FITTING WINNERS

Written by: David Phillips
Senior writer, RACER Magazine  
http://www.racer.com/speedtv

Congratulations to Scott Dixon and everyone at Target/Chip Ganassi Racing on their win in the 92nd running of the Indianapolis 500 on Sunday. As virtually everyone agrees, Dixon & company were thoroughly deserving winners, having set the practice pace much of the month, captured the pole position (with teammate Dan Wheldon P2) and then led 115 of 200 laps, including the final 28, en route to the victory.

But Dixon and TCGR weren’t Sunday’s only deserving winners. Hearty congratulations are also in store for Ryan Hunter-Reay who, with more than a little help from his friends at Rahal Letterman Racing, captured Chase Rookie of the Year honors. Not only was the award deserved – RHR finished sixth overall and first among the first timers at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway – it was particularly fitting in this year of unification.

As many know, RHR’s career straddles both the IndyCar Series and the series formerly known as the Champ Car World Series. For it was in the ladder system of the latter that he first came to national prominence, first in the Skip Barber Dodge Pro Series and later, as a three-time winner in the 2002 Toyota Atlantic Championship. Those performances put him on the fast track to a Champ Car ride and he made the most of things when he won a race as a rookie driving for Stefan Johansson in the Swede’s one and only year as a team owner, ran away with the Milwaukee race in ’04 with Herdez Racing and was named recipient of the Greg Moore Legacy Award, emblematic of a driver who displays “outstanding talent on the track as well as . . . a dynamic personality with the fans and the media.”

Like many before and after him, however, Champ Car’s Great American Hope was destined to founder on the shoals of a season with Rocketsports Racing and he subsequently fell off the “American open wheel” radar. A smattering of Grand-Am rides in GT and Daytona Prototypes, one-offs in A1GP and the Baja 1000 and even some testing for Robby Gordon’s Nextel Cup team followed before RLR plucked him from racing limbo in the middle of the ’07 IndyCar Series. All Hunter-Reay did was earn three top seven finishes en route to the Bombardier Learjet Rookie of the Year Award, despite competing in only half a dozen races.

And despite having been one of the most promising young drivers in American open-wheel racing for much of the 21st century, RHR came to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway this year as a rookie in what, thanks to the unification of Champ Car and the Indy Racing League, was the deepest pool of new talent to grace the Month of May in many a year.

His was not an easy or flawless month of May, for RHR crashed heavily on Pole Day, then labored the next week to regain the speed he’d (seemingly) effortlessly shown before his crash. But he rebounded to put the RLR Team Ethanol Dallara-Honda in the show in the middle of the seventh row at 221.579 mph, then patiently worked his way forward once the race got underway.

Aided by good pit work from Rahal Letterman, Hunter-Reay moved into the top 10 before the midway point, ran as high as fifth and found himself in seventh behind fellow rookie Hideki Mutoh as the laps wound down. RHR gradually reeled in his rival and, after Mutoh rebuffed a couple of overtaking efforts, dove past on the approach to Turn One on Lap 194 to claim the position he would hold to the finish.

“Hideki was blocking me and I can’t tell you how angry I was,” said Hunter-Reay. “But I was methodical and set him up. My spotters did a great job giving me information and we got the job done. There was no way I was going to finish this race with that kid in front of me!”

That sixth place ties RHR’s best IndyCar Series finish (so far), while the Rookie of the Year award represents the biggest step yet in what might be considered the rejuvenation of his career, one that seemed dangerously close to losing its way at this time last year.

As Hunter-Reay well knows . . .

“This year, I think the Indy 500 rookie-of-the-year battle meant a lot more than it has in a while because the field was so strong with so many former Champ Car drivers coming over,” he said at Monday’s Chase Rookie of the Year Award ceremony. “This time last year I was walking the paddock in other series looking for a ride and today here I am in a press conference for being the top rookie at Indy. Wow.”

Wow indeed. It just shows what a lot of talent and even more perseverance can achieve.