By Bruce Martin
NSSN Correspondent
FORT WORTH, Texas — By scoring his first victory of the season in Saturday night’s IndyCar Series Bombardier Learjet 550k at Texas Motor Speedway, Sam Hornish, Jr. is closing in on an impressive plateau.
His next victory will be his 20th in IndyCar racing, increasing his career victory record in the 12-year-old series.
“It will be pretty big,” Hornish said. “For a while last year I thought that I might have an opportunity to get there before my 100th race, and that would make it 20 percent. But this is unbelievable. If you had told me I would have won one Indy car race rather than 19 of them including the Indianapolis 500, I would have thought you were crazy.
“I’ve been very blessed, and I look forward to my next race because I have the opportunity to get No. 20. It would be great to get it pretty soon so I don’t have to think about it much longer.”
Hornish scored his 19th-career win when he survived a thrilling 15-lap dash to the finish that included Tony Kanaan and Danica Patrick. Hornish used the low line to stay ahead of the Andretti Green Racing duo.
With one lap to go, Kanaan went to the outside of Hornish in the first turn.  The two went down the backstretch, but Hornish was able to win by .0786 second.
“I thought we might get one of those side-by-side finishes because Tony was pretty strong,” Hornish said. “We had just a great car, and the gears that my engineer picked out were exactly what they needed to be. I knew if he got beside me, I could beat him to the line.”
Patrick’s third-place finish was the best of her career. The estimated crowd of 80,000 fans was on its feet for the final portion of the race, as Patrick had a legitimate shot at her first-career IndyCar victory.
Hornish led by as much as nine seconds before a huge crash late in the race erased his advantage. When the green flag waved on lap 206,  Hornish was barely in front of Kanaan and Patrick.
Kanaan closed the gap on the leader, but once Patrick got around Scott Sharp’s lapped car, she closed up on Kanaan to tighten the battle as the fastest car on the race track.
But with five laps to go, Patrick began to fall back as Kanaan closed on Hornish, who led five times for 159 laps.
Patrick, who was embroiled in a controversy after she was involved in a post-race confrontation with Dan Wheldon following last Sunday’s race at Milwaukee, finished third.
A huge crash on lap 197 on the backstretch took out six cars, including race favorites Dan Wheldon, who led four times for 52 laps, Scott Dixon and Helio Castroneves. Also involved were Ed Carpenter, Darren Manning and A.J. Foyt IV, whose wheel came off and caused the crash. 
Kanaan miraculously drove through the crash without any contact with Manning or the tire that had come off.
“I felt like ‘Days of Thunder,’” Kanaan said, referring to the NASCAR movie of the early 1990s. “I just saw smoke, closed my eyes and drove through.”
Wheldon did not have the same fortune.
“A little bit of bad luck for the guys on the team and me,” Wheldon said. “It’s unfortunate, but we didn’t quite have the speed today. It’s unfortunate. I’ve had worse happen to me. We just have to bounce back.”