The 1992 Indianapolis 500 saw 10 former winners start the race – but none of them won it. The highest-placed former winner that day was four-time Indy victor Al Unser Sr of Team Menard, who managed to coax the notoriously fast-but-fickle Buick engine past the chequered flag. He was 10 seconds behind the winner, his son Al Unser Jr, who won for Team Galles by holding off Scott Goodyear’s Walker Racing entry by just 0.043 seconds – the race’s closest ever finish.
Recent news that Ryan Hunter-Reay and Dreyer & Reinbold Racing will unite for this year’s 500 brings the tally of former winners entered for the Memorial Day Weekend classic to nine. And perhaps more so than in 1992, all previous victors participating in 2023 have the potential to star. But of those who have already sipped, slurped and splashed the milk at the Speedway, who is most likely to repeat on 28 May this year? Let's take them in reverse order.
Team: Dreyer & Reinbold Racing
Engine: Chevrolet
2014 winner
It’s almost a self-generated cliché by this writer to describe Dennis Reinbold’s team as the best of the Indy 500 one-off squads, and it’s become increasingly meaningless as so many have dropped away over the past few years. But DRR also regularly outperforms the 'Indy-only' entrants run by full-time IndyCar teams… and even the full-time drivers in the full-time teams!
For example, in 2021, Sage Karam struggled for speed in his DRR car during qualifying, yet rose from the back row to finish the race in seventh after a flawless performance from team and driver. Last year, Santino Ferrucci qualified 15th and finished 10th, meaning he started ahead of the entire Andretti Autosport team, both Meyer Shank cars, and a Penske. He then finished ahead of all the Penske cars and all but one of the Andretti cars.
Over the last few years, the thought has occurred to many – maybe to Reinbold himself – that DRR is only a proven winner away from scoring a top three. And that driver might well be Hunter-Reay.
“I was incredibly attracted to the fact that DRR is a streamlined program that puts all of its energy into the month of May,” said Hunter-Reay, putting a positive spin on the fact that the team will always face an uphill battle against those who are in the IndyCar Series race in, race out. But his logic isn’t flawed, and nor is Reinbold’s in hiring the 2014 500 winner. If the car is good enough, a couple of acclimatisation runs should see him back on pace, and it would be no surprise to see the #23 DRR machine qualify in the first four rows. Thereafter? Both team and driver have proven over time that they can make strong progress on race day.
Team: Meyer Shank Racing
Engine: Honda
2019 winner
Simon Pagenaud has become renowned for making the most of what he’s got at the Speedway, and while there must be times when he misses the nurturing of former race engineer Ben Bretzman at Team Penske, Pagenaud can feel confident in Garrett Mothersead, another engineer who has conquered the 500.
Pagenaud is meticulous in practice. He knows exactly how his car should feel for it to work in dirty air or running on its own, on a variety of lines, and in different weather and track conditions. That’s what allowed him to climb through the pack from 26th to third in 2021, and had the race been the Indy 505 on that occasion, he might well have claimed his second Indy win in three years.
Opportunities to pull off those back-to-front performances are rare these days, so it’s become increasingly important for a driver to qualify well – and Pagenaud has proven he can do that, too, when the car is right: aside from his pole in 2019, he has qualified in the first three rows on four other occasions.
The question marks over his ability to win in 2023 surround whether the Meyer Shank crew can beat the likes of Ganassi, Penske and Arrow McLaren under the duress of a yellow-flag pitstop, and whether the MSR team and its technical partner Andretti Autosport have caught up with Ganassi in terms of generic set-up.
Team: Meyer Shank Racing
Engine: Honda
2001, ’02, ’09, ’21 winner
Helio Castroneves’ bubbly and fluorescent personality outside the cockpit belies the cool and rational man who analyses his way around the Speedway each May, taking the high line he learned from former mentor Rick Mears and using it routinely during practice, qualifying and the race. Indeed, Castroneves spends so much time crossing from high line to low line and back again, across the wake of the cars in front, it’s little wonder that by race time, he is fully aware of how his car will react with clean air on the right side, clean air on the left side, or zero clean air on either side. He made his climb from 27th to seventh last year look relatively easy.
Famously, Castroneves has won the race four times – and finished a close runner-up on three other occasions. But less appreciated is the fact that in 22 attempts at the 500, he has crashed out of just two. If you want your car to complete 200 laps, he’s a damn good bet.
Reservations over his ultimate potential this year are similar to those surrounding his team-mate Pagenaud. But then, Castroneves was by no means favourite to score his fourth win a dozen years after his third. Yet when it mattered, there he was, able to out-drive and out-think an immensely talented driver, Alex Palou, in a superior car.
Team: Team Penske
Engine: Chevrolet
2018 winner
In his first 11 Indianapolis 500s for Penske, between 2009 and 2019, Will Power never started outside the first three rows and had a qualifying average of 5.1. Since then, things have taken a tumble: in qualifying trim, the Penske cars were mediocre in 2020, dreadful in ’21 and nothing special last year. So his qualifying average over those three years has been 21.7.
Despite his record-setting tally of 68 pole positions, Power has yet to add an Indy 500 P1 to his resume. But if he were to finally achieve it this year, the majority of the excitement he felt would be founded in his relief that Penske – and Chevrolet – were back on the pace at Roger Penske’s holy ground. Then he and the team would feel the pressure of needing to maximise the opportunity.
That has been the #12 team’s speciality over the past year or so, with strategist Ron Ruzewski, race engineer Dave Faustino and Power himself all proving to be very shrewd operators across the whole IndyCar season. But at the Speedway specifically, is this 18-time winning team back at a level where it can beat all-comers for outright pace? Impossible to tell at this stage. Penske made greater gains in speed at Indy between 2021 and 2022 than any other team, but the obvious caveat is that it was coming from a place it should never have inhabited – its most woeful nadir since the team failed to qualify for the 1995 edition.
Penske’s drivers have acknowledged the team’s primary focus over the winter was on reaching the front of the pack for Indy, but unless Chevrolet has a truly superior product to Honda at Speedway speeds, it’s hard to imagine Penske making up its deficit to Ganassi over the past three years.
Team: Arrow McLaren
Engine: Chevrolet
2013 winner
There will be many pretending to have something in their eye when Tony Kanaan is introduced to a deafening bellow from the crowd on 28 May. For the Brazilian veteran has decided that this is the end of the road for him in US open-wheel racing.
It’s appropriate it should come at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. In one of those quirks of fate that we have come to associate with the track, a driver who became famous for misfortune while in a front-running (Andretti Green Racing /Andretti Autosport) car finally captured the race of his dreams in a KV Racing entry in 2013, after a manic race. Over the years, that result has come to be regarded as less of an oddity – Kanaan is one of those drivers who can rise to the occasion at Indy, made evident by his third-place finish last year for Ganassi.
Now he is getting the opportunity to sign off in another one of the Source: Autosport