Mark Glover’s
AutoGlo car reviews also can be seen in the Northern & Central California Cruisin’ News magazine
published monthly out
of Folsom, California.
Editor's note:
Since 1961, Mark Glover has attended 57 Indianapolis 500s, as both a spectator
and a working journalist. Here's his take on Sunday's race, the 104th running:
Sacramento,
California -- Just when you think you have the Indianapolis 500 figured out, it
whipsaws you.
For most of
Sunday afternoon inside the eerily quiet and fanless 2.5-mile Indianapolis
Motor Speedway oval, New Zealand's Scott Dixon had the 104th running of the
Indy 500 in the palm of his hand. Even
the NBC telecast crew was saying so.
Things were so
rosy that, at one point, Dixon and Nevada City driver Alexander Rossi took
turns leading laps in order to conserve fuel.
Dixon ran away from polesitter Marco Andretti from the start and
proceeded to lead more than 100 laps. He
had this thing in the bag.
Until he
didn't.
With less than 20 laps left and a go-time protocol in effect, Dixon pulled up on the tail of leader Takuma Sato's
Honda-powered car and appeared ready to dispatch the 2017 race winner and claim
his second victory, the first coming in 2008.
Sato said
no. He outgunned Dixon into the first
turn and was then holding off Dixon with what I saw as firm command at the front. In my mind, as Sato was maintaining the gap over Dixon and the laps
were winding down, I was thinking: Dixon needs to pass Sato soon, because if
there's a crash, the race could end right there.
And that's
exactly what happened, with Spencer Pigot destroying his car in a brutal wreck
on the front straightaway with just five laps remaining. Debris littered the track, and safety teams
were tending to Pigot on the paved surface.
No red flag was thrown to halt the race, and Sato cruised across the line at a local
freeway pace to notch his second 500 win.
There was
immediate on-site and online reaction that the race should have been
red-flagged after the Pigot crash, setting up what likely would have been a
wild two- or three-lap dash among Sato, Dixon and even third-place finisher
Graham Rahal. Others are now calling for
a "green-white-checker" overtime rule -- a la NASCAR -- to enable IndyCar
races to finish under the green flag.
Sunday's anticlimactic finish under the yellow flag might generate enough juice to
make that rule a reality.
But frankly,
I'm conflicted about it. Here's why:
From what I was seeing in the closing laps on Sunday, Sato drove the wheels off
his car and was holding off Dixon quite well. Had the race continued to its
conclusion, I think it's very likely that Sato still would have won it. I'll confess
that I have trouble with a green-white-checker rule that often crushes the
hard, hours-long efforts of a good driver who has earned a victory, only to see
a late caution hand the race to a comparatively undeserving winner. That has happened in NASCAR. A lot.
And at the
risk of sounding like a dinosaur, the century-plus history of the Indianapolis race has
always been a test of driver and machine over exactly 500 miles, no matter how much hard luck and mayhem occurs along the way.
I also believe
that Dixon was swept off the victory stand by a perfect storm ... by the name of
Takuma Sato, who is known to be a relentless, go-for-broke driver. His motto is
literally "No attack, no chance." When Sato grabbed the lead from Dixon late in
the race, I thought to myself: Sato will never give up the lead without an
all-out fight. He'd probably crash into
the wall before surrendering his place at the front of the field.
Most of all,
what struck me about Sunday's 500 was yet another late-race drama that turned an
expected result into heartbreak for one, and elation for another. The long history of the race is full of
similar, sometimes beyond belief occurrences that suddenly leap up in the late
stages. It's often said that the track chooses
the race winner. But I was not buying
that on Sunday. Sato drove his guts out
to drink the winner's milk. This win's
on him.
