There are dozens of dirt roads snaking through the northwest corner of Whitman County and none of them lead to Indianapolis. Tom Sneva got there anyhow.

Once upon a time, in the numbing chill of still-dark December mornings, he used to crank a yellow bus to reluctant life and ferry the farm sons and daughters of tiny Lamont, Washington, to school -- a natural enough thing. Tom Sneva was a driver after all, his weekends and summers spent kicking up dust on the tracks around Spokane during his college days at Eastern Washington University.

But he wasn't just the bus driver; he was the math teacher, too. Wait -- he was the math department. At Lamont, the schoolhouse had just four rooms and the duties were, well, multiple. He was the junior high principal, and up the road at Sprague High School he was an assistant coach in football and basketball. He was supposed to be the baseball coach, but the turnout wasn't big enough so they made him assistant tennis coach instead -- mostly because he could drive the school bus and the nearest courts were in Cheney.

Driver's ed? Of course. Who else was going to teach it but Tom Sneva?

In time, he left education to make a career out of left turns. But no matter how hard he pushed the go pedal, he could never quite outrace his schoolteacher's resume. What was it that Jim Murray wrote? Oh, right. That he was the only race driver who knew that a hypotenuse wasn't an animal.

Murray, the legendary sports writer with the acid typewriter ribbon, didn't always have much good to say about Spokane -- or the Indy 500. But he couldn't help himself when it came to Tom Sneva, who made it okay to use those two subjects in the same sentence.

In 1983, Tom Sneva was in his 10th Indianapolis 500. He had a history of qualifying very fast -- three times he was on the pole -- and coming up agonizingly short, for he was also three times a runner-up. This time, he was on the inside of the second row, with a car he didn't really want to drive until it became apparent a newer model would not be ready. Four days before his 35th birthday, Sneva wasn't at the center of the pre-race buzz the way he had been before.

So he made his own buzz.

He led for 99 of the 200 laps, and took the No. 1 position into the pits on the 170th lap when Mike Mosley's crash brought out the yellow caution flag. Behind Sneva, Al Unser, Sr. ducked in to refuel, too -- but stayed just 11 seconds while Sneva took 32. And when they returned, Unser's son Al, Jr. -- out of contention himself -- decided to throw himself into the mix and blatantly run interference for his dad.

For 16 frustrating laps, Sneva tried to find a way around father and son -- finally sweeping by both of them on the 191st lap.

"My heart couldn't stand much more racing," he said, "so I had to get out in front and go for it."

He did, and in the process lived up to his old nickname as "the Gas Man." He cranked out laps in excess of 196 miles per hour, then survived one last panic attack on the last lap when his fuel light turned bright red.

Tom Sneva had been going for it ever since he was barely out of Lewis and Clark High School, running a C-class jalopy at the Fairgrounds Speedway. He was Spokane auto racing's Rookie of the Year for 1967, but also the most experienced rookie around. His father, Edsol, had been running at area tracks for two decades.

"I wasn't really old enough to remember much about his driving," Sneva said, "except he used to win all the time. One year, the racing association kept getting protests that his car was illegal. When they couldn't find anything wrong, they bought the car out from under him. He built another one in a week and ended up going faster yet."

It became a family tradition. Younger brother Jerry ran at Indy, too, while Jan and Blaine were fixtures at West Coast tracks. Babe Sneva suffered severe head injuries in a crash in a Canadian race in September 1974 and never came out of a coma.

Tragedy almost came in twos. Eight months later, Sneva was in a fiery crash on the 127th lap of his second Indy. Trying to pass Eldon Rasmussen on the inside heading into a turn, Sneva's right rear wheel clipped Rasmussen's left front, flipping the Spokane racer's car upside down and sending it hard into the outside retaining wall. He suffered burns on 15 percent of his body, but was back in the cockpit for the Pocono 500 less than a month later.

"The more I see of the films of the accident, the more I know someone had to be watching out for me," he said.

There would be other crashes, both on the track and off. In 1980, a crackup in practice forced him to start a substitute car from the 33rd position, yet he drove his way to second place -- an achievement almost as remarkable as his 1983 victory. Though his volatile partnership with mechanic George Bignotti resulted in that breakthrough, the two parted company after the '83 season and Sneva never again found the right situation to get him back into the Brickyard's top 10. When his racing career braked to a halt in the early 1990s, he was still the only driver to start first and last at Indy and finish first and last, as well -- once going into the wall on the pace lap.

He was also the first man to top the 200 and 210 mile per hour barriers at Indy, but in time he became a dogged advocate for moderation. His theory was that it really wasn't any "safer" to crack up at 180 miles per hour, but that race-day competition was bound to flourish under limitations on speed -- and money.

"If you're a good basketball player, it doesn't matter what tennis shoe you're wearing," he said. "But if you're not in the right race car, well, Superman died a long time ago."

He didn't win many converts. But he did win the big one in 1983, and it cannot be taken away.

"I'm starting to realize more every year how big that was," he said. "We won national championships, but nobody remembers national champions. They remember Indy winners. It opens doors for the rest of your life."

© New Media Ventures, Inc.