No matter that Adrian Fernandez won the IRL’s Delphi 300 on Sunday at Chicagoland Speedway, where he comfortably defeated runner-up Bryan Herta and third-pace finisher Tony Kanaan. That was anticlimactic.
The true climax came 14 laps before the end, when Darren Manning’s right front wheel kissed the left rear wheel of Buddy Rice. That launched Rice’s car, which did a backward somersault, landed on its nose, bounced down onto its roll bar, listed to its left, slammed into the wall and finally slid upside down along the backstretch for hundreds of yards.
“Hey, Buddy. Hear us there?” his crew said to him over the radio.
Rice, who won last May’s Indianapolis 500, did not respond. Even before the car stopped, the safety crew was there. Eventually, gently, 13 of its members righted the car. As soon as they did, Rice popped up into sight.
“I was just hoping for it to stop,” he said. “All I had were sparks and stuff flying by me the whole time. I have no idea what happened. It’s what ends up happening when you have 20-lap shootouts at places like this. Everyone is in tight quarters all the time, and it’s the way it goes.”
Kanaan, who could see Rice flying by over his left shoulder, said: “He was up. I [went] underneath. It was pretty close. It was scary. Buddy was very lucky. I have nothing against him. I think he’s a great racecar driver. But today he was a little crazy out there.”
The craziness overshadowed a race witnessed by about 45,000 that featured 24 lead changes among eight drivers. After Tomas Scheckter was put out in a wreck, he said: “There was a lot of wheel-banging out there. It made things pretty tough.”
After the same wreck put out Jaques Lazier, he said, “Without a doubt, people were driving over their heads.”
After a faulty gearbox cost him track position and then ended his day early, Dario Franchitti said, “We got shuffled back a bit, and then you get back with all the idiots who are trying to wheel-bang and all sorts of stuff.”
All of this resulted in six cautions and benefited Fernandez, whose pit strategy earned him the lead with 19 laps to go. Herta passed him a lap later, but Fernandez immediately regained the lead. Three laps later Rice went airborne, and this race had its climax.
It wasn’t Fernandez, who was never threatened even after the track went green for the last seven laps. It was Rice, the symbol of the madness that characterized the day.
“Long day. Very crazy,” Kanaan said. “I tried to lead as much as I could to stay out of trouble because I was expecting it to be messy back there. But I tell you, it was worse than what I thought.”
Said Rice: “It’s wheel to wheel, and things can happen. Everyone gets excited at times. But actually the crash wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be. The car moved up in the air and I just grabbed my seatbelts and held on.
“It’s not something I want to be doing every week. But it was OK considering what could have happened. There were no bumps, no bruises. I just held on for the ride.”
