The photos always look like a good time. There they are, on the beach with their surfboards. There they are, scooters lined up in formation. There they are, laughing on some hotel balcony overlooking something awesome somewhere, anywhere. The four racers in the pictures are young and perpetually happy, trophies on their mantels and trophy girls on their arm.
But with each passing year, those photos look increasingly dated. They are cursed with that telltale grainy, pre-digital softness. And the drivers in them, the three still with us, now come with the crow's feet and smile lines that today's HD world no longer allows people to mask.
"We are always smiling in those pictures," Tony Kanaan recalled, breaking out into a smile himself. "Those boys look really happy because we were really happy."
The boys in the photos are Kanaan, Dario Franchitti, Max Papis and Greg Moore. The photos were taken in the late 1990s, when they were the christened future rulers of the American open-wheel racing world. As that world was ripped in half by the squabbling of much older billionaires, the four 20-something wheelmen stayed focused on poles instead of politics. They rarely lost a race and never lost a party.
They were known as the Brat Pack. Fast, both on and off the track -- they warranted those photo shoots. Magazines did spreads. The New York Times even did a profile of the four, all the way down to a description of Papis, passed out on the front lawn of his Wisconsin hotel the morning after Franchitti's first career victory at Elkhart Lake the evening before.
But now, on the eve of the 99th running of the Indianapolis 500, the Pack has been reduced to a party of one. Kanaan, at 40, will be the only one of the four in Sunday's race, seeking his second 500 win in three years from a starting spot on the inside of Row 2.
"Yeah, I'm kind of it, aren't I?" the father of two said. "When we started 16, 17 years ago, it was Michael Andretti and Al Unser Jr., Bobby Rahal, all these names that, if I had finished a race ahead of them I would have just bragged to everybody, 'Hey, do you know who I beat today?' I look around today and that generation is gone."
Now, the Brat Pack is that older generation. They are the legends that the kids want to topple, youngsters who include the sons of Andretti and Rahal.
Kanaan is the last official representative of that generation; thus, he is the target.
"I look around and the young guys, they are coming after me. I like it. It keeps me feeling young," he said.
Like the man they call "TK," his friend Franchitti is also on the payroll at Chip Ganassi Racing. But the Scotsman is no longer behind the wheel of a race car. He turned 42 on Tuesday and now works as an adviser to Ganassi's current crop of up-and-coming drivers. The three-time Indy 500 champion and four-time IndyCar Series champion was forced out of the cockpit by a horrible crash in the 2013 Grand Prix of Houston. That same year he divorced actress Ashley Judd after an 11-year marriage.
Papis, now 45 and a father of two, runs occasionally in sports cars, but is primarily a driving coach. He spent Franchitti's birthday at the tiny Millbridge Speedway in Salisbury, North Carolina, his unmistakably Italian profile easy to spot among the family members-turned-crew members watching their youngsters slide Mini Outlaw karts around the red clay oval.
One by one, from 1996 through '98, the Pack made their debuts in the series known as CART, or Champ Car. The four combined to earn 16 wins, 21 pole positions and 66 podium finishes in six seasons.
Their timing, however, was both fortuitous and awful.
On one hand, they arrived when the CART life was every bit as cool as Formula One while still managing to be more human. It was a jet-setting bunch, racing from Australia to Japan to a bevy of road and street courses throughout North America.
They stayed in five-star resorts and dined on chef-prepared foods in sprawling team hospitality areas. Their turbocharged cars were sleek. Their owners were rich. Their weekend kickoff parties were epic.
But they also had showed up just as the American open-wheel community was violently pulling itself apart from the inside. A long-simmering power struggle between the keepers of the series -- CART -- and the keepers of its biggest race -- Indianapolis -- had resulted in a not-so-civil war and two separate sanctioning bodies. Champ Car walked away from Indy.
The speedway belonged to the newly formed Indy Racing League, but the money was with CART. So that's where the Brat Pack ended up.
Moore was widely believed to be the fastest-rising of the four. The Canadian won the Indy Lights title in 1995, won five times in his four CART seasons, and was on his way to drive for Penske Racing. But Moore was killed in a frighteningly fast crash at California Speedway in the 1999 season finale. He was 24.
The Brat Pack party didn't end that day. But it certainly turned down the volume.
Without the stage of Indianapolis, none of the four became household names. When the two sides finally made up and the Brats finally hit the Brickyard after more than a half-decade away, the damage had been done.
Moore never made an Indy 500 start. Papis made two, finishing 23rd in 2002 and 14th four years later. Franchitti's and Kanaan's Indianapolis victories created great drama and even greater emotion, but all of it unfolded in front of what were far from the greatest of Indianapolis speedway crowds.
So we still wonder now, as we did then, what might have been had they been given the same Indy spotlight as those who came before them. And what might Indy be like now had it been able to ride their infectious wave of energy?
There was certainly just as much to love about the Brat Pack as there had been about their predecessors, the titanic names of the '60s, '70s and '80s that are still so well known today. But only the most hard-core motorsports fan knew -- know -- much about the Pack.
"Honestly, it surprised me a little when you asked about it," Papis admitted at Millbridge on Tuesday night. "No one really talks about it much anymore."
However, they have never wasted much energy kicking around could'ves and might'ves. These days the trio is too busy raising families, holding down jobs and being grown-ups. Back then, they were too busy partying to the next race and racing to the next party.
"But you know what? It worked because when it was time to go to work, that's what we did," Franchitti said earlier this month. "We were best of friends off the track, but when the green flag was shown, we could all flip that switch.
"They became the opposition. If you put us out onto some track right now, on bicycles or whatever, it would still be that way. And when we get together, there is still plenty of fun."
Just this week, Franchitti and Kanaan tricked their young Ganassi Racing coworker, 20-year-old Sage Karam. His Camaro had suffered a ding. TK said he had a great shop that could fix it up, so Karam handed over the keys. When the car was returned, it was wrapped entirely in pink.
Classic Brat Pack.
There are a few others from that era who are still around. Like their 40-something friends, they also know -- as do their fans -- that they are nearing their final checkered flag. It was Juan Pablo Montoya who narrowly defeated Franchitti for the CART championship on the day Moore was killed.
He will start Sunday's 500 on the outside of Row 5. Helio Castroneves, who received his big break when Moore's death opened up a 2000 ride at Penske Racing, will pursue a historic fourth Indy 500 win next to old friend Kanaan, rolling off from the middle of Row 2.
Yes, some of those aging photos from '99 include those two. But not many. Instead, the shoe boxes and scrapbooks are full of that original Brat Pack foursome. And the other two leave little doubt as to whom they will be rooting for Sunday.
If Kanaan wins, then -- like the old days -- there will no doubt be a party.
Only this time around, such celebrations come with an asterisk. After all, the old man has to go back to work the very next weekend.
"Back then my recovery time was four hours and I was good to go," Kanaan says with a confessionary chuckle. "Now my recovery time is four days."