A cut tire was the key to Dario Franchitti’s victory in one of the most chaotic Indy 500s of recent years. The race started with pole sitter Helio Castroneves and Tony Kannan swapping the lead on several occasions. The race would involve a large number of lead changes and different leaders over the course of the afternoon, with Kannan appearing to be the most dominant car on track. However due to a large number of cautions, 11 in total, mainly the result of back markers getting offline and sliding into the wall, no real rythmn was established.The real story of the race was the rain, with the first heavy downpour arriving on Lap 111 with the AGR trio of Kannan, Marco Andretti and Danica Patrick in the first three places. Just as the red flag flew the strongly running Franchitti cut a tire but didn’t have time to replace it before the cars were parked.
After a delay of three hours the race was resumed with Franchetti making an immediate pit stop to replace the cut tire. This put him “out of sequence” with the field and at the back of the pack. What followed was an impressive charge as he picked off one car at a time. The task was made easier when several of the leaders, including Kannan and Patrick, pitted dropping them back into the field. Kannan became invloved in another back markers incident while Patrick fought back up to an 8th place finish. Marco Andretti tangled with pre-race favorite Dan Wheldon and ended up airborne and inverted before landing on all four wheels on the speedway infield.
By lap 137 Franchitti was now out front with a second heavy rain fall forecast. The rain duely arrived around thirty laps later and the race was once again red-flagged, this time for good.
The Top 10 finishers were:
- Dario Franchitti
- Scott Dixon
- Helio Castroneves
- Sam Hornish Jr.
- Ryan Briscoe
- Scott Sharp
- Thomas Scheckter
- Danica Patrick
- Davey Hamilton
- Vitor Meria
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