Remembering Dan Wheldon and his last and most amazing IndyCar win
By:David Malsher-Lopez
Saturday 16 October marks the 10th anniversary Dan Wheldon’s death. David Malsher-Lopez pays tribute, then asks Wheldon’s race engineer from 2011, Todd Malloy, to recall that magical second victory at the Indianapolis 500.
Once upon a time, I reckoned Dan Wheldon was superficial, a pretty boy who found racing and winning came too easy because he was driving for a top team in the Indy Racing League. His winsome, cheeky smile, his bonhomie with TV cameramen and interviewers, his tendency to say only the right things in public, the kidding around with team-mates… From a distance, it all came across as somewhat forced and artificial.
And then I met him. Turns out I had been the superficial one, because I’d been judging the Emberton, UK-born lad only on what I saw or read in the media. I was on the other side of the US open-wheel split, covering the last few years of the Champ Car World Series. But at the end of 2005 I was given the opportunity to interview Wheldon, the first UK-born winner of the Indianapolis 500 for 39 years, and now also the Indy Racing League champion. Long before the end of our one-on-one time, I realised I should have had greater faith in the idiom, ‘Speak as you find’.
Dan was mesmerising.
Of course he was in sparkling form as he explained the great experiences he’d had at Andretti Green Racing and why he was joining Chip Ganassi Racing for 2006. But what really left an impression was how ferocious was his will to win. I left the interview convinced that he’d retain ‘500’ and Series crowns.
And he could have done. His #10 Ganassi car led three-quarters of the 2006 Indy 500, but lost track position due to the way the cautions fell in the closing stages. Then he ended the season tied on points with champion Sam Hornish Jr, but missed out on the crown because of fewer wins than the Penske driver.
Wheldon’s three years at Ganassi produced six wins, but while he boosted Scott Dixon’s oval form by constantly striving for setup perfection, the shy Kiwi inadvertently highlighted the fact that Wheldon’s skills on street and road courses had been blunted. My own theory is that with ovals being so predominant in the IRL, Dan’s desire for success meant he focused on what might lead to more Indy 500 wins and more IndyCar championships to the detriment of evolving his talent on courses that demanded right as well as left turns.
His chances of achieving series titles took a dive following the 2008 merger of IRL and Champ Car, as the number of road/street courses started to increase. Also affecting Wheldon’s ability to win was the move from Ganassi to Panther Racing, a team that had conquered races and championships in the IRL era but was struggling to find its feet away from the ovals.
In fact, even on left-turn-only tracks, things were becoming ever tougher, for John Barnes’ team ran only one car full-time, and the IndyCar field was becoming deeper in quality. Naturally, Wheldon was missing someone with whom to share data in practice sessions and thereby halve the amount of time it took to investigate potential race day set-ups. That particularly hurt when the 1.5-mile ovals were 99 percent down to the speed of the car.
But mercifully, Indianapolis Motor Speedway remained a major driving challenge in that era and there Wheldon was magic. In both 2009 and 2010 he drove his Panther from 18th on the grid to finish runner-up, and while we’re fond of saying that there’s no race where second place means less, his results on those two Memorial Day Weekends were the result of Wheldon’s maturity in the practice days. He knew that wherever he qualified, he could make his way to the front, so focused on making his car one of the best in traffic.
His Indy performances immortalised Wheldon, and that was appropriate. In my experience, no other racer besides Al Unser Jr. has ever conveyed so passionately the fact that he was bewitched by Indy, and no one other than Rick Mears and Dario Franchitti has more eloquently explained the techniques, demands and quirks of the Speedway.
At the end of 2010, Wheldon left Panther and was without a full-time ride – besides being test driver for IndyCar’s next-gen chassis and engine. But former Andretti Green team-mate Bryan Herta, whose eponymous squad had started just one other IndyCar race – the previous year’s Indy 500 – knew exactly who he wanted for his team for the 500 in 2011.
