Long before Johnny Rutherford had any of his three Indianapolis 500 victories, he had to learn how to manage the crowd, visually speaking.

During his first shot at the 500 in 1963, the effect that the mass of fans had on him on race day came as a shock.

"I had practiced there on an empty racetrack -- the only time it had any type of a crowd at all was on qualifying day, and I didn't qualify on the first day, so I wasn't out on the track looking," Rutherford recalled in May 2004.

He qualified on the third day, when "the crowd wasn't as big."

"But on race day, when you get out there and you strap into the car and you come around on that first parade lap, you see the color and the crowd, and the racetrack looked like it was 50 feet narrower because you have all the sea of color right down to it," he said. "Things that you use (as) reference points disappear because the fans are there, covering it up."

Rutherford, who won the race in 1974, 1976 and 1980, said the crowd was one of the things he used to talk about in pre-race meetings with Indianapolis 500 rookies.

"That was the one I always thought to tell them: 'When you go out there today, the racetrack is not even going to look like the same place because it is full of people,' " he said.

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