Motorsport: The 10 fastest Indy 500 facts

Scott Dixon. Photo / AP

1 Dixon's quest for another Baby Borg

Scott Dixon, the Kiwi IndyCar champion has often said winning an IRL title is hard - he should know he's got two - and winning the Indianapolis 500 is harder still. It's one race, once a year and if you haven't got lady luck riding shot-gun with you, the planets all aligned and Jupiter rising in whoever's quarter, it isn't going to happen.

Dixon has as good a chance as anyone else of having his name on the Borg Warner Trophy for a second time. And starting from the second row of the grid is no bad thing, winners have come from as far back as the 10th row in the past.

Winning the IRL championship and an Indy 500 title already will have relieved a bit of pressure. Dixon's achievement last year means New Zealand can lay claim to the Triple Crown of motorsport. Kiwi drivers have won a Monaco Grand Prix, a 24 Hours Le Man and Indianapolis 500. Not bad for a country with more sheep than people.

2 Rich race history

In 1906, car dealer Carl Fisher came to the conclusion public roads were hopeless for testing and developing new automobiles.

He wanted to build a complex with long straights and sweeping curves for testing, and the odd race meeting. His idea found favour with Jim Allison, Frank Wheeler and Arthur Newby who all formed the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Corporation in 1909 and bought 137 hectares in the area.

A 4km track was built and the first race held in August that year. A few years later in 1911, the first official Indianapolis 500 was held. Ray Harroun won with an average speed of 120km/h in six hours and 42 minutes.

After World War II, the Speedway was a broken-down wreck and owner Eddie Rickenbacher wanted out. Later that year, motorsport fan Tony Hulman rode into town to save the day and bought the Speedway from Rickenbacher.

After investing in the track and nurturing the race for 30 years until he died in 1977, Hulman grew the race into what is now described as "the greatest spectacle in racing".

3 Why the milk?

On winning the Indy 500, the victor is given a bottle of milk to drink in a tradition going back to 1933 when race winner Louis Meyer was photographed in his garage downing a glass of milk to quench his thirst.

He repeated the exercise in Victory Lane after winning his third 500 title in 1936, as his Mum had told him buttermilk was a good pick-me-up.

A picture appeared of Meyer in the paper during the following week and an executive from the dairy industry, thinking it was standard milk, arranged for a bottle to be on hand every year.

The tradition fell by the wayside after 1947 but someone saw the light and a bottle of the white stuff reappeared in 1956 and every year since.

Sports Illustrated magazine has saluted the Indy 500's bottle of milk as No1 on a list of the world's coolest sport's prizes.

4 No more backseat driving - women in the 500

When it comes to keeping the fairer sex at arm's length, motorsport is down there with the worst. It wasn't until 1971 that the Indianapolis Motor Speedway allowed women to enter pitlane and the garages.

Five years later Janet Guthrie became the first woman to pass the rookie test, but did not qualify. The next year Guthrie made it to the grid, which prompted Tony Hulman to utter the immortal words, "In company with the first woman ever to qualify at Indianapolis, gentlemen, start your engines."

It wasn't until 1982 that another woman had a go and Desire Wilson made one unsuccessful attempt to qualify but didn't make the grid. Ten years later, Lyn St James managed to jump through all the hoops and lined up with the boys to become, at 45, the oldest rookie.

In 2000, two women made the grid, St James and 19-year-old rookie Sarah Fisher, the youngest driver in the race. However, they took each other out during the race. Five years later, Danica Patrick announced her presence by being the first woman to lead the 500 and went on to finish fourth.

This year three women have made it to Sunday's race - Patrick, Fisher and Milka Duno.

5 The greatest duels

The narrowest winning margin in the history of the Indy 500 also happened on one of the coldest race days. The 1992 event was fraught with accidents due to cold tyres and after leading for 160 laps it looked like Michael Andretti had it in the bag - until his fuel pump packed in.

With seven laps to go, Al Unser jr had Scott Goodyear glued to his tail pipe, but was able to hold him at bay by commanding the racing line. Exiting the final turn, Goodyear had his nose under Unser's rear wing, and just before the line, dropped to the inside to pull alongside Unser's car. It wasn't enough though, and Goodyear missed out on the win by 0.043 of a second.

Everyone has their own best racing duel, but for my money it was the 1960 battle between Roger Ward and Jim Rathmann. For over half the race these two were the only ones in it and were never separated by more than a few car lengths.

In those days there weren't many cautions to allow cars to bunch up, or fuel stops. They exchanged the lead 14 times and passed an additional eight times over the last 40 laps. Heading into the last few laps, Rathmann was wondering how he was going to stay in front.

