David Letterman isn’t your average racing fan.
The former Late Night talk show host is such a huge IndyCar Series fan that he’s actually the co-owner of Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing, and one of his drivers, Takuma Sato, was the defending Indianapolis 500 champ going into Sunday’s Indy 500.
Letterman’s earliest memory of the race nicknamed “The Greatest Spectacle in Racing” is from 1955 when he’d listen to the race on the radio with his family just miles away from Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the mammoth 2.5-mile track that hosts the race.
But before Sunday’s 105th Indy 500, Letterman shared a hilarious story of the first Indy 500 he attended.
It was 1966, he told NBC Sports, and he and a friend from Ball State, where Letterman went to college, went to the race with what he described as a “homemade beer-carrying melter.”
David @Letterman has always been passionate about motorsports.@RutledgeWood caught up with the late night talk show star, and defending #Indy500 winner co-owner of @RLLRacing. pic.twitter.com/9afzVArlbx
— IndyCar on NBC (@IndyCaronNBC) May 30, 2021
As Letterman tells it:
“I think it was 1966. Jackie Stewart was there, Dan Gurney was there, A.J. Foyt was there, and it truly was a world event. …
“And the other thing, I think it was a buddy of mine from Ball State, we drove down, and we found a old piece of Samsonite luggage. A big, like six-suiter or something, and we put as much beer in it as we could. And as the day heated up, all the ice melted, and we had a waterfall going down. And people beneath us [were like], ‘What? Where is this?’ And of course it was the idiots, the drunks, sitting up there.”
Letterman’s IndyCar team had three drivers in Sunday’s Indy 500: Sato, who started 15th, Graham Rahal, who started 18th, and Santino Ferrucci, who started 23rd.
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