INDIANAPOLIS — It’s been 21 years, 11 months and 15 days since Paul Van Thomme’s Indy 500 dream died. That was the day his father died, the man who had instilled this crazy, intense love of racing in his son.
The two had plotted for decades to one day maybe, just maybe, go to the Indy 500 together. But life got in the way. Time passed. The plotting faded. Paul Joseph Van Thomme got older, and the talk stopped. Then, June 8, 2004, he was gone.
“Then,” Van Thomme says, “the dream was gone.”
The Indy 500 became bittersweet for Van Thomme. He still watched it every year, recorded it and reveled in the race’s spectacular glory sitting in front of a television screen.
But, there was always a twinge of regret that seeped into his soul for what could have been or should have been, if only he’d tried a little harder.
A couple of years ago on a road trip with his daughter, Jenna, to visit a college, they started talking about bucket list kind of stuff. Van Thomme told Jenna how much he wished he had made it to the Indy 500 with his dad.
Five months ago, Christmas Day to be exact, Van Thomme was sitting in a black office chair in red, Snoopy-themed pajamas, holding a gift his children, Jenna and Billie, had gotten him, a book filled with front page IndyStar stories on every one of the 109 Indy 500 winners.
Van Thomme thought the book was the gift. And he loved it so much. “We’re going to get tickets soon,” he said to his family, with tears in his eyes.
“We have them,” Jenna said. Then Van Thomme read the book’s dedication.
We know you always wanted to go to the Indy 500 with your dad, but we want to go with ours.
It may have been Christmas, but Van Thomme’s mouth couldn’t help itself. “Are you f—– kidding me?” “Holy s—.”
“We’re going to the Indy 500,” Billie said.
Van Thomme burst into tears, looked up and said, “Dad. I’m going, dad.” Then he leaned over, put his face in his hands and said, “Thank you.”
Jenna recorded her dad’s reaction, crying the whole time, right along with Billie and their mother, Beth. Then, she posted the video. And, it went viral.
The video got nearly 500,000 views, was picked up by USA Today, was posted by IndyCar and James Hinchcliffe reached out to set up a garage tour for the family. Firestone did, too.
Everything the internet loves in a video was mixed into one — endearing (Van Thomme at age 67 in Snoopy pajamas), tears, disbelief, cursing, joy, a lost parent never forgotten, regrets and second chances.
Within two hours, the messages were pouring in from friends they hadn’t talked to in years, from co-workers who knew nothing about IndyCar and from strangers all over the world.
And that is how it all started, how Van Thomme, who had never been to an Indy 500, became known around Indianapolis Motor Speedway this weekend as the “IndyCar dad.”
‘Stuff got in the way. Life got in the way’
Actually, that’s not how it all started. It started in 1959 when Van Thomme was born to his parents, Paul and Joan, on Long Island in West Islip, New York. His dad, a mail carrier by day, was a lover of racing.
He had gone to the Indy 500 in 1952 and 1957, before Van Thomme was born. He never made it back.
But his dad was always taking Van Thomme to local tracks. They’d go to Trenton Speedway in New Jersey to see the Indy cars and Langhorne Speedway in Pennsylvania. It didn’t matter what kind of racing — stock cars, sprints, midgets — they just wanted to watch cars go fast.
Before the Indy 500 was on television, they listened to it on the radio, the legendary voice of Sid Collins. The more of a taste of racing Van Thomme got, the more he couldn’t get enough of it.
His favorite driver growing up was A.J. Foyt, because that was his dad’s favorite. Then Mario Andretti came onto the scene. Then Van Thomme started following Al Unser, Jr., and Michael Andretti. “They both were hard chargers,” he says.
One summer, when Van Thomme was a teen, they went camping in upstate New York. His dad turned to him and said, “Let’s take a trip. Let’s go find Pocono Raceway.”
The 2.5-mile oval in Blakeslee, Pennsylvania, had just opened a few years earlier in 1969. When they arrived, on a weekday, they couldn’t get inside, so they just drove around the outside then walked up the grass and looked into the track.
Years later, in 1982, they started going to Pocono for its annual 500-mile CART Indy-style series. They did that until 1989, always talking about making it to Indy one day.
Then Van Thomme’s career started up, working night shifts in aviation.
“Stuff got in the way, you know, life gets in the way,” Van Thomme says. “And then we just, we never really decided, ‘It’s going to be this year. We are going.'”
After that college road trip two years ago, after hearing how much Indy meant to her dad, after hearing how it sat at the very top of his bucket list, Jenna went to her mom.
