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My guess is that a few years of this left a bitter taste in the mouths of the city officials, most particularly the local cops. Because in 1988, the racetrack got a payback of sorts. The Long Goodbye, a record of sorts for me.

I'm guessing a little here because, after all, 1988 was 15 years ago and I'm not totally sharp on all the little details. But anyway, the race wrapped up late Sunday evening and if you've ever been to SIR, you know that for the spectators the main gate is a single six-lane (I think) road in and out the front gate and onto the highway that leads back into Seattle from Kent.

I was assigned to cover the race and my roommate that weekend was Todd Veney. After cruising the pits and socializing for an hour or two, we decided to hell with it, let's go back into town and eat and drink. No big deal, except for one unseen tripwire.

The main parking lot was in the trees that paralleled the aforementioned road out of the joint, and when we got to our car, traffic out was at a standstill. Standstill as in no movement at all. It was at about 8 p.m. when we got in the car, and we noticed that cars are just stopped, like camped out in a national forest. People strapped to a tree with roots 'cuz they ain't goin' nowhere to misquote Bob Dylan.

Veney and I are of similar temperament in a situation like this. After enduring 3-5 stationary minutes, one of us observed casually, "What the f*** is with this s**t?" And on and on, we stalled. Nothing for at least a half an hour to 45 minutes. Not an inch of movement. Finally, and in the only time I can remember doing this, we agreed to screw it. Abandon the car, we'll go back to the pressroom, the pits, any place other than this sinkhole. No one around us seemed to mind, so we went to the press room, read the race notes, had a beer or two, leftover press biscuits, anything that would kill time.

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Occasionally one of us would go outside the press trailer and see if anything had moved. For the most part, no.

I can't remember for sure, but I'm guessing that it was three hours before we finally went back to the car. There was movement in the pines. We crawled into the line out and sometime around 11:30 to midnight, got back to the hotel.

Why did this happen? Were the Seattle cops out of No-Doz? What was the deal? Officially, the word was that there had been a nasty wreck near the main gate, bodies all over the place, and that the cops were letting people out of the park ... ONE CAR AT A TIME. One car at a time for roughly 10,000 people or thereabouts. It turned out later that there had been a wreck, but it had been cleaned up before the race ended and that the cops, probably still mindful of the golden Doner/Evans experiences, decided to show these race pricks that cops have long memories.

Was that true? Could be. There are plenty of Andy Sipowiczs and Lenny Briscoes behind the badges of this world and they were more than capable of creating a long goodbye like that one.