Dario Kart

INDIANAPOLIS ­– Mother Nature would only allow for 415 miles to be completed in the 91st running of the Indianapolis 500 on Sunday. But the fans who stayed at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway through a nearly three-hour rain delay saw a total of 11 caution flags and 23 lead changes.\nAnd after 166 laps, it was Scotland’s Dario Franchitti who was in the right place at the right time, taking home the checkered flag under caution in the rain-shortened race. Franchitti held the lead on the 163rd lap when an accident along the backstretch brought out the yellow flags. Not long after that, the skies opened up for the second time since the race had started, ending the 500 and sending Franchitti’s No. 27 car into the victory lane.\n“The one comment that sticks in my mind was (crew chief) John Anderson saying on the radio, ‘The rain is eight blocks away,’” Franchitti said. “I’m like, ‘Come on.’”\nAfter 113 laps, the rain came for the first time, and officials stopped the race with a red flag. At that time, three of Franchitti’s Andretti Green Racing teammates, Tony Kanaan, Marco Andretti and Danica Patrick were in first, second and third place respectively, while Franchitti sat in fifth.\n“All day we had race cars in strong positions,” said Kim Green, part-owner of AGR. “We were doing a big rain dance at lap 113, hoping it would rain out at that point. In the end, the rain probably got to us earlier than we thought it was going to. But everybody at AGR and all five drivers did an awesome job.”\nFranchitti called the stoppage after 113 laps a bittersweet moment, as he thought he could have enough of a lead to win the race, but his team had four of the top five positions at the time.\n“The selfish side of me was thinking, ‘I hope we go back racing because I think we can do something,’” Franchitti said. “But at the same point, if the results had stayed after the red flag, I wouldn’t have been as happy as I am now, but it would have been the second-best result of the day.”\nWhen the race started back up, Kanaan held the lead for much of the remaining time. With Franchitti sitting in third, Marty Roth crashed on lap 151 and the yellow flags came out again. During the caution, the leader Kanaan and second-place Sam Hornish Jr. went in for a pit stop. Franchitti, who had pitted just 10 laps earlier to change a tire after running over some debris, took the lead. \nRight after the racers got the green flag again, Jaques Lazier spun out, hitting Kanaan’s car and forcing him to make yet another pit stop. The accident effectively ended Kanaan’s hopes of winning the race, and the Brazilian driver ended in 12th place.\nAfter the wreckage of Lazier’s car was cleared, Andretti’s car flipped in a four-car wreck that included former Indy 500 champions Buddy Rice and Dan Wheldon. Patrick, who was in third after the first rain delay, finished in eighth.\n“It’s all about winning, isn’t it?” said Michael Andretti, part-owner of AGR and 13th-place finisher in the race. “That’s why we have five cars out there. Hopefully one of them is going to be in the right position, and that’s what happened. After the first part of the race we had three in a good position, and in the end we had one. Lucky that it was Dario. That’s the way it worked out for us.”