If the Monaco Grand Prix is cartoon Eurotrash, then the Indianapolis 500 could hardly be more apple-pie American: separated by an ocean of culture, they will nevertheless take place this Sunday bound together in an atmosphere of unease for the future.

Indy racing is in something of an existential crisis with its traditional domination of US motor sport a thing of the past due to Nascar.

The American public has voted with its wallet and apparently decided that death-defying speed isn’t sufficient for its jaded palette anymore, turning instead to Nascar and its redneck legacy of running bootleg booze in souped up bangers.

Unsurprisingly, this is causing more than a little angst for those in charge of what still remains America’s most famous race. The Indy 500’s TV viewership has gone through a period of noticeable decline, the reasons for which are causing much navel-gazing about racing’s fundamental appeal.

Similar introspection appears to be happening across the pond. Viewing figures for Formula One are declining in some vital markets amid continuing fears that people are turning off a spectacle dominated by a tiny elite which is failing to engage the wider interest of Joe and Jo Public.

Despite the suspicion figures are merely declining in those markets where F1 has gone for the bigger pay-per-view buck, there’s enough concern that drivers are reportedly going to canvass social media this weekend as to how the sport can be improved, a cosmetic move which sounds like asking passers-by to fix your car rather than going to a garage.

Conundrum At root,

most of it still boils down to the oldest racing chestnut of all – is it all about the car or the driver?

This is supposedly an eternal conundrum for F1, indeed all of motor sport, except it isn’t really. A conundrum presumes doubt, and there’s no real doubt that the ‘brmm-brmm’ game is all about the machinery. If you don’t get that, you should be watching something else.

Waiting on drivers for entertainment means you’re likely to be waiting a long time. It is a long-established contradiction that perhaps the sexiest and most exciting job in all of sport – driving racing cars – is almost exclusively the preserve of some of the most boring people on the planet.

Maybe it’s a prerequisite for coping with the perpetual reality that danger lurks around the next corner but modern drivers are mostly uber-geeky tech types droning on about revs per second, fuel consumption and tyre-thread-depth rather than the playboy cliché of old.

Maybe the days of James Hunt blearily treating the paddock as backstage at a Led Zeppelin gig aren't gone completely. Maybe the PR-bods are just better at disguise.

But there are still times when it feels like pointing a post-race microphone at a car would make for a more enthralling interview than the figure driving it.

But here’s the point: that’s as it should be. Just as supposed tennis fans bemoaning the absence of ‘characters’ and yearning for the days of McEnroe and Connors should really be looking at something else besides tennis, it is ridiculous to expect drivers to indulge in panto gurning to supposedly ‘humanise’ things. Actually, it’s more than ridiculous, it’s futile.

Parse most sports down and it usually winds up at the human element. It might all be coated in financial and political layers but essentially it boils down to players kicking a ball, or athletes racing, or fighters beating the snot out of each other.

But motor racing is essentially about the motor. It actually has more in common with horse racing than anything else. Sure, there’s the human element but just as there are some who can’t walk by a horse in a field without stopping to look at it, there are those similarly in thrall to the sound of an engine, any engine.

Refuelling And it seems a raft of changes proposed for F1 in 2017 finally acknowledge that. The reintroduction of refuelling and the aim to increase speeds by up to six seconds a lap run opposite to previous right-on aims for economy – but when has F1 ever been about something as mundane as cost?

In order to humanise the sport, F1 bosses have actually been cutting the ground from beneath their feet in recent years. If F1 is about anything besides vulgar money, it is about aspiration.

But that’s been purposefully downplayed in order to supposedly even things out between the drivers.

Mercedes’ dominance is all you need to know about how that plan has worked out. Yet the sport has persisted up to now in putting a brake on technology development in order to slow down cars, and slowing down cars surely betrays a fundamental engineering ethos which is to always look to go faster.

By definition that makes it all about machinery and the wonks who tweak it here and there to make it go a millisecond per lap less than the other guy. And by extension, it makes it all about those hundreds of millions of petrolheads around the globe who are innately fascinated by stuff that goes ping.

Those of us who don’t get that might characterise petrolheads as badly dressed Top-Gear wonks but hey, each to their own. And it is F1’s great good fortune, and indeed Indy racing’s too, that it has a captive audience whose allegiance is such that intermittent image problems can be addressed by simply giving them more ping stuff that makes cars go faster.

That’s why ultimately the Indy 500 will be fine. Indy racing is simply faster than Nascar. And F1 is the fastest of the lot. And for a sizeable slice of the globe, that fundamental appeal will never change.