While many of us thought this pair’s reunification was a cool story, few reckoned it was a winning combo against the Ganassi, Penske and Andretti hordes. But Wheldon believed it, Herta was optimistic and their blend of gung-ho demeanour and meticulous analysis pervaded the little team throughout the month of May. The #98 BHA machine qualified on the second row, ran in the top six seemingly all day and Wheldon was in position to pounce on the final lap of the race when JR Hildebrand’s Panther entry struck the wall exiting the very final turn. Indy win #2 was in the bag.
After one of the most amazing final laps anyone could remember, many onlookers were mentally torn between empathising with the devastated Hildebrand and sharing the exhilaration of Wheldon and Herta. What happened at Las Vegas Motor Speedway less than five months later reminded everyone of what real devastation at a race track felt like – and made us truly gratified by the Indy outcome.
“I think all of us had reasonable confidence in the cars going into the month of May, and then we also made progress through that month, so I think that raised Dan’s optimism,” Todd Malloy
How special was that Indy win? Well, his race engineer Todd Malloy, with previous experience of star US open-wheel teams such as Forsythe Racing, Newman/Haas/Lanigan Racing and RuSPORT, naturally recalls the day with great fondness. He had been doing contract work for Conquest Racing through much of the 2010 season, but in October that year he got a call from Steve Newey of Bryan Herta Autosport. The team had at that stage run precisely one previous IndyCar race – the 2010 Indy 500 with Sebastian Saavedra – but BHA had a unique project in the works, along with another Indy shot. that proved enough to entice Malloy.
“Steve told me that BHA had got the deal to do the development work on the all-new IndyCar for 2012,” he says, “and as I recall that was all agreed before I signed on. So I started working with them at the end of 2010 or the beginning of 2011, and once I knew what the team did and didn’t have, in terms of the extras you need to run competitively at Indy, I started urging them to form a technical alliance with an existing team, and Bryan did the deal with what was then called Sam Schmidt Motorsports.
“So I spent a decent amount of time working with Schmidt’s guys on our car and their two cars [for Alex Tagliani and Townsend Bell] as we prepared for the 500.”
It was announced at St. Petersburg’s season-opener that for a second year, Indy Lights team Bryan Herta Autosport would temporarily move up to IndyCar to enter the Indy 500 but this time it would be with 2005 winner Wheldon – currently out of work. Notwithstanding the quality of the personnel involved, their mission to win looked crazy-ambitious. The Dallara IR09 in its final year was very long in the tooth, everything there was to know about the car had been learned, so it wasn’t as if anyone at BHA was going to make a sudden breakthrough to vault the team ahead of the multi-car opposition from the star squads owned by Roger Penske, Chip Ganassi and Michael Andretti.
But still, SSM and BHA were rightfully considered underdogs. Yet Wheldon, despite years of experience at Andretti and Ganassi, and most recently Panther, for whom Indy always appeared to be the endgame, was no prima donna at BHA – but nor, just as importantly, did he lean on the relative newness or smallness of the team as an excuse for underperformance.
“I think all of us had reasonable confidence in the cars going into the month of May, and then we also made progress through that month, so I think that raised Dan’s optimism,” says Malloy. “Tagliani’s car was just a rocketship, wicked fast, and we rubbed and rubbed on our car but it was never going to beat that car. In the end no one did, and so Tag got pole. But we lined up sixth, and Townsend in the other car was fourth. So I think that was testament to the work that we and SSM had done together.
“But what was different about BHA is that by 2011 Dan had a lot of experience of Indy, both great and bad, and he was just so focused on the big picture, the 500 miles. Tag would be doing a lot of short runs to make sure the outright speed of his car was good, and we were doing the long runs. Dan was pretty focused on making sure we had good long run pace, good handling in traffic, good handling whatever the weather and track conditions – and to be honest, his mindset was critically important to the end result.
