LEXINGTON, Ohio — For two drivers who had finished in the top five of Sunday’s IndyCar Honda 200 at the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, Danica Patrick and Tony Kanaan didn’t want to celebrate.
Both had been involved in an incident at the start of the race that was triggered by polesitter Helio Castroneves’s fast start. Patrick, who started on the outside of the front row, had to slow up when the pace car pulled off the track, and that allowed Castroneves to hit the accelerator.
Patrick’s car wiggled, which stacked up the outside row of cars. Kanaan hit the brakes to try to avoid Patrick, and he ran into the side of teammate Marco Andretti, sending Andretti’s car into a lazy flip, where it landed upside-down.
His father, Michael, also crashed and flipped at Mid-Ohio in a 1998 CART race.
The Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course has an unusual layout where the race actually begins on the backstretch, between the third and fourth turns of the 13-turn road course. In the old days, there was an old wooden bridge at the end of the long frontstraight, and track officials deemed it too dangerous to begin the race at the flag stand.
The old wooden bridge is gone, replaced by a concrete structure, but the tradition of starting the race coming down the hill out of the “keyhole” portion of the track remains.
That allowed a situation where the pace car has to pull off, and in order to do that, it pulled in front of Patrick’s car on the outside lane.
Patrick entered this race with her best starting position on a road course and believed her first IndyCar victory was within reach.
To pedal her way back to a fifth-place finish may have been one of Patrick’s best races. But she can’t forget about how her shot at victory ended at the very start of the race.
“I have to stop myself and think for a little bit that everything happens for a reason,” Patrick recalled. “I didn’t know what it was, maybe we’d have some clever strategy or something. We managed to work our way to the top six pretty quickly, so we didn’t get crazy with our strategy and got a solid finish.
“It’s a real shame to start the race like that, especially when there are some teammates involved.”
Patrick, Kanaan and Andretti all drive for Andretti Green Racing. A fourth driver, Dario Franchitti, finished second to race-winner Scott Dixon.
“I thought it was all right. We got some people in the pits at the beginning and after that I clipped off people one by one,” Patrick said. “It was a bit of a clunk for a while. I got a few people on restarts, but it was a shame that Marco was knocked out of the race.”