Sato wins Indy 500 under caution with stands empty
Wins race for second time after teammate crashed
INDIANAPOLIS — At an eerily empty Indianapolis
Motor Speedway, Takuma Sato snatched a second Indianapolis 500 victory in an odd and unsatisfying finish to “The Greatest Spectacle in Racing.”
Sato held off Scott Dixon and won under caution after teammate Spencer Pigot crashed with five laps remaining in Sunday’s race, run in front of empty grandstands for the first time in 104 runnings because of the pandemic.
Pigot needed medical attention on the track, the crash scene was a massive debris field and the cleanup time would have been lengthy. There were also just four laps left in the race, not really enough time to allow for a proper restart.
If it had been a NASCAR race, a stoppage would have been immediate to set up a final shootout. Indycar tends to avoid gimmicks and a late red-flag in the 2014 Indy 500 incensed purists.
Dixon, the five-time Indycar champion who had dominated the race, asked on his radio if Indycar was going to give the drivers a final shootout.
“Are they going red?” Dixon
asked. “They’ve got to go red. There’s no way they can clean that up.”
The answer was no, turning the end of the race into a game of what-ifs.
“Its a little silly to predict what might have happened. The reality is Takuma won,” said winning car owner Bobby Rahal. “This isn’t the first 500 to be flagged under yellow and there was a hell of a mess out there.”
Indycar said in a statement after the finish “there were too few laps remaining to gather the field behind the pace car, issue a red flag and then restart for a green-flag finish.”
Dixon was visibly disappointed after leading 111 of the 200 laps in pursuit of his own second Indy win.
“Definitely a hard one to swallow for sure. We had such a great day,” Dixon said. “First time I’ve seen them let it run out like that. I thought they’d throw a red.”
Dixon had figured he would ultimately run down Sato as
Sato worked through lapped traffic, and he believed Sato’s team was cutting it close on fuel. Rahal said his driver had enough gas to get to the end.
None of it mattered in the end as Sato was able to coast around the speedway then ride the lift new track owner Roger Penske installed to take the winner to an elevated victory circle. Along for the ride were Rahal, the 1986 Indy 500 winner, and David Letterman, his mask buried in an unruly gray beard as the longtime comedian and TV host greeted Sato.
“Let me just say, if someone said to me this morning at the end of the Indianapolis 500 that Takuma Sato and Scott Dixon and Graham Rahal would be racing for the lead, I would say that’s a dream, that’s a dream come true,” Letterman said. “And I woke up and it turned out we won the Indianapolis 500.”
Sato became the first Japanese winner of the Indy 500 in 2017. Graham Rahal, Sato’s teammate at Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing, was third behind Dixon.
The Sato win helped Honda snap Chevrolet’s two-year Indy 500 winning streak. Santino Ferrucui finished fourth as Honda took the fist four spots.