“And I was like, ‘I want to send dad to Indy. I don’t know when. I don’t know how we’re going to do it,'” Jenna says. “But I want to surprise him.”
Unbeknownst to Jenna, Billie had also approached their mom separately. “Hey, can we surprise dad with Indy this year for Christmas?”
They bought the tickets in October. At the family Thanksgiving, “we were all giggling to each other, like, ‘He doesn’t even know,'” Jenna says. She started posting photos to Snapchat of her dad doing random things with the caption: “He’s going to the Indy 500, but he doesn’t know it.”
Keeping the secret from their dad those five months was tough. Jenna would sit in her room away at college and play different scenarios over in her head of how she thought her dad would react, and she would cry tears of happiness imagining it all.
Van Thomme most certainly didn’t disappoint Jenna — or the world — with his reaction to his Indy 500 ticket Christmas gift.
“I had no clue. I had no clue. I really didn’t,” he says. “I was blown away. I can still get choked up about it.”
Jenna and Billie had pulled off the surprise. Now, Van Thomme had five months to wait.
He got a fairy tale ending to his first Indy 500
“I’m going to be such a basket case when I walk through the gates,” Van Thomme told IndyStar in April. “I’m just, every day, it’s like I’m getting more amped up.”
Van Thomme and his kids left Thursday at 3 a.m. and made the 14-hour drive from Long Island to Indy, which felt like forever to Van Thomme. He just wanted to get there.
Inside IMS for the first time Friday morning, as Van Thomme walked up in the stands overlooking the track, he was in awe. The place is so massive. Nothing, but seeing it in person, could do IMS justice, he said.
Van Thomme reached down to touch the lanyard hanging around his neck, which held a custom ticket made by a friend with a photo of his mom and dad at their wedding.
“Carry it with you, so they are with you,” his friend told him, “so you’ll have your dad with you at the race.”
Jenna was getting her hair done Wednesday when her dad texted her a photo of the ticket. She started crying in the chair. There were a lot of tears this weekend.
When taps played before the start of the race Sunday, “it hit me,” says Van Thomme, whose dad served in the Navy. “It always does, even when I watch it at home.”
His dad was in a nursing home in 2004 when he had a stroke. “When we got the word, within 48 hours, he was going to be gone,” Van Thomme says. “It was tough. It was real tough.”
Jenna never got to meet her grandfather, and Billie doesn’t remember meeting him. Van Thomme brought Billie, just a month and a half old, to see his dad hours before he died. Van Thomme told him to reach up and touch Billie’s foot.
He did.
Van Thomme’s dad was with him everywhere he went this weekend. So many little reminders and waves of nostalgia leading back to their trips to those racetracks all those years ago, the countless talks they had about drivers and speed, all the things his dad taught him about cars.
The Van Thommes were given the royal treatment at IMS, starting Friday with a private tour of the Firestone garage, which provides nearly 5,000, artisan-made tires for the Indy 500.
“It’s the TikTok dad,” a woman with Firestone said to Van Thomme. That’s another one of the nicknames Van Thomme has earned around the track. Sometimes, “IndyCar dad” is shortened simply to “Indy dad,” too.
On Saturday, Meyer Shank Racing gave Van Thomme, Jenna and Billie a tour of their garages, courtesy of Hinchcliffe, where they got to see the cars close up, including the one driven by Sunday’s Indy 500 winner Felix Rosenqvist.
They also got to meet Billie’s favorite driver, Will Power, and Helio Castroneves. And Rosenqvist.
Yes. Van Thomme got to meet the driver who won the Indy 500 at his first Indy 500.
“It’s been really good, more than I expected, a lot more,” Van Thomme said Sunday as cars whizzed around the track. “The whole atmosphere is just amazing.”
But the finish. That finish to his first Indy 500 was a fairy tale ending Van Thomme never could have expected in this whole “IndyCar dad” journey, in his decades of wanting to make it here.
As he sat in stand J, section 8, row L, Van Thomme watched the closest finish in the history of the Indy 500 — Rosenqvist winning in a one-lap shootout, just 0.023 seconds ahead of David Malukas.
Of course, Van Thomme was rooting for Rosenqvist. He had just met him the day before.
Follow IndyStar sports reporter Dana Benbow on X: @DanaBenbow. Reach her via email: dbenbow@indystar.com.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Viral ‘IndyCar dad’ goes to his first Indy 500, meets Felix Rosenqvist, then he wins
Reporting by Dana Hunsinger Benbow, Indianapolis Star / Indianapolis Star
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
