2018 Indianapolis 500

The month of May is here. It's a time to kickoff the summer stretch. It's also a time for IndyCar drivers capable of going 240 mph around the famed Indianapolis Motor Speedway to prove they're worthy of being Indianapolis 500 champion. The race is Sunday, May 27th on ABC on the biggest day in motorsports. This will be ABC's 54th and final broadcast of the race as NBC will take over in 2019.

This will not only be Danica Patrick's final 500, but her final race of her professional racing career in the Ed Carpenter #13. Helio Castroneves returns to the Penske #3 to claim his 4th Borg Warner trophy.


Entry List

1 Josef Newgarden
3 Hélio Castroneves
4 Matheus Leist R
5 James Hinchcliffe
6 Robert Wickens R
7 Jay Howard
9 Scott Dixon
10 Ed Jones
12 Will Power
13 Danica Patrick
14 Tony Kanaan
15 Graham Rahal
17 Conor Daly
18 Sébastien Bourdais
19 Zachary Claman DeMelo R
20 Ed Carpenter
21 Spencer Pigot
22 Simon Pagenaud
23 Charlie Kimball
24 Sage Karam
25 Stefan Wilson
26 Zach Veach
27 Alexander Rossi
28 Ryan Hunter-Reay
29 Carlos Muñoz
30 Takuma Sato
32 Kyle Kaiser R
33 James Davison
59 Max Chilton
60 Jack Harvey
63 Pippa Mann
64 Oriol Servia
66 J. R. Hildebrand
88 Gabby Chaves
98 Marco Andretti



Bump Day was yesterday and probably the biggest shock in recent Indy 500 qualifying memory happened. One of the fan favorites James Hinchcliffe did not set a good enough time to qualify for the 500 alongside Pippa Mann.

The 33-car grid will set the starting lineup today and the top 9 cars will run for the pole.

Surprised to see this thread not have more posts especially after Hinch DNQ’d.

Anyways, Ed Carpenter takes his third Indy 500 Pole! Looks like the Chevy’s have the advantage, at least in qualifying. Here’s today’s qualifying results.

http://www.imscdn.com/indycar_media/documents/2018-05-20/05-20-18%20Indy%20500%20unofficial%20qual%20results.pdf

Rossi 32nd end me

Really surprised to not see any post race comments here. I’ll give my thoughts before I head to bed.

Was cheering super hard for Ed to finally win this things, but he came up just short. I was gutted for him, but he still had a super nice race.

Overall, I don’t like this package as well as the style they’ve had the last few years due to the tougher passing. Although, seeing the car being more difficult to not wreck (Hélio, Bourdais, Jones, Kanaan) was very interesting. Had a super nice time and I’ll be interested in seeing how this car progresses!

Also, Jay Howard and James Davison were just awful today and co-earn Reject of the Race Award. Mad Chilton wasn’t great either, but those two characters were moving chicanes.

(This is copied from my personal writing, which is why I wrote in a lot of context.)

Think the biggest story going into the month of May this year was that this'd be the last race for Danica Patrick. It was only fitting that she'd end her career at Indy, after being brought up through IndyCar and making history in 2005 by becoming the first woman to lead the Indianapolis 500. The fact that she entered with a green #13 car (and I mention the color of the car specifically because of the old racing superstition that race cars painted green are bad luck) certainly made it seem like she was trying to tempt fate, though she ended up losing in the end of that deal -- more on that in a minute. Helio Castroneves also returned to Penske for this race in a bid to win his fourth Indianapolis 500.

So for the first time since 2015, this year's edition of the Indianapolis 500 had Bump Day! Thirty-five cars entered and only thirty-three could make the race, so they do a full day of qualifications to decide who makes the grid and who goes home. Pippa Mann missing the field was disappointing, but not unexpected. What was more unexpected was James Hinchcliffe -- the dude who sat fifth in the point standings going in, and sat on the pole for this race two years ago -- failing to qualify after a sequence of issues kept him from setting a time. I felt kinda bad for Hinch after that; I was more expecting Zachary Claman DeMelo to get bumped before Hinch.

Worth noting that a couple of the EFR guys were at this race: Ike (Rykia), Vincenzo (SpeedDemon37), and Rutana (Syzygy) were all seated in the Turn 3 grandstands. Lucas (RockyDennis) attended this race for the second year in a row, sitting in the same spot he was in last year -- in the grandstands behind NASCAR pit stall #41 on the frontstretch. All of them got to see a lot of action from their perspectives during this race.

The lower downforce generated by the new IR-18 models would produce a different style of racing, akin to what we saw in the 500 before the DW12 models were used. The drivers would have to put a little bit more wheel into it when they negotiated the turns. The drivers told the media to expect a pack race, but the ninety-degree weather on race day made the track much more slippery and made overtaking difficult. I noticed the effects on the cars' handling at first while watching Danica Patrick wrestle with understeer in the first thirty laps, and later on when we saw six different drivers weed themselves out due to accidents caused by self-spins. I did see drivers making passes though, and some ballsy ones at that. Alexander Rossi in particular was going for it all race long after starting on the last row; he was exciting to watch. The pole sitter Ed Carpenter assumed the lead and stayed there for quite a while. Tony Kanaan was up there leading laps for the A.J. Foyt team in the first half too, and Will Power would join the fray as well.

In the place of James Hinchcliffe was James Davison, who bumped Hinchcliffe in the last half hour of qualifying, but showed to be well of the pace in race trim. Davison was a weapon all through the first hundred miles, and eventually did to last year's winner Takuma Sato what it looked like he was going to do to himself -- that is, take himself and Sato out. At that moment, somewhere, Hinch must've been laughing.

