A primary car that caught fire, a back-up that had been an 'EV mule', and a quarter-mile of fuel away from glory. It's time to delve deeper into one of the best stories from this year's Indianapolis 500.
Ryan Hunter-Reay is the 2012 IndyCar champion and 2014 Indy 500 winner. At the end of 2021 he left the Andretti seat he'd made those achievements in, sat on the sidelines for a year, and has since returned to the race for the last three seasons with Dreyer & Reinbold Racing/Cusick Motorsports.
He led 48 of this year's 200 laps, the second-most of anyone on the day, and was set to come out at the head of the pack that eventually fought for the win, featuring eventual race winner Alex Palou and Marcus Ericsson, at the final stop. Even more importantly, an average stop would have also got him out ahead of the two drivers trying to stay on the lead lap, Devlin DeFrancesco and Louis Foster, that Palou and Ericsson got stuck behind.
Add all that together - on the lead strategy with 30 laps to go, and with two cars as a buffer desperately trying to get their laps back and keeping pace - and it's hard to imagine how Hunter-Reay wouldn't have won his second Indy 500 if that last stop had just gone to plan.
But he ran out of fuel just before pitting on lap 169. With not enough fuel to get to the engine even after filling the tank, the car couldn't be restarted.
"It's headline stuff, it's kind of what dreams are made of," Hunter-Reay says of his lost win, speaking on the latest episode of The Race IndyCar Podcast.
"And I don't even think the Fox broadcast booth had an idea of exactly how real it was that we were going to have a shot.
"We were going to be controlling the race from the front. In the last stint I was going to come out in front of those two lap cars that Alex Palou and Marcus Ericsson had to deal with from behind.
"Could have, should have, would have, but I would have had a shot to go fight for it.
"And yeah, we just missed it by tenths of a gallon, quarter mile, basically."
But that's not even really the craziest part of the story.
On the Friday before the Indy 500, Hunter-Reay's car erupted into flames in the pits during Carb Day practice. With no back-up built to the same specification, Hunter-Reay needed the spare car and he must have been speechless when he saw it.
A few weeks ago he had been sat in this car - when it was an EV. The team put an electric motor in it to practice pitstops. So not only was it not a car with all the perfectly curved, flat and treated areas for aerodynamics on the surface, but it had been battered thousands of times with wheels being smashed on and ripped off.
"This car had to be converted from that pitstop-beater to the race car basically overnight," adds Hunter-Reay, with most of the Dreyer & Reinbold/Cusick crew not sleeping and working through the night.
To make matters worse, after building this car, the team had to ask for a special session on Saturday morning to do an install and check for leaks. That amounted to an out-and-in lap in freezing cold conditions, some of the coldest on record. There was no chance for a balance check as the tyres were too cold and the air not representative of the density and temperature it would be in the Indy 500.
Then it was wrapped, and thrown straight at Turn 1 at over 200mph for the first time in the race the next day!
"The team does such a great job in their car prep," says Hunter-Reay, "because they focus only on the 500, it's a really talented group there at Dreyer & Reinbold/Cusick Motorsports.
"Their preparation, the car fit, the body fit, all of that is some of the best I've ever seen. However, the race car, the primary car, is the car."
Hunter-Reay says he "sunk like a stone" at the start of the race because they'd gone conservative on the set-up, basically for safety, and he had horrendous understeer. But the team kept adding front wing, and Hunter-Reay's point about its preparation was clearly bang on as the car edged closer and closer to contention.
It's not easy to be the only team that does only the Indy 500. Your personnel might be fresher and motivated a bit differently, but they're also coming up against teams in the rhythm of six race weekends already and with bigger budgets and staff counts.
It feels like every year Dreyer & Reinbold/Cusick overachieves in someway. It qualified 12th in 2024, which "is something remarkable" in this series, Hunter-Reay reckons. He finished 11th in 2023 and the two years prior to that the team notched top-10 finishes.
But what next for the driver originally from Dallas, Texas? Will he be back to try to right the wrong of 2025 in next year's Indy 500?
"Every year since leaving Andretti, every year that I come back and do this, it's about a number of variables that have to be met to my standard that I want to see done," he says.
"The amount of development being done, the damper programme, the windtunnel testing. And Dreyer & Reinbold/Cusick Motorsports has done a great job on that.
"But I have to make that decision based on those variables every year. I'm not going to the Indy 500 to be a part of it. Never want to be a participant in that regard. I'm going there to win, and I want a shot to win.
"I've got to make those decisions as they come and we'll see where that lies. Haven't really got there yet though. We'll see soon enough."
