• 5 years ago, Marco Andretti won the Indy 500 pole. Sunday, he’ll be hoping to make the last row
• Colton Herta’s team turned a bare chassis, bar tub into a qualifying car in 4 hours
• Mike Shank vows to be better prepared next year after Marcus Armstrong crash

INDIANAPOLIS – “You know, some days, I’m happy I’m here. I don’t have to do this (expletive) anymore.“

That was Tony Kanaan, who Thursday morning zipped up his fire suit, yanked on his helmet and strapped into an Indy car for the first time in the two years since what was meant to be his third and final retirement from the sport. For 15 of his 25 years, the Indianapolis 500 proved to be Kanaan’s Achilles heel – the race that made him famous, made him an honorary Hoosier and that once every 12 months would find a way to rip his heart out.

That 2013 victory gave him a taste of perhaps racing’s greatest triumph, and some wondered if he’d ever be able to finally hang up his helmet and cease his pursuit of that second Baby Borg.

But days like Saturday – where names like Rahal and Andretti found themselves on either side of one of the most vicious cutlines in sports and where one driver crashed and saw his future hang in the balance for nearly five hours – gave Kanaan a reminder just how brutal the Indianapolis Motor Speedway can be during the Month of May. And for a moment, he found some solace in his new role on the timing stand.

‘This place is something else, man’

Marco Andretti will be fighting Sunday afternoon to make his 20^th Indy 500 start after falling into the Last Chance Qualifier by just 0.0028 seconds over the course of 10 miles to Graham Rahal. Andretti started on pole five years ago and four times finished 2^nd or 3^rd in the Greatest Spectacle in Racing.

This year, he’ll do well just to get to drive it again after Sunday.

“I don’t know what else to do. I think tomorrow is ours to lose. We need to just not be dumb tomorrow and do four solid ones, and we should be okay,” Andretti said Saturday evening after finishing Day 1 of qualifying for the Indianapolis 500 as one of four drivers on the outside looking in and not yet locked into the field. He’ll be joined in Sunday’s Last Chance Qualifier – where three drivers will start May 25 on the back row, and one will be left a spectator, by Meyer Shank Racing’s Marcus Armstrong and Dale Coyne Racing’s Jacob Abel and Rinus VeeKay.

“Just the fact we’re running tomorrow is a bummer,” Andretti continued. “(Not getting) 30^th isn’t a big deal unless we screw up tomorrow, obviously. But I don’t want to be in that position. We have bigger problems. Just had speed problems. I’ve seen it across the garage with big teams. There’s always that one (car) where they change every bolt on the car, and how fast it’s going is how fast it’s going to go. I drew that straw this year.

“This place is something else, man.”

‘What a heroic effort’

If you saw which Andretti Global driver skidded through the short chute of IMS just minutes after noon Saturday and completely totaled his car, you would’ve presumed Colton Herta, not Andretti, to be the Andretti Global driver losing sleep Saturday night.

And yet, it was Herta’s No. 26 squad – and Andretti Global at-large – who wowed last year’s championship runner-up, taking just four-and-a-half hours to go from watching Herta skidding upside down with sparks flying to rolling his backup car out onto pitlane to fill up with fuel and tear out onto the warmup lane.

And with an hour left in Saturday’s action, Herta threw down four laps that not only proved his new No. 26 was largely running properly, but ones that landed him in the field and bounced his teammate Andretti.

“What a heroic effort by the guys. I don’t think I’ve seen anything like that on any car. Bare chassis, bare tub in four-and-a-half hours to a complete car,” Herta marveled Saturday night. “The only thing we transferred over was the engine. Everything else was destroyed.

“It was (our crew’s) day. Me and (Herta’s engineer Nathan O’Rourke) tried our hardest to take us out of the show. They kept us in.”

And yet, as he steps away from the adrenaline rush of the final six hours of Sunday’s action and takes stock in the challenge that awaits him – versus the expectations he shouldered entering the month – there’s pain, too. The Saturday Herta weathered put him in a hole next Sunday after expecting to be fighting for pole.

“It sucks. I think from our standpoint of where we want to be, what we want to contend with, we’re not happy just making the show,” Herta said. “We want to fight for the pole. We want to be in the Fast 12, and when we don’t get a chance to do that, it’s pretty disappointing.”

For Mike Shank, the Meyer Shank Racing co-owner who experienced multitudes of emotions Saturday – a wrecked race car, a driver with a possible concussion, a four-time 500 winner at times on the ropes to even make the race and an under-the-radar veteran who turned the single fastest lap of the day (and two of the fastest three) and will have a legitimate shot to take pole or land his car on the front row for this year’s 500.

‘We’ll come back tomorrow’

When he stepped back from the chaos of it all, Shank, whose team won the 2021 500 with Helio Castroneves, ultimately goes to bed Saturday night shouldering some frustrations not about a driver and team who turned maybe one of the fastest cars in Gasoline Alley into a mangled mess, but about a team he believes wasn’t properly prepared for the disasters that IMS sometimes brings in May.

“It’s incumbent upon me in the future to be more prepared for situations like this at Indy, which comes down to money,” Shank told IndyStar after MSR was forced to prepared Armstrong a backup 500 car not from backup oval machinery, but from his purpose-built road and street course car that was ready to pound through the streets of Detroit in a couple weeks – not hit speeds reaching 240 mph around IMS. “As a team, we need to think about how we handle situations like this and maybe consider putting some capital into a proper Indy 500 (backup) car.

“Now, that’s $1 million, or close to it, but we need to come up with that. These times are tough, but when you look at this, we can’t not make this race. We’re going to work our asses off (Saturday night), and we’re going to get the car wrapped and tune on it and get a couple systems that weren’t working properly back running.

“I would anticipate we should be able to get to 231 (mph), but we’ve just got to be cool and not make any mistakes.”

It was a marvel that Armstrong, like Herta, saw any more track time Saturday afternoon after his No. 66 Honda turned into a mangled pile of spare parts Saturday morning in his practice crash, and Shank believed those two runs the second-year 500 driver turned, even if they weren’t fast enough to get him safely in the race on Day 1, settled the 24-year-old’s nerves enough to set him up for success come the pressures of Sunday’s LCQ.

“My mindset was, if the car is good enough to do it, I’m not going to be the reason we’re not going to get through today,” Armstrong said. “I threw caution to the wind and just went flat.

“Hoped the balance was there, and it was. Ultimately, it wasn’t quick enough. We’ll come back tomorrow.”