Hometown hero has a race to win
INDIANAPOLIS – Ed Carpenter can’t dance. It’s something he wants me to know, his way of explanation, as if to say: There is no explanation. He won the pole for the 2018 Indianapolis 500 on Sunday, won it again, his third pole since 2013 and his fourth front-row start in six years, and it’s not like he’s a qualifying specialist who can’t handle Indianapolis Motor Speedway with traffic. He led this race two other years when he didn’t start from the pole and had a real shot to win another time, and he can’t explain it, other than to put it like this:
“This track is very much a rhythm track,” he says, and he thinks he’s finished talking, but I’m staring at him stupidly.
Carpenter gets the message and continues.
“Ovals, everyone thinks you’re just turning left,” he says. “But there’s four corners here, and there’s so much going on. This racetrack has a rhythm to it, how you drive that car. And I feel like I feel that rhythm really well. Terrible dancer, though.”
Spend an afternoon at IMS, come out here when the sun is shining and the cars are roaring, and it sounds like the world’s largest beehive. To Carpenter, it must sound like a symphony. He’s hearing Mozart or Beethoven, even as other drivers hear warning sirens.Will Power, who has won 29 IndyCar races but never the Indy 500, called this racetrack “daunting” after qualifying third on Sunday. Danica Patrick, who will race for the final time next week, finishing her career at the racetrack where it first went viral in 2005, qualified seventh among Sunday’s Fast Nine and said a trip around IMS is “either boring or you change your drawers.”
Ed Carpenter isn’t daunted. He isn’t changing, ahem, his drawers. For whatever reason – it’s a rhythm racetrack, perhaps, and he has the rhythm – IMS just makes sense to him.
Simon Pagenaud, who qualified second on Sunday and will start next week’s race on the front row between Carpenter and Power, said Carpenter’s race team – called Ed Carpenter Racing; it’s his team – has special insight into IMS.
“They understand this place very well,” Pagenaud said. “They obviously know how to get speed out of these cars. They definitely understand something great.”
Understand this: This is the race Carpenter wants. He flinches when I ask him about that, because everyone in the paddock wants this race – it’s the Indianapolis 500, for crying out loud – and because he isn’t about to say he wants it more than anyone else.
“We would all cut off an arm to win this race,” he says. “Or more.”
But that’s why he’s driving the car and I’m writing the story, this one, explaining to you that this is the race Ed Carpenter wants so badly that his focus changes and his job title changes and people around him say that even his personality changes.
Ed’s an intense man, nobody who knows him would try to suggest otherwise, but this is his city and that’s his racetrack and this is the race he wants.
Ed Carpenter wins his third Indianapolis 500 pole position. Clark Wade/IndyStar
And so when he pulls into the Ed Carpenter Racing garage at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, he is greeted by a sign that reminds him: You’re not the boss anymore. Not this week. This week the driver-owner sheds half that title, because his team knows: He needs – no, he deserves – every bit of focus he can muster. Carpenter put together the Danica Patrick deal, folding her into his race team for her final shot at IMS, but now he removes himself from that, from the circus around Patrick. He trusts the team he has put together to take care of the details, and his team is having one hell of a week.
All three ECR drivers made it into the Fast Nine on Sunday, with Spencer Pigot qualifying sixth, one spot ahead of Patrick.
“The team’s been nearly perfect,” Carpenter says. “It’s been a really good week.”
A good week for Carpenter is a happy week at IMS, where his popularity is discernible in volume. He’s a hometown driver, of course, an Indianapolis native since age 8 who graduated from Butler and is wonderfully busy in the community with his wife, Heather. Carpenter’s No. 20 Chevrolet has a “Project 44” decal to represent Butler through the legacy of late Butler center Andrew Smith, who was 25 when he died in 2015 of leukemia, and whose loved ones hope to register enough blood-marrow donors to save 44 lives.
Carpenter is a Bulldog through and through, attaching a sticker of the iconic Butler mascot to the dashboard of his race car, just left of the steering wheel. Carpenter is pals with Butler director of external relations Michael Kaltenmark, who you might know as the owner of the bulldog Blue III. Kaltenmark was at the track Sunday with Carpenter. Blue III, aka Trip, will be out later this week. Carpenter is pals with Trip, too.
Danica Patrick four lap average of 228.090 mph puts her inside row three for Sunday’s Indianapolis 500. Clark Wade/IndyStar
“Oh sure, Trip knows Ed,” Kaltenmark is telling me. “Trip knows close friends and family.” And Ed’s one of those? “Ed’s one of those,” Kaltenmark says. Carpenter has a race to win, and the crowd at IMS will rejoice if it happens. One lap into his four-lap qualifying effort on Sunday, the crowd exploded when he became the only driver to top the 230mph barrier this week.
Gregg Doyel