk into Indianapolis, Daytona and a small handful of other tracks where the stakes on the table are plain to see. I hope for the best, and usually I get it. But I remain quietly on edge, every nerve taut and alive.
Sure it’s crazy: I love a place that scares me half to death. Already, I can’t wait to get back there.