If you measure the quality of the race by the number of lead changes on the track, and by the way the lead was shared amongst 7 or 8 drivers for the entire race, then the 2013 edition of the Indianapolis 500, the 97th in the fabled history of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, was perhaps the greatest ever. And if not ever, then certainly in the last twenty or thirty years.
We thought last year's race had great drama and plenty of on-track action, but it was nothing compared to 2013, when there were more than 65 lead changes, cars shooting into the lead seemingly every second corner, with passes in Turn One, down the back straight, into three, basically everywhere on the track. With very few cautions - just two in the final couple of hundred miles - the race was run at a frenetic pace, the likes of which we hadn't seen at Indianapolis before, and it was a testament to the composition of the cars that there weren't any major malfunctions to speak of. It was a testament to the drivers, too: all thirty-three of them who held their nerves at incredible speed, over and over, two hundred times.
And at the end, as three-time and defending champion Dario Franchitti slid into the Turn One wall - not unlike Takuma Sato, his challenger for the win one year ago, did to end the 2012 Memorial Day Classic - it was Tony Kaanan of Brazil who was at the head of the field after a wild restart a lap before, and whose final lap of the Brickyard, under pace car, took him to double checkers at the flag stand, crossing the bricks at the start/finish line to take a popular victory, his first after eleven years and too much heartache. It was the first for KV Racing Technology, too, the outfit co-owned by driver-turned-owner Jimmy Vasser and Ausralian entrepeneur Kevin Kalkhoven, and as popular a win as there's been at the Speedway in some time.
It was Kanaan's KVR car against three Andretti Autosport machines of defending series champion Ryan Hunter-Reay, third-generation American Marco Andretti and impressive rookie Carlos Munoz. Indeed, it was Hunter-Reay who lead on what turned out to be the final restart, but no one had been able hold the lead on a restart all day. Not with the cars behind having the ability to slingshot to the inside or the outside, which was what Kanaan did, getting around Hunter-Reay, and Munoz did, too, looking very un-rookie like in his first ever Indy Car Series start.
Then Franchitti hit the wall, and there were not enough laps left for a restart - Indy Car does not use the gimmicky Green-White-Checker finish that has become a big part of NASCAR racing - and it was Kanaan in the lead, and Kanaan who cried and drank the milk in Victory Lane, so overcome by emotion, equal parts elated and relieved, it seemed, to have won finally, after so much disaster at Indy, which is as cruel a mistress as any other race track in the world.
The Andretti Curse continues, with Marco third. His grandfather, Mario, won in 1969 and no other member of the famous racing family has seen Victory Lane at Indianapolis since. Alas, the Curse will last another calendar year. Marco was so very close. So was AJ Allmendinger, the man who was rescued from the fringes of racing by Roger Penske after failing a NASCAR-mandated drug test last year. Penske had faith, and put Dinger in a car for Indy, and AJ might've won it all - he certainly had the speed in his IZOD Penske Chevrolet - had, inexplicably, his seatbelt not come undone, forcing an unscheduled pit stop. It was a freak incident, not unlike the sort of luck that's befallen the Andretti's over the years.
Of course, racing is so much above could've, would've, should've, and Indianapolis has given us more - far, far more - than it's fair share of horror stories and racing tragedies over the years. Nothing is certain until those checkers are waving above you as you cross the line of bricks. It isn't even certain on the final corner of the last lap. Just ask JR Hildebrand about that...
For defending champion Franchitti, and the others who rode with Honda power on this day, it was a slow, frustrating one. Chevrolet were the class of the field, and ending in the wall was somehow fitting of the sort of day Dario had experienced. For a man who knows just about all there is to know about running up front at the Speedway, it must have been an extraordinarily frustrating day to be running mid-pack, and then to have his day end in the outside wall.
At the end of it all, after a race of comers and goers, so many lead changes you couldn't look away for even a second, Brazil's Tony Kanaan stood in victory lane, there to be serenaded by hundreds of thousands of race fans around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. That's Kanaan, a great people person and a fan favourite in the truest sense of the word...and now an Indianapolis 500 champion.
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