2009 Indianapolis 500 - Race

Race

The green flag was waved off on the first attempt after Hélio Castroneves hit the accelerator in the middle of turn four and the field did not maintain its traditional three-row lineup. The second attempt, although similar in formation, was given the green flag.

During the first lap entering the first short chute, Mario Moraes squeezed Marco Andretti into the wall, crashing both drivers out. Both drivers were out, but Andretti returned briefly later in the race. Moraes held the view that Andretti ran into him, and both drivers expressed their frustration to the TV crews. Andretti said that Moraes is "clueless," while Moraes believed that Andretti checked down on him.

Ryan Hunter-Reay also had a crash on lap 20 which saw his car slide into the pit lane. This capped a brutal month of May for the Vision Racing driver, in which his car never seemed to get up to speed, and he barely even made the 500 field.

Graham Rahal and Davey Hamilton had similar crashes on laps 56 and 83 respectively. Both slowed their cars between turns 3 and 4, drifted up the track, and hit the wall on the front straightaway. Rahal had a similar crash in the 2008 race.

On lap 98, while running third Tony Kanaan suffered a driveshaft failure while at speed in the back stretch, pitching his car into the wall. Kanaan's steering was largely incapacitated and the Brazilian bounced off the backstretch wall and then hit the turn 3 wall. In television interviews, Kanaan appeared visibly shaken. The next day, Tony stated the hit was recorded at 175 G's.

During the first half of the 200-lap event, Scott Dixon, Castroneves and Dario Franchitti swapped the lead with the Dixon–Franchitti Target Chip Ganassi team leading much of the laps. Dixon led laps 91 through 141, with Franchitti close behind to protect him.

Drivers Robert Doornbos, Nelson Philippe, and Justin Wilson, all former Champ Car World Series race winners, had incidents in the middle-to-late stages of the race that ended their respective days. Under the caution for the Philippe incident, Franchitti's fueler got stuck in his car, causing him to lose track position. With nobody to block for him, Dixon was powerless on the restart to stop Castroneves from passing him. The Penske Dallara-Honda cleared Dixon before the cars even entered turn 1. It turned out to be the winning pass.

The scariest incident of the day occurred on lap 173, when Vitor Meira and Raphael Matos collided in turn 1. Both had heavy contact with the wall. Meira was taken to Methodist hospital after the incident. Meira broke two vertebrae in his back and spent the next two days in the hospital being fitted for a back brace. Matos suffered a bruised right knee in the crash. Meira's car also flipped on its side and slid along the wall for hundreds of feet before falling back to all four wheels on the track.

Ryan Briscoe had fallen back to the middle of the pack with a bad set of tires, but short-fueled in a late round of pit stops to claim second place, behind teammate Castroneves. Eventually Briscoe attempted to take the lead, with the intention of pulling Castroneves along, in order to help the Brazilian save fuel by using the draft. However, he had to pit during the Meira–Matos caution and was never a factor to win.

In the final 15 laps, Castroneves maintained a gap over Dan Wheldon, Danica Patrick and Townsend Bell. Castroneves and Wheldon kept similar lap speeds of 218 mph through the last 15 laps, but with a gap of roughly eight car lengths and Patrick on his tail, Wheldon could not catch the pole-sitter.

Castroneves won the event as his sister, Kati, and mother celebrated. The driver and his crew engaged in his traditional victory celebration, climbing the frontstretch catch fence, to the delight of the crowd. It was his third career Indianapolis 500 victory, with the others coming in 2001 and 2002. He is the sixth driver to win three 500s and the first foreign-born driver to do so.