Ward, on the other hand, knew his race was run as the cords appeared on his front tyres. He lifted off, allowing Rathmann, who had finished second three times, to take the win by 12 seconds.

6 The most Indy 500 wins

Wining a one-off race is much harder than winning a series: Anyone who has won both the IndyCar Series and an Indianapolis 500 will tell you the 500 is harder. Make a mistake in a one-off race and it's all over. In a series, there is a good chance one bad race will not damage a title chase too much.

No one has managed to win three in a row and only five drivers have defended their title. The most races anyone has won is four - A.J. Foyt (1961-64-67-77), Al Unser (1970-71-78-87) and Rick Myers (1979-84-88-91). Of the current drivers, Helio Castroneves is probably the best bet to win more than four races as he won back-to-back in 2001 and 2002 and is a leading favourite to win this weekend.

7 It pays to be lucky

Two-time winner Helio Castroneves must be thanking his lucky stars he's been able to get a bit of race time under his belt before the start of this year's Indy 500.

He was lucky to not be jailed for keeping a big part of his earnings out of Uncle Sam's grasp. He, his sister and his lawyer were all before the judge accused of using Dutch and Panamanian companies to hide assets. Castroneves could have been jailed for six years, and then chucked out of the country.

But winners keep on winning and the Indy 500 champion (and American Dancing With the Stars winner) was cleared of six counts of federal tax evasion after a six-week trial back in April. A seventh conspiracy charge had the jury split down the middle, leaving the judge no option but to rule a mistrial - lucky Helio.

It didn't take him long to get back into the groove of things and, heading to the Motor Speedway, Castroneves lies 10th in the IRL championship after contesting only two races out of four, and has plonked his car on pole for the big race.

8 Oddball facts

Frenchman Jules Goux drank four bottles of Champagne on his way to winning the Indy 500 in 1913 at his first attempt.

Less than a metre of bricks remain, on the start-finish line, of the 3.2 million originally used to cover the track. Each time the circuit is resurfaced, a new 90cm row of the original bricks is inlaid again.

For more than 30 years, the winner's wreath has featured 33 ivory-coloured orchids with burgundy tips with 33 miniature chequered flags intertwined with red, white and blue ribbons.

The American Automobile Association determined the safe distance between each car around any track should be 121 metres, thus determining the number of cars allowed to start.

Ray Harroun's share of a total purse of $47,777 was $23,677 as a winner in 1911, while Scott Dixon walked away with $4.9 million from a total purse of $23.9 million last year.

9 Dixon and Franchitti set a record

Scott Dixon and his new teammate Dario Franchitti have set a new IndyCar record. Both have won an IRL title and an Indy 500 in the same year, over back-to-back years (2008 and 2007 respectively) and are driving for the same outfit.

It's the first time in history such a combination has been part of one team in a major racing event, including the Monaco Grand Prix and the Daytona 500.

Franchitti left IndyCar last year to try his hand at Nascar, a failed effort after the wheels fell off halfway through the season. He's now back in open wheelers, and so far this season has carried on as if he'd never left, lying third in the championship after four rounds.

Despite an inauspicious start when the pair first met on a race track (Franchitti bumped wheels with Dixon when he first arrived in the main game after winning the Indy Lights series) the two have become firm friends.

10 The foreign invasion

In the beginning, American drivers made up the majority of the Indy 500 grid with just a smattering of foreign drivers adding a bit of spice to the mix. From the 1920s until the 1980s it was mainly the Americans' race. It took the Brazilian Emerson Fittipaldi in 1989 to crack open the door. Since then only seven Americans have won the race. This year, it will be just as hard for the hosts, as there are only 11 Yanks. The full list:

Yanks (11): John Andretti, Marco Andretti, Ed Carpenter, Sarah Fisher, A.J. Foyt IV, Davey Hamilton, Graham Rahal, Ryan Hunter-Reay, Danica Patrick, Townsend Bell and Scott Sharp.

The rest (22): Scott Dixon (New Zealand), Ryan Briscoe and Will Power (Australia), Helio Castroneves, Raphael Matos, Vitor Meira, Mario Moraes and Tony Kanaan (Brazil), Paul Tracy and Alex Tagliani (Canada), Mike Conway, Alex Lloyd, Dan Wheldon, Justin Wilson (England), Nelson Philippe (France), Hideki Mutoh (Japan), Robert Doornbos (Netherlands), Dario Franchitti (Scotland), Tomas Scheckter (South Africa), Oriol Servia (Spain), E. J. Viso and Milka Duno (Venezuela).