Hinchcliffe hopes Derby luck persists
Earlier this month, IndyCar driver James Hinchcliffe found himself in a familiar place. He was at a prestigious race track with some people there for the competition, plenty there for the party and a few there just hoping to make a little money. Only horses were racing instead of cars.
At his first Kentucky Derby — along with fellow driver and last year’s Indy 500 winner Alexander Rossi — Hinchcliffe was just there for the ride. But miraculously, the driver of the No. 5 Schmidt Peterson Motorsports Honda actually walked away with a little extra cash in his pocket.
“I’m not a gambler — I know nothing about horse racing — so I did what any egotistical racing driver would do, and I bet on the horse that had my number,” Hinchcliffe explained Thursday at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. “And I won, so it kind of worked out for us.
“This gambling thing is easy, I don’t know why guys don’t do it more often,” he joked about his $1,400 winnings from Always Dreaming, the No. 5 horse, finishing first.
As he recalled his first Derby just days before the Indy 500, Hinchcliffe drew several parallels between the Verizon IndyCar Series’ most famous event and the horse racing world’s biggest spectacle. Along with the prestige of both, their histories extend more than a century, they both offer an overwhelming number of prerace festivities and pageantry and fans don’t need to know much about the respective sports to have a good time.
Although racing is racing in some sense, he noticed one major difference between the two.
“The biggest thing from the fan perspective is at the Derby, you stand around all day drinking, waiting every half hour for a 90second race,” Hinchcliffe said. “Where in IndyCar at the 500, you stand around all day drinking the
entire time there’s a race going on. “There was a lot more standing around and waiting for stuff to happen than there is here at the 500, so I would definitely still prefer this event as a fan.” Of course he would. But does he think his unexpected Kentucky Derby luck could carry over to a win from his No. 17 starting spot?
“God, I hope so,” he said, shaking his head. “I hope I didn’t use it all up there. I’ll be really upset if I potentially traded an Indy 500 win for a winning ticket at the Kentucky Derby.”