Motorsports

Start your engines - and watch out

Anxious drivers have often made a mess of start at Indy.

By JOHN SCHWARB
Published May 26, 2006

	[Gett Images, 2001]
	Pole-sitter Scott Sharp climbs out of his car after crashing on the first lap five years ago. Racing on ethanol: It's all about business for now King Petty still against women racing When: 1 p.m. Sunday TV: Ch. 28 On the pole: Sam Hornish 2005 winner: Dan Wheldon

INDIANAPOLIS - Scott Sharp enjoyed the best month of May a driver could have at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

In 2001, the Indianapolis 500 veteran qualified for the pole, posted the fastest speed during fan-favorite Carburetion Day and even won the annual pit stop contest with his Kelley Racing team.

All that was left was to win the race. And not waste a moment doing it.

"I wanted to go lead the race the first lap. I was pretty aggressive, young, maybe more exuberant than I am now," Sharp said. "I went into the first turn, everything was fine until the left rear tire crossed the inside line. I didn't have enough grip and the car turned on me."

Sharp's car spun up the track and into the wall, and his Indianapolis 500 was over before completing a single official lap.

The annals of the so-called "Greatest Spectacle in Racing" are filled with such debacles, as drivers who are overzealous, inexperienced or unlucky (or all three) have seen weeks of work vanish within moments of being called to start their engines.

The Indy 500 is unlike any other event an open-wheel racer sees all year, which is the start of the problem. Between the 33-car field, its three-wide start, the 500-mile distance and the tricky 2.5-mile track, there are plenty of variables distinctly Indy. Throw in the human element and you have a recipe for trouble, sometimes sooner than later.

"It's a high-pressure race. So much of a team's budget, focus and attention get spent here," Sharp said. "Certainly a lot of drivers feel you've got to make it happen, whether you have the car to do so or not. That's probably part of the reason there are so many issues."

The buildup is certainly unlike any other race. At most Indy Racing League stops, including last month's Grand Prix of St. Petersburg, qualifications, practice and the race are all held over three days. There is often a morning practice as well before an afternoon race.

Indianapolis is two solid weeks of practicing and qualifying (though a two-weekend qualifying format has been reduced to one by rain the past two years), then all on-track activity shuts down in the days leading to the race except for an hour of Carburetion Day practice today.

Add all that to the raceday pomp and circumstance including anthems, flyovers and other traditions and you get 33 drivers with a very itchy right foot.

"You're all juiced up, you have all this energy and it has to go someplace," 1998 champion Eddie Cheever Jr. said. "At the start of the race it's really hard to not use that energy to pass a car, but you teach yourself it has absolutely nothing to do with what happens on the first lap."

It's a disorienting start for those anywhere but in the front row, Cheever said, full of eye-watering methanol fumes and "dirty air" that wreaks havoc with a car's handling. Plus, drivers are on cold tires, in a pack of traffic not seen in practice, and running three-wide. By the first turn of the first official lap (following three pace laps), cars are already near 200 mph.

"You're looking for any spot of clean air you can, but you can't move because you've got a guy on your left and a guy on your right and you're just trying to sort this mess out," Cheever said. "Hopefully by the time you come out of Turn 2 you've got it in some sort of a line and everybody falls into place."

They hope. In 1966, a massive mess on the main straightaway ensued when Billy Foster drove into the back of Gordon Johncock, eliminating 11 cars including those of A.J. Foyt and Cale Yarborough. It took nearly an hour and a half to clean up the track.

In 1995, Stan Fox lost control of his car and triggered a five-car pileup in the first turn. Fox slammed into Cheever and then the wall, and Fox's disintegrated, airborne car with his legs flying unprotected is one of the speedway's more gruesome images.

Polesitters have not been immune to such mishaps, with Sharp and Roberto Guerrero in 1992 seeing high hopes come crashing to an end. Scott Goodyear, now an ABC/ESPN commentator, started in the 33rd position in '92 and remembered struggling on pace laps to find grip on a day with windchills in the 30s. He radioed his car owner, saying he was going to take it easy for a while. Then he came off the backstretch and saw the safety vehicles tending to Guerrero, who had not backed off and instead spun into an infield wall.

"You could look at it and go, "Man, how could you do that?' " Goodyear said. "Only I could understand it, I was in the same thing in the back (of the field). That set the tone."

From that point, Goodyear became the poster boy for patience at Indy, working through the field all day and losing at the line to Al Unser Jr. by .043 seconds (the race's closest finish), nearly becoming the only driver to win from the last starting spot on the grid.

Veteran drivers stress patience, patience and more patience to survive the start of the race, but sometimes lessons are only learned the hard way. Kenny Brack won the race in 1999, but as a rookie in 1997 he took his entire row out of the event on a pace lap, drifting from his outside starting spot and collecting Stephan Gregoire and Affonso Giaffone.

"You come here to do the Indy 500, you do all the work qualifying, you go to race and you don't even make the green (flag) - you can't imagine how mad you can be," said Gregoire, who will start his seventh 500 on Sunday.

"You have to be wise; you never win this race on the first lap. It's when you can get into the biggest trouble."

[Last modified May 26, 2006, 08:26:04]