Hélio Castroneves Did It

Hélio Castroneves.

Holy bazookas.

Thoughts/recap/various things from yesterday:

1. Hélio Castroneves!

Hard to think of a better storyline than one-race entrant Castroneves winning his fourth Indy 500 and ascending to a tie at the top of the all-time list. Incredible stuff, and the collective joy after the race really hammered that home for those of us who don’t know IndyCar all that well.

2. The crowd.

Again, the postrace joy added a lot to this, but the roar of the crowd at a few points in the race was a special thing, and a thing that’s been sorely missed, even if not always actively. Emotional stuff.

3. Conor Daly was doing the thing.

One of those roaring-crowd points in the race came when Daly, a native Hoosier, took a stunning lead which he went on to hold for a good chunk of the day until Graham Rahal’s crash sent a wheel bounding towards Daly that gave his car a substantial hit and substantial damage.

4. How much did the aeroscreen save Conor Daly?

The small windshield at the front of the cockpit is relatively new to IndyCar, and it appeared that Rahal’s wheel struck it on Daly’s vehicle. The aeroscreen’s there to prevent drivers from getting hit in the head. I don’t know what would’ve happened if it wasn’t there, but it might have been a lot, lot worse.

5. Pit road was treacherous.

It was an historically caution-free race, but what problems there were came overwhelmingly from drivers trying to slow entering pit road.

6. The drafting differences between IndyCar and NASCAR are interesting.

In NASCAR, you get pushed, so you want cars behind you. In IndyCar, you want to break away from them. Evidently the open wheel draft is more parasitic than symbiotic, with the opposite true with stock cars? Someone correct me if I got that wrong.

7. The Indy 500 is like all of golf’s majors rolled into one.

Something I don’t do a great job of remembering is that in NASCAR and IndyCar, the Daytona 500 and, possibly to a greater extent, the Indy 500 seem to be more important than the actual championship, at least to many. In this way, both sports are more like golf and tennis, having majors and non-majors despite featuring the same characters most weeks, than they’re like team sports, in which the championship is the ultimate goal. The Indy 500’s dwarfing of the rest of the schedule in terms of importance makes it bigger, in the IndyCar world, than The Masters is in golf. It’s like, as is said above, all the majors rolled into one.