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The Indy 500 is the centrepiece of the championship and a gargantuan sporting event in its own right. Taking place at the legendary 2½-mile Super Speedway oval track at Indianapolis, in economic terms it’s bigger than the Super Bowl, which is partly a result of the huge numbers that attend on the race day itself, and partly because it takes place over three weeks of practice, testing and qualifying before the race itself. ‘The Month of May’, they call it.

As an engineer, you come up with a shopping list of things you’d like to try in terms of Indy 500 set-up. A common mistake was to set up the car with too much understeer, so the driver would go through the corner flat-out without lifting the throttle but he’d lose too much speed because the front tyres would scrub across the track and that action would create drag and slow it down.

Equally, if the car was too nervous at the rear the driver would have to lift the throttle or risk losing the rear and so, again, you’d end up losing speed.

So trying to get the balance of the car just right was crucial at Indy, and a difficult thing to keep right throughout the month. Often in the early days of testing building up to qualifying week, you’d find some teams and drivers starting with very quick times but slowing down as the track rubbered in and the weather warmed up.

There were so many variables. So many different things to try on the car that I’d come up with a list of the key things and then attempt to work through them each day. But despite the track being open from 10am to 6pm, productivity in testing was frustratingly slow. For example:

10.00: First run of the day. Installation run, go out, do two warm-up laps, engine cover off, check for oil leaks, etc.

10.20: First proper run of four timed laps on new tyres. Come in. Bobby complaining of poor car balance. Check the all-important stagger (difference in diameter of the rear tyres), find it is wrong and adjust it.

11.00: Run again for four timed laps. Come in. Bobby now happy that car balance is as expected based on previous day. Car now low on fuel. Hitch car up to quad bike and tow car to ‘Gasoline Alley’ to refuel (we were not allowed to refuel in the pit lane for safety reasons); sit in queue at fuel station. Get car back in pit lane and make the set-up change I had prepared on my list for the day.

12.20: Go out, full course yellow thrown because a car has broken down and dropped oil before Bobby has done a lap.

13.10: Finally get out and do four timed lap runs to try to evaluate change. But by now ambient and track temperatures have increased considerably, so we are not sure if it is better or worse. Decide to revert to start-of-day set-up to check; what is known as an A-B-A test.

13.50: Run again on base set-up.

So, at a little after 2pm, four hours after the track opened, we have evaluated precisely one change.

I couldn’t get over just how big Indy 500 was, and not just on the day itself, but the build-up to it as well. The grandstand alone has a capacity of upwards of a quarter of a million, with in-field seating raising the attendance to about 400,000 on race day – making it the most-attended single day of sport anywhere on earth. But even knowing that fact doesn’t quite prepare you for the size. It is huge. Vast. They had a campsite called the Snake Pit, which was rammed for the entire three weeks, and going in there one night was almost as much of an eye-opener as getting lost in the Bronx. Hard rock blasting out. Motorbikes revving. Massive, ZZ Top-looking blokes wandering around with a beer in one hand and a girl in the other. I remember seeing a girl standing on top of a VW camper van advertising blowjobs for $5, and nobody – well, nobody but me – batting an eyelid. I overheard a TV crew interviewing one of the campers, a rather grizzled, lived-in guy in an oily denim jacket. ‘How long have you been coming?’ they asked him.

‘I’ve been coming here for the last twenty years; haven’t missed one yet,’ he said proudly.

‘Oh, that’s fantastic, and what do you think of it?’

‘Well it’s just the best goddamn event in the whole of the USA.’

‘What do you think of the cars then?’

He paused, thinking. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘that’s the damnedest thing. Twenty years, I ain’t seen one yet.’

He was just there to party.

Race day was quite something. We had to get up early in order to steal a march on the quarter of a million people also trying to get into the circuit. At 7am a cannon went off to signal the gates at the two opposite ends of the oval opening and punters began flooding in. Watching it, we saw two cars collide as they met in the middle. It was pandemonium.

Everybody took their seats. I remember our team manager, Steve Horne, tripping over the low wall, falling flat on his face in the pits and earning a standing ovation from the grandstand, a reminder of just how much attention was focused on us. And, of course, with it being one of the biggest sporting events in the world, there was all the American pomp and ceremony that goes with it. Jets flying past, pom-pom girls, the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’.

That particular year, it looked as though the March 85C was a little quicker than the Lola, which was its nearest rival.

As the race developed it became a tight battle between the two cars. Mario Andretti in the Lola had the lead but Danny Sullivan in the Penske-run March had a performance advantage.

Danny got up to second and was on Mario’s tail, but couldn’t find a way to overtake. Finally he tried to get past on the inside, but Mario, being the experienced old fox that he is, wasn’t making it easy.

The apron is where the banking angle changes, so you get this change in camber of the track, which unbalances the car as it crosses. What Mario did was force Danny down onto the apron, which was aggressive but legitimate. Danny was halfway past Mario when the camber changed and he lost the rear and spun – ending up directly in front of Mario. Mario managed to brake and avoid him, and for a moment you could see Danny spinning in a cloud of tyre smoke with Mario just behind him, no doubt grinning in his helmet.

But Danny held on. The car didn’t hit anything, and when the spin was complete, he was pointing in the right direction. The engine stalled but Danny put the car in gear, the engine fired and he was able to continue. Later, Danny would say that it was half skill and half ‘dumb luck’ that he was unhurt and able to continue.

The stewards flew the yellow flag for the pace car while the smoke cleared. Danny continued with heavily flat-spotted tyres, screaming in the radio, ‘I’ve spun, I’ve spun!’ Both drivers came into the pits for a fast tyre change and then went back out. There was a new race order now, but it soon reverted back to Mario in the lead, Danny second. And this time Danny managed a clean overtake to win the race.

The ‘spin and win’, it’s called. It’s one of the most dramatic moments in IndyCar history and well worth seeking out on YouTube when you have a chance.