Robot Viking

All the speed and grace and charts of Indy racing.

As I sat back this Memorial Day weekend sipping iced tea and enjoying my favorite sporting event (the Indy 500), I reflected on happy childhoods and the sacrifices made by military veterans that make such things possible. That line of thought (plus watching cars hurtle around Indianapolis Speedway at 220 mph) lead me to recall this game, a true classic and one of my all time favorites: USAC Auto Racing.

To be perfectly honest, I’m certain there are better auto racing games out there. In fact, I’ve played a few of them. But Auto Racing will always have a special place in my heart because of all the great memories it brings back. It came out in 1979, and was officially endorsed by the United States Auto Club, the sanctioning body for the Indy 500 at the time. It includes stat cards for all the top drivers of that era, which must have been a licensing nightmare since USAC was in the midst of splitting from CART at right about the same time.

Here’s how the game works: there are 33 cars, each with its own driver card. The cards have three columns for different driving styles. For each driver’s move, he can choose to drive normally, charge or back off. A roll of 2d6 on the appropriate column gives the resulting number of spaces moved. If you charge, you’ll move more spaces on average, but the charge column also includes an increased chance of crashing. To run a race with all 33 drivers takes hours upon hours -  you can even run qualifying laps to determine starting position. So many cars crash or drop out with mechanical problems that sometimes the winner is simply the last one still running.

When I got this game, it was a few years old, and many of the included drivers were retired (or, sadly, dead). I wanted to race with my own Indy heroes, so this game became the first I ever created a mod for. I wrote out an entire new set of 33 drivers on index cards, each one depicting Indy drivers from the late 1980s. I wasn’t content to just copy over the old cards and change the names. No. I made all new racing charts for every driver. Of course, back then I didn’t really grasp 2d6 probabilities or game balance concepts, so the charts I made were pretty broken, and my favorite drivers tended to go a lot faster than the others. But wow did I ever have fun. Since this game plays perfectly fine solitaire (a common theme among the games of my youth), I ran many an Indy 500 simulation.

The molded plastic cars came unpainted, as pictured, but I (and pretty much everyone else who ever owned this game) almost immediately painted them in individual colors. I didn’t match colors to real drivers – with no Internet back then, it would have taken forever to track down contemporary photos of all the drivers. I was perfectly happy with my own paint schemes. To this day I assume that in 1989 Buddy Lazier drove a green car with a bright red stripe. I don’t think I really even knew who Buddy Lazier was back then, but I figured he had to be awesome because his name sounded an awful lot like LASER!

Maybe I should make a new set of cards. Kanaan, Castroneves, Patrick, Wheldon. Well, there goes another weekend.

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