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Checked against the Speedway's driver record
No starter — and one who nearly was: The Indianapolis 500's driver record, checked for Fort Wayne, gives the city a thin and honest line: no driver born in Fort Wayne has started the 500 in the record this history could reach. The nearest approach is a full one. Steve Ball was born in Fort Wayne on June 20, 1950; he began in midgets at twenty-one in 1971, moved to sprint cars in the mid-1970s, finished a close second to Bob Frey in the 1981 Copper Classic, and then beat Frey to win that year's ICAR pavement sprint-car championship. The championship bought him his chance at Indianapolis: Ball took part in rookie orientation for the 1981 Indianapolis 500, but the program collapsed when his sponsor was arrested on income-tax violations, and he never made a start. The Fort Wayne name most bound up with the 500's own world belongs instead to a neighbor: Gene Hartley, of Roanoke in Huntington County, fifteen miles southwest, who won the first USAC race ever run, at the Coliseum in 1956, and the 1959 USAC midget race at the Fort Wayne Speedway — his record lives in the Coliseum and Speedway entries, and his hometown is printed as Roanoke, not Fort Wayne, because it was.
Sources:
- OldRacingCars.com, "Steve Ball" — born June 20, 1950, Fort Wayne, Indiana; midgets from 1971; the 1981 Copper Classic and ICAR championship against Bob Frey; rookie orientation at Indianapolis in 1981 and the sponsor's arrest; Indy 500s: 0.
- USAC, 1959 USAC National Midget Season review — Gene Hartley of Roanoke, Indiana.