While rain and half-full grandstands may have challenged the second-year staging of the Grand Prix down on the street level, it was a smashing hit for people watching it for next to nothing at the Level 4 food court in The Gallery at Harborplace.

For the price of a soda from McDonald’s or slice of Sbarro’s pizza, a standing-room-only crowd had an excellent view of the cars careening around the race’s first turn at the corner of Pratt and Light streets.

“We actually have tickets, but the view is better here – and there’s air conditioning and less noise,” a man said, as his wife picked at her salad with chopsticks and looked down every few minutes whenever the buzzing swarm of cars circling the two-mile course reappeared.

Why this crowd was so multi-ethnic is hard to say but it included women in saris, Latinos and Chinese and people speaking Korean and Caribbean-inflected French.

And who doesn’t love a bargain? They were saving themselves the cost of a Sunday one-day general admission ticket of $55 plus tax.

Camped out near the windows for hours, the spectators got along well.

Little kids counted the cars as they went around the track. People shouted when a skidding Indy Light car spun almost completely around. Applause erupted when crews got the disabled car back into the race.

“You’re going to have to leave if you don’t buy anything else,” said a security guard, who approached after a while but didn’t appear ready to actually eject any members of the riveted all-ages crowd.

Scalpers Hawking Half-Price Tickets

At the 2012 Grand Prix, cheap seats was the theme even down on the street. By early afternoon, the ticket booths had few lines and scalpers were hawking general admission tickets at half-price.

Race organizers and city officials, who weren’t offering any specifics on ticket sales or crowd size, had taken pains to set expectations for a low-key event.

Lacking hard numbers, what to make of the actual turnout and true balance sheet will be much debated.

Was this a pathetic poop-out capping a year of organizational calamities? Or a heroic performance in spite of those calamities? Was the weather to blame? Or a face-saving excuse? High-performance tires weren’t the only thing spinning over the weekend.

Clearly, though, downtown streets outside the chain-link fences that had been bustling under sunny skies for the big race day last year were noticeably quieter this year, with fewer people and vendors.

Another difference from last year was the feel and pace of the race itself. On a rain-spattered course, cars kept skidding into the wall or tires, prompting officials to repeatedly stop and re-start the action.

Depending on your point of view, this either made the race sloppy and slow-paced or generated some interesting controversy.

With five laps to go, Ryan Hunter-Reay grabbed the lead on one of those re-starts – going on to win the race but prompting complaints from two drivers that he broke the rules and took off too soon.

Series leader Will Power, who won the race last year, got out of his car looking disgusted. Ryan Briscoe, whose car Hunter-Reay surged past in the restart, likewise cried foul. Briscoe’s team owner Roger Penske asked for a review by officials, but they declared Hunter-Reay’s restart clean.

Afterwards, with his fourth Indy IZOD Series victory secure, the upstart celebrated his nail-biter of a win with champagne. He goes on to the last race in the series, in Fontana, Calif., on Sept 15, with a chance to overtake series leader Power.

But like the folks back in Baltimore debating what to make of the race as a multi-million-dollar civic and political event, people may be arguing about what really happened for a long time to come.