The place is nearly 100 years old, but it's still capable of having an effect on a veteran driver who's been there almost a dozen times before. On a recent trip to Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Dale Earnhardt Jr. picked the brain of open-wheeler Dan Wheldon, and even fantasized about a schedule that would allow the NASCAR star to compete in the Indianapolis 500. Down in the basement of the track's museum, he was awed standing next to a Formula One car for the first time.

"If you're a race car driver, that's kind of like being in the same room with a national swimsuit model or something," Earnhardt said with a laugh.

That's Indy. No, its flat, rectangular 2.5-mile oval doesn't always make for the best racing, but what it lacks in action it more than makes up for in atmosphere. Even the most grizzled of drivers feel that familiar spike of adrenaline as they drive through the tunnel into that impossibly wide and green expanse of an infield, see the sunlight glinting off the emerald glass of the scoring pagoda, flip the ignition switch on a frontstretch lined by grandstands on both sides.

The current or former home to IndyCars, NASCAR stock cars, F1 cars and motorcycles, a place conquered by greats like A.J. Foyt and Jeff Gordon and Michael Schumacher and Valentino Rossi, Indianapolis absolutely seeps with history. No other auto racing venue in America, or perhaps the world, can match it in terms of grandeur and presence.

Which is why it seemed such a perfect fit for NASCAR when it broke with tradition and invited stock cars beginning in 1994. The nation's biggest racing series and the nation's most famous race track were made for one another, and the grumbling of purists was quickly drowned out by the shriek of race fans eager to see their favorites compete.

When nine NASCAR team haulers arrived at the speedway for that first compatibility test in June 1992, thousands of people lined 16th Street as if the pope or a presidential motorcade were passing by -- even though it was late at night, and the test hadn't been formally announced. Ryan Newman, in town with his mother to pick up some Hoosier tires, snuck in to try and meet Gordon. Ticket demand for that first Brickyard 400 could have sold out the 250,000-seat venue twice.

Those were glory days, the times when Brickyard tickets sold faster than White Castles on race morning, the years when NASCAR's Indianapolis event solidified itself as the second-most prominent race on the Cup schedule behind the Daytona 500, and even had some folks asking if it deserved to be No. 1. Contrast that to today, as NASCAR returns to Indianapolis this weekend for a pivotal Allstate 400 at the Brickyard, on the heels of a 2008 tire debacle and in the midst of a recession that's hammered the manufacturing centers of the Midwest. (Continued)