Danica Patrick's Indy 500 sendoff ended much like her Daytona 500; this time, with a self-inflicted spin and crash in Turn 2. Apparently the crowd reaction was mixed -- heard from Rutana's end that the crowd cheered when Danica binned it, but on Lucas' end, there was an air of disappointment. For reference, she's not the most well-liked person in the racing world, not even on the IndyCar side. I wasn't really fazed by it, though. Perhaps just because I've been so used to seeing her races end this way on the NASCAR side of things.

After Danica wrecked there was a long green flag run, which was honestly pretty dull. There was some pit strategy taking place, but I wasn't paying enough attention to be totally invested in it. Tony Kanaan had a flat tire after one of his pit stops, and that set him back a ways. Sebastien Bourdais was the next car to crash, and seeing that was pretty heartbreaking. Bourdais coming back to race at Indy after nearly dying in a wreck here last year was a feat in itself. He looked like he could have won this race. Then Helio Castroneves wrecked, and he nearly clobbered the pit wall in the process. That might've also been his last 500, but he was apparently begging Roger Penske to bring him back for next year after the wreck, so maybe not?

Pit strategy came back into play late in the race, and with 20 laps left, it looked like it was going to be between Will Power, Ed Carpenter, and Alexander Rossi for the win. A few backmarkers -- particularly Oriol Servia, Stefan Wilson, and Jack Harvey -- stayed out, thinking they could stretch their fuel mileage the same way Rossi did when he won this race in 2016. They all got lucky when Tony Kanaan wrecked it in Turn 2 with twelve laps left, forcing the yellow and setting up a seven lap dash to the finish. At this point I thought if they weren't able to make passes all race, they were sure as hell about to try now!

Servia was leading on the restart and was apparently told he was good on fuel to the end, but got freight trained by the rest of the leaders going into Turn 1. Jack Harvey held down second place while Stefan Wilson claimed the lead, and at the moment when it seemed like Wilson was pulling away and was gonna try and go for the upset, they both bailed for the pits with four to go and pretty much left Will Power unchallenged for the win. So that was lame, though I liked the irony that Charlie Kimball was the first lapped car ahead of the leader in the last laps, and Kimball was the same driver that caused JR Hildebrand to throw away his Indy 500 on the last lap in 2011. I would have laughed if Power did the same thing Hildebrand did because of Kimball in Turn 4 on the last lap, but we had no such luck.

I had been saying that this race has outdone itself every year since 2010, but I wasn't sure how to feel about this one. My friends were comparing it to an "old-school 500", so maybe I just feel more indifferent about this year's race because I haven't been watching the Indy 500 long enough to know what an "old-school 500" looks like. The hot weather factored into this one more than anything else; if not for that, we probably would've seen something more dynamic in terms of the racing quality. And as I said it's also the first race with a new car, so I shouldn’t have expected the first race with it to be amazing. All in all, I guess this was a decent 500. I'm sure the teams will work on a better package for next year and we'll have a better race then. If only it weren't a full year away...

This is ten days late, but oh well.

The heat (the ambient temperature reached a race record of 95 F/35 C) was intense enough on race day to significantly affect how cars handled both by themselves and especially in traffic, as Matt mentioned above. To see the races of drivers like Castroneves, Bourdais, Kanaan, and Patrick all end their races by losing it on their own really shows how easy that it was to lose control. The multi-car runs during the two weeks of practice leading up to the race looked very different than what transpired for the majority of the race (I know that the racers normally drive much differently in practice than they do in the race, but I digress).

And while the field may have been a little spread out beyond the restarts, there were two drivers in particular who made the race really fun to watch. Alexander Rossi and Graham Rahal collectively improved 48 positions from where they started; we spent much of the race following the two of them as well as Oriol Servià, who was doing a lot of passing, himself, even before his attempted fuel run to the finish. And of course everybody who saw the TV broadcast saw the many near-hopless maneuvers that Rossi somehow managed to make work. His run to the front in particular was really something to see, and it's amazing to see what he's been able to make happen all year with such confidence, bravery, and skill.

Once it became apparent that Servià, Wilson, Harvey, and Dixon were making a run for it on fuel, it started to look like we all might have been about to witness something special, and not unlike Rossi's heroic run to the finish two years ago. The whole north end of the speedway roared with cheers once Wilson got the lead on the final restart, and did so every time he went by until he had to dive into the pits. Admittedly I was somewhat disappointed that the fuel runs didn't work out for the #25, #60 or the #64, but the victory was well-earned by Will Power. He was one of the fastest cars at the speedway all month long, and he drove a fantastic race to cap it all off. I've never been his biggest fan, but it was really cool to see him so elated after he won it. It's obvious that he appreciates the importance of the race, and after having had such a successful career up to this point, it's only fitting that his name has now been added to the coveted list of 500 champions.

gone-sovereign wrote:Worth noting that a couple of the EFR guys were at this race: Ike (Rykia), Vincenzo (SpeedDemon37), and Rutana (Syzygy) were all seated in the Turn 3 grandstands. Lucas (RockyDennis) attended this race for the second year in a row, sitting in the same spot he was in last year -- in the grandstands behind NASCAR pit stall #41 on the frontstretch. All of them got to see a lot of action from their perspectives during this race.

And boy, was it a blast! As I already stated, this probably wasn't the single-most thrilling 500 of all time, but being there in person was an amazing experience; I very much hope that I can go back soon! I'm really happy that I could make it down there for the race and for all of Ike's help in making this mini-EFR meetup happen.