"And Dan knew what he wanted because he’d done it for several years, he’d been a winner, so he knew what it would take. His feedback was great – spectacular, actually – and we gelled easily. I had worked with him very briefly at Team Green in when Michael Andretti bought into the team and Dan arrived. I was assistant engineer at his first couple of tests before I went over to Champ Car. So it wasn’t a brand new relationship, but still, it was good that we gelled really well straight away in 2011. He trusted me, I trusted him.”
One of the potential weak links in any start-up/one-off Indy 500 squad can be the mechanics or pitcrew, for the simple reason that finding top quality personnel, in the month when inevitably there’s a run on them, can prove tricky. Heck, even the most experienced of squads – or the drivers – can foul up under the pressure of competing in the biggest race of the world. But BHA suffered no such problems – another case of crucial personnel gelling together for the common cause.
Ask Malloy, in all honesty, when he believed a victory was on and he answers simply, “When JR crashed! So Turn 4, Lap 200!
“Seriously, it made no sense to us how he could be out there still running around. We thought we were in pretty good shape fuel-wise compared to the others – and we were – and in those final laps we had passed strong cars that were now running slowly, like the Ganassi cars, because they were obviously trying to squeeze that last drop of fuel without making another stop. But JR was another matter: he just stayed out, stayed out, stayed out… and it wasn’t like he was running around slowly. He was still running really strong laps, and so we just thought, ‘Huh, OK, that’s it.’ We started to feel a bit deflated because now we were expecting a P2. Then next thing we know, JR shunts and we win. I like JR a lot but that win was so sweet.”
While there was sheer elation in the BHA pit, and in the #98 car’s cockpit as Dan screamed out, yelled his thanks, and declared his love for wife Susie, there didn’t seem to be as much shock from the driver as there were from his team personnel. It almost seemed like he had expected to add another win to his Indy 500 tally…
“Yeah, it’s interesting,” agrees Malloy. “I would say there was an air of quiet confidence in the team that grew through the month as our pace increased. We definitely felt like we should be in the mix, especially as we got the car better and better in traffic. But there’s still so many things that can go wrong for any of the 33 cars that you can’t ever go in thinking you’re going to win. A huge part of it was the partnership with SSM, and Allen McDonald who was on Tag’s car – he’s a good friend and I have huge respect for him. The work that those guys had already put in, we benefited from that, in that we started from a very good point in terms of equipment and understanding of the cars.
A decade on, we as motorsport fans and observers can celebrate Wheldon's life, while acknowledging that since that day the members of his UK and US families have had holes in their lives that no one can fill
“Then we kept chipping away at it, getting the car better and better, and that was steered by Dan’s feedback, his experience, his knowledge, the little details he went into to tell me what he thought the car needed, and then his analysis of what those changes did when we tried them. I honestly don’t feel that car could have been more race-ready by the time. He worked hard, the team worked hard, so after that it’s just about executing.”
For the Las Vegas finale, in which Wheldon could win $5m if he came from the back of the 32-car field to win, he was shifted into the Sam Schmidt Motorsports #77 car with which Tagliani had taken his scintillating pole at Indy.
Malloy recalls: “This car that had been mysteriously fast at Indy was mysteriously slow in practice at Vegas, so we went from high expectations to low expectations. So there was a lot of head-scratching, we tore the car down and rebuilt it and for those first 10 laps it was looking promising.”
Indeed so – the #77 passed an average of a car per lap in those opening moments. Then on Lap 11 a predictable chain-reaction accident turned into an unpredictable and hideous catastrophe, and Dan Wheldon was gone, aged 33.
A decade on, we as motorsport fans and observers can celebrate Wheldon's life, while acknowledging that since that day the members of his UK and US families have had holes in their lives that no one can fill. In fact, many of his close friends will say the same. But even in as narrow a field as IndyCar racing, Wheldon’s legacy is so much more than two Indy 500 wins, a championship and a total of 16 wins.
The series lost perhaps its most charismatic driver of this century, a man to whom people – fans, media folks, fellow drivers, sponsor representatives – were drawn as if by magnetic force.