INDY 500 NOTEBOOK |From The Brickyard

PUT UP YOUR DUKES: Teammates Tony Kanaan and Marco Andretti tangled on the track, perhaps costing Kanaan a chance to win. Danica Patrick — all 100 pounds of her — went looking for a fight before cooler heads prevailed. Scott Dixon took the victory, but the walls at Indianapolis Motor Speedway claimed plenty of trophies in a mayhem-filled Indianapolis 500 on Sunday. No one was injured seriously in the seven crashes and spinouts that marred the race, but Kanaan still paid a heavy price. He went from leading the race to crashing out of it in a matter of seconds. Kanaan put the blame on his teammate and didn’t seem to take any comfort in the fact that Andretti apparently said he was sorry over the team’s radio. “He’d better be,” Kanaan said. “That was a very stupid move. Me being a good teammate, I didn’t want to turn into him and take out two cars.” Kanaan was leading on lap 106 when he appeared to slow on the backstretch and was passed by Scott Dixon and Andretti. Kanaan seemed to think Andretti didn’t give him enough room to race, and that caused him to slide out of control coming out of Turn 3 — where he was blindsided by Sarah Fisher, who had nowhere to go. Andretti went on to finish third and didn’t seem willing to take the blame. “Stupid? I don’t know about stupid,” Andretti said. “Last-minute, maybe.” Kanaan was seething, but his display of anger was nothing compared to Patrick’s after she was run into by Ryan Briscoe while trying to leave pit lane late in the race. A furious Patrick then got out of her car and walked purposefully toward Briscoe’s pit for what was shaping up as a confrontation with his crew. She removed her gloves and seemed ready to rumble before track security personnel directed her back to her own pit area. “I was ready to take it all off, my helmet and everything — because it’s hard to talk through the helmet,” Patrick said. “It’s probably a better idea that I didn’t make it all the way down there anyway because, well, as you guys know, I’m a little emotional.”

NIGHTMARE ENDS: Nobody had a worse May — or a worse race day — than Fisher. First, her initial sponsors backed out of their deals after Fisher and her husband poured their life savings into her new race team. Then, armed with a new set of sponsors for Sunday’s Indianapolis 500, Fisher endured a whole new set of problems, culminating with her No. 67 car being taken out in a crash on lap 106. Like the rest of the month, it wasn’t even her fault. “I’ve been known my whole career to be able to get out of incidents like that,” Fisher said, crying. “That’s the crazy thing about this sport. This is going to set us back a little bit. I think I’ve experienced every emotion there is to it.” Fisher crashed three times in her first four career starts at Indy, but this race day might have been the worst of all.

ROOKIE PARADE: Eleven rookies started Sunday’s race. Only six finished it. That’s not surprising given what normally happens with first-timers on the historic 2.5-mile oval. Graham Rahal, at 19 the youngest driver to win an IndyCar race, was the first one out when he tried to pass a slowing Alex Lloyd in the fourth turn. Rahal went high, ended up too high and slammed into the wall. He wasn’t the last to have a problem. Included among the mangled at day’s end were rookies Justin Wilson, Rahal’s teammate, Jaime Camara and Alex Lloyd. The top rookie finisher was Ryan Hunter-Reay, who started 20th and finished sixth. The improvement was the second-biggest of the day, matching that of two other rookies — Spain’s Oriol Servia and Brazil’s Enrique Bernoldi. Servia went from 25th to 11th, while Bernoldi went from 29th to 15th. Only 1996 winner Buddy Lazier had a bigger jump, going from 32nd to 17th.

Associated Press