Helio Castroneves won the Indy 500 this year and joined an exclusive group in the process.

What exclusive group? It was his fourth time winning the Memorial Weekend race. There have been only three other four-time winners, A.J. Foyt, Al Unser Sr., and Rick Mears.

I’m not a huge fan of motorsports, but I usually take note of who wins the Indy 500 race. When I was a young whippersnapper, the Indy 500 was THE race. NASCAR hadn’t reached its current level of popularity back in those days. Even though the events in Indianapolis sometimes take a backseat these days to those NASCAR happenings in Charlotte or Daytona, I still pay attention.

My list of sporting events I’ve attended in person only includes a smattering of motorsports. When I was in high school, a group of friends and I sometimes would take the 30-mile jaunt over to Belleville, Kan., the site of midget car races. The races there were highly entertaining, if you didn’t mind dodging the clods of mud the midget cars would throw into the stands as they were making their way around the track. For the life of me, I can’t remember the name of the driver we all were excited about. He won just about every time we saw him in Belleville. I wish I could remember because he went on to be a well-known driver in the Indianapolis 500.

The Belleville races weren’t my first introduction to motorsports. I have referred to Sport Magazine quite often in this space. One magazine that came to my house had a story about Bill Vukovich, who to this day is described by some pundits as having been the greatest Indy Car driver in history. Vukovich won two Indy 500s in a row, in 1953 and 1954. I remember the circumstances surrounding the 1955 race quite well. My mother had had surgery at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and someone in the lounge area of the rooming house where my Dad and I were staying had the race on the radio. The announcers were saying that Bill V, as some called him, was the likely winner of his third consecutive 500. I wasn’t listening to the race very closely as I was only marginally interested. But all of a sudden there was a lot of commotion both on the radio and in the room. As I listened more closely I learned that Bill Vukovich had been in an accident and the announcers were saying that it didn’t look very good for him. Eventually it was announced that he had been killed. He had been leading in the race when the accident happened.

Reading a recount of the event, I see that he was leading by 17 seconds on the 57th lap when the chain-reaction accident took place. Eventually Vukovich’s car was forced over the outside wall and cartwheeled through the air until it landed on a group of parked cars and then came to rest upside down, bursting into flames. Vukovich was killed instantly.

His son Bill II, and grandson, Bill III, both were Indy Car racers, and sadly, Bill III was also killed during his racing career. The youngest Vukovich died in a practice session mishap at Mesa Marin Raceway in Bakersfield, Calif. in 1990 at the age of 27.

I’ve heard some who are knowledgeable about motorsports opine that had the eldest Vukovich lived, he may have won at least four Indy 500s.

When Castroneves won this year’s Indy 500, he picked up his fourth win 12 years after his third win in 2009. At age 46 he is one of the oldest drivers to win the event. From Brazil, he also won in 2001 and 2002.

I wasn’t very familiar with Castroneves, but did know more about the three other four-time winners.

The first to accomplish the feat was A. J. Foyt, who won first in 1961 and then in 1964, 1967 and 1977. Foyt was not only an Indy Car driver, but he had a very successful stint driving in NASCAR. In fact, he is the only driver to have won the Indianapolis 500, the Daytona 500, the 24 Hours of Daytona, the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the 12 Hours of Sebring.

He would have raced at the Belleville track where my friends and I took in a few Midget Car races as he began with the Midgets and Belleville was a major venue for such racing. He graduated to bigger cars after the 1957 season, which means that we didn’t see him. It would have been 1959 and 1960 when we were in attendance.

I remember that Foyt and Parnelli Jones had quite a competition going back in the 1960s. Jones was the winner of the 1963 Indy race and came close a number of other times. Like Foyt, he was a versatile driver, racing stock cars and midget cars as well. He too would have raced at Belleville sometime in his career.

Al Unser came from a talented racing family as his brother Bobby also was quite accomplished as a driver. Al won the Indy 500 in 1970, 1971, 1978 and 1987. His first two wins came while he was driving for Parnelli Jones, by the way. The Unser family has won Indy nine times as Bobby won in 1968, 1975 and 1981 and Al’s son Al Jr. won in 1992 and 1994.

Before Castroneves, the last person to win four times was Rick Mears. Mears won the event in 1979, 1984, 1988 and 1991. Mears, along with Bobby Unser, are the only two drivers to have won in three different decades. Mears also holds the mark of the most times holding the pole position for the race (6). He and I have one thing in common at least, we are both native Kansans. Mears was born in Wichita, but was reared mostly in California.

I remember from my days attending races at Belleville, there was a lot of discussion about the Offenhauser engine. I am normally illiterate when it comes to anything mechanical, but I do remember some of my more knowledgeable friends discussing the “Offy” engines. Looking it up, the Offy was the dominant engine for midget cars and open wheel cars like the ones raced at Indy for many years. The dominance began about 1934 and was going ‘full throttle’ in the 1950s and 1960s. Offy cars have won the 500 27 times. Offenhauser was very prominent in the World War II effort, putting a lot of work in developing and manufacturing war plane engines. The dominance started to wane in 1964 when Ford came on the scene. Offy was still competitive, but didn’t win as often as it once had. It continued to compete well through the mid-1970s even with the event of turbocharging found in other engines. The Offy’s final victory came in Trenton in 1978 in Gordon Johncock’s Wildcat car. The last Offy-powered car raced was at Pocono in 1982.

I also wondered--Are they still racing at Belleville? The answer is a hearty “Yes.” The Belleville High Banks Track bills itself as the World’s Fastest Half-Mile Track and has a full summer of midget racing scheduled for 2021.The Sprint Car Nationals are set in August. On the site is a midget car racing museum. I remember it was fun watching races at Belleville. Dodging the clay clods thrown up on occasion into the stands was part of the fun.