Jimmie Johnson, Romain Grosjean are a rare star-studded Indianapolis 500 rookie class

INDIANAPOLIS – Perhaps it’s because we’ve gotten a chance to get to know them in their new IndyCar homes for over a year, or that we had a pretty good inkling back last summer they were both going to take on this challenge together. But it feels foreign still to think that Jimmie Johnson and Romain Grosjean will be making their Indianapolis 500 debuts as rookies this Sunday. It doesn't seem entirely real and certainly not as big a talking point in the mainstream sporting landscape as their endeavors deserve.

Perhaps it’s just the lack of that iconic image we have from the days of Nigel Mansell, or even Fernando Alonso, when the global racing superstars needed bodyguards to pave their way in and out of pit lane and through Gasoline Alley in order to not spend their entire days shaking hands and signing autographs. And media covering the Greatest Spectacle in Racing isn’t what it used to be – when throngs of reporters four-deep did everything they could just to get their recorder within a few feet of Mansell anytime he spoke on an otherwise innocuous practice day during his rookie year in 1993.

Then again, so much of the mania that drove headlines and curiosity around Mansell, Alonso, Emerson Fittipaldi, Graham Hill and other global superstars that chose to take a stab at the 500 came because they were purposefully mysterious, reserved and guarded. Hailing from a traditionally closed off Formula 1 world, many race fans and media members were getting their first real glimpse of someone whose career they may have known a great deal of and did their best to follow but face-time is something else entirely.

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Grosjean and Johnson, on the other hand, have been nothing but open about the roads that led them here – the processes they went through and decisions they made after swearing off ovals (and the 500 specifically) less than two years ago, and then doubling back. In their own special ways, the 500 rookies from Andretti and Ganassi have used their YouTube channels, as well as other avenues, to let their fans inside parts of their personal and professional daily lives. Undoubtedly, Johnson and Grosjean have been the two most-written-about subjects in IndyCar since their series debuts 13 months ago – more than the series champion Alex Palou, and probably more too, even, than the historic defending 500 winner Helio Castroneves.

Through a worldwide fan survey this offseason, Grosjean was named IndyCar’s most popular driver. Depending on the circles you converse in, the simple mention of their names and the start of their respective American open-wheel racing careers is almost certain to incite an impassioned, potentially heated back-and-forth. How many other 500 rookies could we say that about?

So rare, too, is it for this race to get rookie star power that is at – or nearly at – its racing peaks. Yes, Johnson is 46 and may not have more than a handful of years left running full-season, but put him on an oval – whether it be a stock car or an open-wheel one – and there’s not too many I’d choose who are ahead. Grosjean, as we’ve seen several times this past month, is eager to get after it, go for broke, bang wheels and do whatever it takes to get to Victory Lane. He’s not going to give an inch in practice, let alone even an otherwise innocuous regular season race at Barber Motorsports Park. Say what you want about how he drives, but the skills he does have when he puts it all together seem just as sharp as ever at 36.

Such a gift to the racing world is rare at this place. Future modern-day greats like Josef Newgarden and Simon Pagenaud (2012); Ryan Hunter-Reay, Will Power and Graham Rahal (2008); Scott Dixon and Dan Wheldon (2003); and Dario Franchitti and Tony Kanaan (2002) packed classes with talent that was yet to fully develop. Looking back now, it’s easy to apply rose-colored glasses to their debuts, but back then, we didn’t know what we do now.

More: Details on the 7 rookies in this year's Indy 500

The same applies to 2001 (Castroneves), 1982 (Bobby Rahal, Danny Sullivan and Chip Ganassi), 1978 (Rick Mears), 1965 (Mario Andretti, Gordon Johncock and Al Unser Sr.), 1958 (A.J. Foyt), 1951 (Bill Vukovich and Roger Ward) and 1949 (Johnnie Parsons, Jim Rathmann and Troy Ruttman). Imagine watching those races, knowing what we know now – that it would be the first time we’d see those drivers on the biggest stage in the racing world. Imagine the anticipation we’d have to see these all-time greats shoulder the pressure of these 500 laps for the first time and see whether they crumbled or sat up a little taller in their seats. Imagine the stress of wondering if they’d begin their star-studded careers by joining the shortlist of rookies that have won this Greatest Spectacle in Racing their first time out.

That’s what we have with Johnson and Grosjean. What’s more, is they could actually – and I mean actually – win this thing.

The sheer number of oval races – whatever the machinery – Johnson has run is truly astounding. We saw at Texas, where he finished 6th in his IndyCar oval debut, that he’s capable of holding his own in these. In the past two weeks, we’ve seen he’s capable of wielding the speed these Chip Ganassi Racing cars all have and keep the pedal to the floor – sometimes just past the limit of no return, and even then, he’s managed to save those wobbles and that lone wheel slap to the wall and keep it headed straight.

Keeping an eye on Jimmie: Meet Johnson's spotter. His name is Gary, Jimmie's dad.

