Indy Lights Freedom 100 Four-wide Finish at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway

The Indy Lights Series had recently been in the press for all the wrong reasons. It suffers from low car counts - the starting field for today's Freedom 100 at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway was just eleven cars - and the cars seem to be too slow and with too little power compared to their big brother Indy Cars (which aren't really stocked with horsepower themselves, compared to the old CART days, but that's another issue for another time, and another blog) for the best Lights drivers to jump into the bigger cars and go fast enough to challenge the likes of Dario Franchitti, Will Power and Helio Castroneves on a regular basis.

In fact, there've been only a handful of drivers who have graduated and had real success at IndyCar level - think Ed Carpenter, who sits on the pole for the Indy 500 - but, even then, it's only been fleeting. Common thought is that this feeder series, the top rung of the Mazda Road To Indy program, is at a crossroads now. Unless it can find more cars, and run with a new formula a little closer to IndyCars, it might fold.

None of that mattered today, not as the 40-lap Freedom 100 reached it's final stages. It had been mostly a three-car race since the green flag, and with one tour of the 2.5-mile super speedway left to go, no one could have really imagined



Well, there's your defining moment for the series. Ireland's Peter Dempsey came from further back than nowhere to win that race, snatching it at the last possible moment. It was motor racing's version of grand larceny.

The freeze frame of the cars crossing the finish line tells the tale. As the commentators said, it looked like a staged finish. But it wasn't. It was real racing, a spirited finish, and four cars so close to the line of bricks finish line at IMS that you could've thrown a blanket over them. There hasn't been an Indy Light race at the Brickyard quite like that before. In fact, I'm not sure that there's been a more dramatic end to a race at the Speedway, at least not with four cars still running and off the wall, coming to the checkers. It was breathtaking stuff.

This finish is going to get plenty of air time on Sports Centre and elsewhere, and that's exactly what the Indy Car people needed for their feeder series: a great bit of press ahead of the 97th Indianapolis 500 on Sunday.