Things are looking up for Indy 500

It is springtime for Tony George. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway owner turns 50 later this year but looks younger. He works out daily, sometimes running up and down the Speedway's grandstands football player-style. He has his hair.

These days when George moves through the Speedway, fans point reverently. Even the market forces align in George's favor: Scalpers are back to getting twice face value for choice Indianapolis 500 tickets.

Says his friend Jim Irsay, who was in his 30s when he took over his family's Indianapolis Colts, the same age George was when he took over his family's racetrack: "Tony's drifting into middle age with grace, which is good, because a lot of people get torn up out there."

George, who is famously guarded (he declined to be interviewed for this story), did get torn up out there. He has survived a tremendous pounding. Shortly after he formed the breakaway Indy Racing League in 1994, fans booed him — booed the man at his own track. Many saw him as the man who wrecked Memorial Day weekend.

The legendary racer Mario Andretti, whose pit cred is unrivaled, joined them at the barricades, raging against George's decision to form the IRL.

"Do I agree with it?" Andretti said in 1996. "Never. I can't support anything they're doing." Today, with open-wheel racers once again unified, Andretti describes himself as "Tony George's biggest fan."

Through the worst of it, George seemed to never come unglued, his facial expression rarely anything but serene. Or blank — it depended on your take. George inherited the Speedway, after all; he didn't work his way to the top. His public speaking style, though improved, is wooden, monotonous. Those who know him well say he's bright, just not spontaneous. "He's very different from his public perception," says Kent Baker, an Indianapolis businessman who has fielded race teams in the past. "Tony always engages his brain before his mouth," Baker says, "something few of us can say."

Says Paul Gentilozzi, one of the principals of the drain-circling Champ Car World Series, the IRL's rival series that bent to George's will earlier this year: "He doesn't shoot from the hip. He doesn't amplify a lot. So people jump to assumptions he doesn't understand the subject."

George is often compared to his similarly reserved grandfather, the late Anton J. "Tony" Hulman, the wealthy, Yale-educated Terre Haute businessman who bought the IMS in 1945. Hulman was president of Terre Haute-based Hulman & Co., best known for its top-selling Clabber Girl baking powder. The Indianapolis Star