By Lewis Franck, Special to Kickin’ the Tires
INDIANAPOLIS – Kissing the Bricks at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
It’s something that every driver and most team owners aspire to do.
Take last year, after Kyle Larson won the Brickyard 400. His car owner, Rick Hendrick (then 75 years old), also got down on his knees and turned his baseball cap around to perform the iconic ritual.
That rite has become so meaningful that Indy 500 winners and their families also crave to do it.
So, how did we get here?
Back in 1909, Carl Fisher and his partners paved the legendary 2.5-mile, four-turn oval with crushed limestone and tar, according to the Indianapolis Star.
Tragically, debris from the track came up, caused by the “high” speeds of the cars, resulting in chaos and something had to be done.
In came 3.2 million paving bricks. Sometime later, this hallowed ground of racing became known as “The Brickyard”.
Over the next half-century, IndyCars raced over the bricks or partially paved bricks until 1961, when the track was fully paved as you see it today, except for a three-foot-long, 50-foot-wide strip at the start-finish line.
Of course, at that time and until today, the winner’s tradition of the Indy 500 has been drinking from a bottle of milk in Victory Lane.
When NASCAR arrived in August 1994, the stock car series didn’t have its own winner’s tradition after Jeff Gordon won the inaugural Brickyard 400.
Two years later, when Dale Jarrett won the race, he inaugurated the now unique tradition.
But it was his crew chief at the time, Todd Parrott, who came up with the idea.
Parrott told Rick Mast, on a Kenny Wallace video, “It was at a dinner at St. Elmo’s (a famous steakhouse in Indianapolis) after a test, ‘when we win the Brickyard 400 there’s something special we’re going to do as a team.'”
Sure enough, Parrott’s declaration was more than a prediction; Jarrett won.
The former crew chief continued, “After all the pictures and hoopla in Victory Lane, I said ‘c’mon.’” He (Jarrett) said ‘Where are we going?’ I said, ‘You don’t remember the dinner a month ago?’ ‘Oh, yeah,’ Jarrett replied.
So we crossed the wall, bent down, turned our hats around and kissed the bricks.”
“It was kind of warm and wet. Probably the best kiss I ever had,” Parrott said with a grin.
The following year, Ricky Rudd repeated “the kiss” and a tradition was set.
After that, every NASCAR winner at Indianapolis has been inspired to do so.
The late Dan Wheldon, the 2011 Indy 500 winner, his team manager, Steve Newey, and the team owner adopted the tradition.
Since then, virtually every winner at the Brickyard has “Kissed the Bricks.”
Joey Logano, a three-time NASCAR Champion and a Daytona 500 winner, has one important item on his racing bucket list.
“That is the number one race on the list to want to win just because it’s Indy,” the driver of the No. 22 Shell-Pennzoil Ford Mustang told the media. “How iconic that Speedway is, the dream of kissing the bricks is a real thing. That’s the real thing for me. I would love to be in that position someday. We’ve been close. Obviously, Roger Penske now owning the racetrack and being my boss adds more to it, but it was there before that.”