The Race by James McGuane

Author:James McGuane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sports Publishing
Published: 2016-03-28T04:00:00+00:00

My goal in that race was to keep the race leaders in sight. We had a very fast race car, but it’s not always the fastest cars that win. You have to be in the race at the end to win. I bided my time, I led at certain parts of the race, at other times in the race I was in the top five. Until . . . (I think Bobby Unser calls it the “blood and guts” of the race) . . . the last stint. The last pit stop.

Out!

You really let the car “all out.”

They had just repaved the race track for the month of May, so it was as fast as I’d ever seen it. We had incredible grip and that was the last year of the turbocharged engines. We were just screaming. We were cutting off laps—wide open—in the 238 or 239 miles per hour. I think it hit 240 in the draft. We were just haulin’. It was a very, very fast race. You have yellows—cautions—that pull down the average speed of the race so I don’t know if the record supports it, but it was a very fast race. For the first time in my life I had [a] car that could win the Indianapolis 500. With all the struggling I’d done I wasn’t going to let an injury like this keep me from winning the Indy 500.

The only thing that’s on your mind is what’s in front of you. For me it was looking at each stage of the race. Okay, that was a clean pit stop, picking off race cars and moving my way through the field, and of course “staying clean”—making it to the end of the race. And when I got to the end of the race, I was able to let it all hang out. I made a couple of passes at the end of the race for the win.

You never know if it can happen again. For the last eight years I’ve been trying so hard to get back into Winner’s Circle—especially in 1997, when we came so close, missing it by three or four seconds and in 2000 missing again by two or three seconds. When you take second place at the Indy 500, if you’d never won it before, it would be the greatest thing.

The Indianapolis 500 is all about dreams. In life there are so many dreams that don’t come true. I wouldn’t say “crushed” dreams. There are so many people that have gone there [and] given it all they’ve got, but they just didn’t have the race car to qualify. That driver’s life has now been “put on hold.” He has an eleven-month quest to get back with a bigger gun, a bigger race car that would be capable of qualifying. Then there are guys like me that have struggled, then found a race car that will qualify, and go on to win the race. I’ve had dreams that have come true.

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