2004 Indy 500 Wrap

Congrats to Buddy Rice, the winner of the 88th Indianapolis 500. Rice’s Rahal/Letterman team takes home more than $1.7 million of the $10 + million purse. The 1.7 isn’t bad, but the total purse really needs to be raised to garner more interest by teams and drivers to compete in the 500. But that is another argument and we have been over that before and will cover it again I am sure. Kosuke Matsuura was named Rookie of the Year. When they finally did go racing it was a good one. Rice really did seem to have the fastest car of the day although Vitor Meira actually turned the fastest lap. Rice took off like a shot from the green flag and really pulled away from Tony Kanaan and Dan Weldon who seemed to be the only other two in his zip code most of the day. Of course strategy played a part and Rice was shuffled back on a couple of pit stops, but he was able to get through. On his last stop his team demonstrated why he won the Carb Day pit stop competition with a fantastic stop that kept him ahead of TK and The Gentleman. There was intrigue at the end as Bruno was leading at lap 150 because he had gotten out of sequence with the leaders on pit stops. Had it rained 10 minutes earlier, he or possibly Bryan Herta would have won. Herta too was out of sequence. All in all it was a good day of racing, but a long day nonetheless. We got on the road from my place about 8:15. By 9:15 the next set of rains came and came hard. That delayed the start of the race by a little more than an hour. After just 27 laps the rains came again. Not as hard so we stayed in our seats as most everyone else bolted for the exits. They did allow pass outs so a lot of people left the grounds. Miraculously they were only down about an hour and a half before resuming the race. As I am sure you know the race was called at lap 180 and shortly thereafter, the skies opened up. I took my time getting back to the car as I was rain geared up. We eventually left Speedway at 7. It was a long day, but I am glad we got it in on Sunday. As much as I love that place, I just didn’t want to do it all over on Monday!