Rick Mears' classic Indy 500 win

It is never a hardship to look upon Chris Mears, and on Sunday afternoon her unaffected joy was contagious, as well as refreshing. In Formula 1 the Marlboro motorhome is considered something of an inner temple, but the one at Indianapolis became an instant party.

Rick had not yet arrived. He was engaged elsewhere with his winner's press conference. You get conditioned over time to expect these affairs to take the form of a catalogue of woes, of misfortunes somehow overcome, of the stress of it all. You do not expect much in the way of levity, for quite often they feature people who will not so much as look at one another, let alone offer congratulations. Everyone recalls Suzuka for the Senna-Prost accident, but noteworthy, too, was the laughter at the conference, after Piquet and Moreno - genuine friends - had finished one-two for Benetton.

Mears played down his role in the victory on Sunday. No, the car hadn't been perfect, but, then, no race car ever was. In the changing conditions he had played with the roll bars, constantly trying to balance the Penske to his taste, and in the late laps he had it just so.

Most of all, though, he had to take his hat off to the team, he said, for preparing the back-up car to such a high standard, for he had wrecked the intended race car in practice. He didn't say that the accident - a huge one - had been no responsibility of his, or that, following a check-up at the track hospital, he had gone out in the spare Penske and run a lap at 227mph.

Mears is a thoroughgoing pro, one of that breed of Americans which regards driving race cars as a career, in the fullest sense. Into his 14th season with Penske, he will never be rich, in the Formula 1 sense of the word, but I'll warrant he is a contented fellow. No one has ever heard Rick Mears whinge, because life doesn't hang necessarily on victory today. There is always next week, next year.

I watched from a grandstand, something I haven't done for 10 years, since my last visit to Indianapolis, in fact. At ground level you do not truly appreciate this place.

The folk in front of me got very wound up during the last few laps. Well, fans do. But for these people the involvement was rather more personal, for they included Mears' parents, and also his two sons. Bill, his father, had a scanner tuned into Penske's frequency, and kept us right up with the game: "Rick's telling them he's got too much of a push at the moment, and he wants a change on the wing at the next stop..."

I thought them astonishingly sanguine, I must say, for people watching their son lapping often wayward backmarkers at well the wrong side of 200mph. On one occasion, as Rick went by Scott Pruett in Turn 2, the two cars appeared momentarily to touch. The incident was past and gone in a blink, but still it made you wince, and for a few seconds there was no response from the Mears gang, until his mother broke the silence. "That was close," she murmured. Clearly a lady who has seen a lot of motor racing.

It was typical of Mears that he should later volunteer responsibility for this near disaster. "I must go and speak to Scotty," he said, "because he reacted so quickly. I'd gone under him in the turn, and my car just lost all its front downforce. I couldn't do anything about it - I was going to run into him. And he realised instantly what was happening with me, moved up out of the groove, and gave me the space I needed. I have to find him to say thanks..."

The last few laps were unforgettable, as Rick chased down Michael Andretti. "Michael needs a splash-and-dash!" said Bill Mears excitedly, as he listened to his scanner. "And Rick can go the distance on what he has..." But that solution evaporated when Danny Sullivan blew up, which meant a yellow. Andretti was topped up within 10 seconds, and rejoined to sit right behind the Penske in the queue. When they got the green, he passed Mears on the outside at Turn 1.

The family was quiet now, as if resigned. There had been something awfully final about Michael's assertiveness in the late stages of a race he had largely dominated. But next time around the boys whooped as their father pulled the same manoeuvre, then began to draw clear. When he took the flag, their joy was unconfined.

We felt drained as we walked back to the paddock, and not only because we had risen at four to miss the traffic. There had been an emotional intensity about the afternoon, because there had been so much pure motor racing to watch.

There are those in Formula 1 who get very huffy when you talk about yellow flags. Contrived, they scoff, all right for showbiz, but out of place in pure motor racing.

"I don't mind yellows," Mears said. "Sometimes you lose by them, and sometimes you gain, but over a season I'd say it balances out for all of us. And I think it's great for the spectators..."

What we had on Sunday afternoon was a war comprising several very different campaigns and battles, several races within a race, in fact. Mears averaged more than 176mph for the 200 laps, yet still the thing lasted nearly three hours. It seemed half as long as most recent Grands Prix. You were there, Jean-Marie. I hope you learned some lessons from this, another Sunday, another race.