Grosjean has looked shaky too, at times – and yet he qualified far better than any of his Andretti Autosport teammates. Some of that was circumstance out of drivers’ control, but there’s never been an Indy 500 decided without a little luck involved. Will his aggression push him over the edge? We’ll have to wait and see, but you can bet if there’s a move to be made in the closing laps, he'll try and stick it. Sometimes that’s 2012 Takuma Sato, and others it’s 2014 Hunter-Reay.

What we do know is these types of rookie classes, which also include potential future greats like Kyle Kirkwood, Callum Ilott, Christian Lundgaard, David Malukas and Devlin DeFrancesco, don’t come around often. Whether any of them end up like Alexander Rossi in 2016, Alonso the year after or somewhere in between, just know as you scream from the grandstands or lounge on your couch, we’re witnessing history on Sunday.

Indy 500's top rookie classes

2017

This may be all you need to know: Though Fernando Alonso was with a struggling McLaren F1 team at the time, a two-time World Drivers Champion opted to skip the Monaco Grand Prix to make his 500 debut. And in Speedway, Ind., Alonso-mania lived up to the hype. Maybe a dozen Spanish-speaking news outlets made IMS their home for two weeks just to document Alonso’s comings and goings. The McLaren/Andretti driver went on to lead 27 laps before bowing out from near the front due to engine failure with just over 20 laps left.

2000

Juan Pablo Montoya had just taken CART by storm a year ago as a rookie, winning seven of 20 races and edging out Dario Franchitti for the title on a tiebreaker. As Ganassi became the first of the major CART teams to dip their toes back into the IRL with an appearance at the 2000 500, there was genuine curiosity whether the 25-year-old had what it took to do it on this stage, too. He left no doubt, leading 167 laps and winning by more than 7 seconds on the day 19-year-old Sarah Fisher also made her first 500 start.

1993

Nigel Mansell was the 1992 F1 champion, a 13-year veteran of the series, and yet because of a contract dispute, he jumped ship and tested his mettle in American open-wheel racing – a challenge that came with running the biggest race in the world. Mansell’s rookie CART season had begun with massive highs and lows – a win from pole in his debut at Surfers Paradise and a DNS in his oval debut at Phoenix due to a high-speed practice crash. Though he ultimately didn’t win, Mansell led the second-most laps (34) and held the lead down the stretch until eventual winner Fittipaldi and runner-up Arie Luyendyk got the best of him on a restart.

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1984

After Mario Andretti had been hot on the scene for two decades, the world finally got to see what his 21-year-old son Michael was made of. During the same year two-time F1 champion Emerson Fittipaldi burst onto the IndyCar scene, the younger Andretti bested his father in qualifying (4th vs. 6th) as well as the race (5th vs. 17th).

1977

Each of the first 60 runnings of the Greatest Spectacle in Racing hadn’t included a driver who was a woman in the field, but after failing to qualify for the race a year earlier. Janet Guthrie made history in 1977. Forcing track personnel to second-guess the starting command and rewriting the record books was only a small part of Guthrie’s historic start that paved the way for eight more women to follow. Finishing 29th due to a mechanical issue was merely a footnote and far less important than the trailblazing her presence in the race did in the sport.

More: From sleeping in her car to the Indy 500: How Janet Guthrie changed racing for women

1966

The ‘British Invasion’ in American open-wheel racing perhaps reached its climax in ’66 when rookie Graham Hill, the back-to-back-to-back Monaco Grand Prix winner in 1963-65 who won the F1 title in 1962 and took 2nd-place each of the following three seasons, descended on central Indiana. Along with Scotsman and fellow 500 rookie Jackie Stewart, who’d finished 3rd in the F1 title race the year prior, the pair qualified mid-pack but were able to steer clear of a massive Lap 1 wreck that took out a third of the field. They’d go on to lead a combined 50 laps, with Stewart dominating the race’s latter half before he broke down with 10 to go – the same 10 Hill would lead to triumph as a rookie. And though he’d had nowhere near the success he’d go on to have in stock cars, the ’66 race also featured the American open-wheel debut of NASCAR legend Cale Yarborough.

1963

Some to this day argue that Jim Clark deserved the win in his debut at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, but regardless of your position on Parnelli Jones’ late-race oil leak, you can’t ignore what that year’s eventual F1 champ achieved. Clark led the second-most laps (28) and put himself in position, had USAC officials opted to black-flag Jones for his leak. Clark was by no means the first F1 star to give the 500 a try in the midst of his prime, and he certainly wouldn’t be the last, but his intrigue with his race while simultaneously competing overseas in F1 while the 500 was no longer part of the World Drivers Championship eventually led to a pole a year later, three front-row starts in five years and a win in 1965.

Email IndyStar motor sports reporter Nathan Brown at nlbrown@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter: @By_NathanBrown.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indy 500: Jimmie Johnson, Romain Grosjean are rare rookie drivers