Hunter-Reay on wild ride at Indy: ‘The stuff dreams are made of’

“I have never been so mentally and emotionally exhausted.”

That was Ryan Hunter-Reay’s take on the three-day whirlwind experience of having his primary Indy 500 car catch fire last Friday on Carb Day, watching his crew work for more than 24 hours straight to replace the burned car with a beaten-up backup to test on Saturday, and racing into the lead for 48 of the 200 laps on Sunday at the Indianapolis 500.

Unfortunately, the FOX broadcast missed the amazing comeback story as it played out with Dreyer & Reinbold Racing/Cusick Motorsports, the smallest team in the IndyCar Series, the last of its kind as an Indy 500-only participant, as it came within a few sips of fuel from being in the mix to win “The Greatest Spectacle In Racing.”

But leave it to the 2012 IndyCar Series champion and 2014 Indy 500 winner to fix the oversight and take us on a fascinating and winding tale of how the biggest underdogs at the biggest sporting event in the world almost pulled off the upset of the century.

“Somehow we managed to experience the full spectrum of emotions that Indy can offer,” the 44-year-old Hunter-Reay told RACER. “But this is a unique story because just a month ago, I was in the shop doing pit stop practice in this car that had an improvised electric motor in it, and the guys were just pounding on it, doing pit stops – the team worked so hard on their stops, and they were so good on that side of it in the race. It really paid off.

“Obviously, the race car caught fire. Damaged the tub. I was hoping and praying it wasn’t damaged, but it was. It compromised the structure where the engine meets the tub. And I’ll never forget seeing the old pit stop car, all-white car, get lowered off the lift of the DRR transporter as I went by after some media thing at the track.

Hunter-Reay took DRR from a frantic to rebuild to leading the Indy 500. Joe Skibinski/IMS Photo

“I didn’t know anything about the car – nothing – just that it was a beater pit stop practice car. I jokingly said to the guys that were lowering it, ‘Well, that’s definitely not our new race car.’ They looked back at me kind of puzzled because it was! And that thing, what, 20, maybe 24 hours after they built it, turned the second-fastest lap in the Indy 500 and led the second-most laps. Absolutely wild.”

The ending of the story is a painful one to get out of the way up front. Called into the pits on the 169th lap while leading, Hunter-Reay’s No. 23 DRR/Cusick Chevy exhausted its fuel supply as it rolled into the pit box. In the realm of hindsight where perfect decisions are made, the call to come in for fresh tires and refueling would have been delivered on the 168th lap.

But Hunter-Reay’s turbocharged motor was starved of fuel – to the point where it stalled and wouldn’t refire – as all of the precious liquid that mixes with air and combusts inside the cylinder walls was burned while traveling the final distance to reach the No. 23’s pit crew. It was here where the TV cameras finally found the car that led 49 of the opening 168 laps, on pit lane, as the car stalled and as the crew plugged in the remote starter to try and prime the fuel lines and get the motor to light.

Unable to get the engine to run properly with the new fuel placed in the tank, Hunter-Reay, team owner Dennis Reinbold, partner Don Cusick, their crew and their sponsors were crestfallen. The blue car returned to the box and sat in silence as the finals stage of the Indy 500 played on without its former race leader.

Despite its frustrating conclusion, Hunter-Reay took a lot of pride from his team’s Indy run. Justin Casterline/Getty Images

“The fact that we were 30 laps away from this story panning out is just unreal,” Hunter-Reay said. “Everybody at DRR is there for one reason: They love the Indy 500. That’s it, and the amount of work and effort they put into the primary car, the body fit, is the best I’ve ever experienced – the preparation, everything like that. But I have never seen anything like this, where I saw that pit stop practice car roll into the garage and these guys, you know, obviously they show up at the track on Carb Day morn ing, let’s say seven o’clock, and worked all the way through until 2pm the next day. They worked all through the night, didn’t sleep.

“Usually, when that happens, naturally, as a driver, my worry is there’s going to be mistakes, right? There’s going to be something. Crossweights are going to be wrong, you know? This went here and should have went there, and something’s going to be a surprise. But not once. There was not one mistake, which would have been totally understood from the exhaustion. But it was perfect. With the fire, they had to fit a brand-new underwing, the whole top side of the car, the engine cover, that’s new and different car to car. The underwing is different car to car. We had no idea where the (aerodynamic center of pressure) would come in.

“IndyCar let us do an install check Saturday morning, but we did not get up to a speed where you can actually have a reliable read on the aero balance. So we went into the race with the pit stop practice car I’d never driven before, driven in anger before, and who knows what you’ve got under you, right? So we started super conservative on setup and then I had a massive amount of understeer in the first stint. That’s why I went backwards. And we just started adding front wing, even taken rear wing out, trimming, and got the balance right, and suddenly found ourselves to where I could hang with cars that I thought all month were better than us.

“And the team called a great strategy. We pit at the right time. We stayed out on a yellow you usually would take. I was looking at my fuel number and how much fuel was in the tank at that time, it’s like, ‘Wow, we’re staying out.’ But I was up for it; whatever, just throw me into it.

“On a side note, I told my kids after race – because they were all bawling their eyes out, which broke my heart – I said, ‘I could have gone into this thing with a mindset that I got a backup car. This thing’s a junker. I’m just gonna ride around, see if I can pick up some spots or whatever. Lower my expectations. But we wrung its neck.’ And that’s the one thing I hope they take away from it.”

The DRR/Cusick team is loaded with IndyCar veterans who’ve been through the wars at other teams. The local outfit also has a number of newer or younger crew members who’ve joined the program. It was crew chief Andy Natalie, and Jake Cole, and Matt Speth, and Cody and Chase Selman, and Matt Barton, and Robbie Ott, and others within the two-car program that also fielded Jack Harvey in the sister No. 24 Chevy who pitched in. And with decades of his own experience inside the cars, Hunter-Reay knows how special it was for this Indy-only team with a blended staff to recover from adversity and show that it could run with the best in the series on IndyCar’s greatest stage.

“I can’t say enough about the crew that they did all that,” he said. “I came in at probably 10pm Friday night to the garage to see if they were ready for fitting me to the car because you have different seat belts, the pedal heights; everything’s different. It’s a completely different car. A different headrest has to go in there. They weren’t ready, so I set my alarm for 5:30am and came over the garage at 6. And I could see…it’s like everybody just walked off a red-eye from Vegas… They’re absolutely exhausted and at that point, at 6 in the morning, they were still there til 2pm. I couldn’t believe it.