When the thing was done he stopped the car precisely on the yard of brick, and then -- finally; FINALLY -- the Champ Perpetually In Waiting got to do what he'd been aching to do for a dozen bitter years.
He got to go crowd-surfing.
As America watched and the 300,00 inside motorsport's holiest cathedral howled and banged their palms together, he bailed out of his seat, ran over to the fence, and -- wait, what's he doing now?
Not climbing the fence, like some knockoff Helio. No, he's ducking under it, then hopping the low fence that separates the fence from that immense cliff of grandstand, and ... oh, look, he's wading into this dense mass of humanity, letting it swallow him, flow around him, buffet him with a thousand reaching hands.
This is how Josef Newgarden celebrated winning the Indianapolis 500.
This is how he celebrated being The Guy Who Did after so long being The Guy Who Will.
Sunday was his 12th 500 and he's been one of the designated faces of his sport for several years, winning two IndyCar titles for the name-in-lights monolith that is Team Penske. But something always happened to him on the last Sunday in May, and it was never good. Never good until going on 4:30 yesterday afternoon, when he was 2,000 yards from home on the last lap of a 500 that gone on too long and too bizarrely.
What happened was, he got a run on defending champ and leader Marcus Ericsson coming off turn two.
Halfway down the backstretch he flogged his car past him, as Ericsson snake-danced to steal his air the way he'd snake-danced to shake Pato O'Ward a year ago.
Deja vu all over again. Until it wasn't.
Newgarden passed him and then snake-danced himself down the main straightaway toward the checkers, as Ericsson desperately tried to re-pass him. He failed by less than half a second.
And then Newgarden was climbing out of the car and going under the fence and running back and forth through that sea of reaching hands, and, listen, if this was something we'd never seen here before .... well, that was pretty much the narrative of the day.
Never before, after all, had we seen the race red-flagged three times in the last 15 laps.
Never before had we seen it come down to a one-lap sprint to the checkers.
Never before, after all the times Josef Newgarden had been a favorite to win, did the win finally come on a day when he probably wasn't expected to win.
While the Ganassi and McLaren stables blazed around the joint, the Penske rides were pokey all month, which accounted for Newgarden coming to the green from the middle of Row 6. But on this day he had a fast car from jump, and the laps rolled by, and stuff began to happen. And pretty soon you blinked and he was in third place, right up there with Ericsson and Pato O'Ward and Felix Rosenqvist and the rest of the frontrunners.
His day, at long last. His day, when for so long it looked like Alex Palou's day or O'Ward's or Ericsson's or even that of Santino Ferrucci, who gave the No. 14 stars-and-stripes livery of A.J. Foyt a hell of a drive before finishing third.
Some other stuff:
* Welcome to the day of "I Went To The Indianapolis 500 And The Daytona 500 Broke Out."
Because, really, this was some yee-ha business down there at the end, when (just like Daytona!) people kept running into each other and stopping the race because they'd sprayed the track with auto parts.
The first red flag came out when Rosenqvist got up in the marbles off turn one, banged the wall and spun down to the inside of the track, where Kyle Kirkwood clipped him and sailed into the fence in turn two. One of his tires went whirling over the fence, narrowly missing the grandstand and landing on a car in the parking lot like a thunderbolt from some angry Firestone god.
Kirkwood, meanwhile, wound up sliding down the track upside-down, a wild-looking ride he walked away from without a scratch.
The other two red flags were, like so many of Daytona's, avoidable in one case and simply stupid in the other.
The first happened when O'Ward tried to go under Ericsson in turn three, got squeezed and wound up in the wall, ending a day that for a long time looked like his. Then, almost as an afterthought, he was rear-ended by rookie Augustin Canapino, who got clipped by another back-marker and snapped a brake line.
Then, as the yellow came out, Simon Pagenaud ran into the back of Scott McLaughlin, which brought out the red flag again.
And the third red flag?
The dumbest of all.
When the green dropped with four laps to run, the leaders barely were in the first turn before Ed Carpenter and rookie Benjamin Pederson got together trying to go three (or four) wide with Marco Andretti and Graham Rahal. All four were deep in the pack, raising the obvious question of why a bunch of back-markers were trying to go three (or four) wide.
"Because I coulda finished, I don't know, 16th or something," is not an acceptable answer.
* Welcome, also, to the day of "We Drive Really Fast, But For God's Sake Don't Let Us Try To Park."
Which is to say, you'd think guys (and gals) good enough to negotiate 500 miles at 220-plus could get in and out of the pits without running into something.
Not yesterday, they couldn't.
It was a cavalcade of shenanigans in the pit area all day, with drivers overrunning their pit boxes and sliding around and either narrowly missing or crashing into one another.
Katherine Legge lost it in the pits. Rinus Veekay got sideways and hit Alex Palou as both were exiting, which sent Palou into the pit wall and subsequently to the back of the field -- one of the day's biggest what-ifs, because Palou was the hottest shoe of the day and proved it by getting all the way back to fourth by the end.
Oh, and a tire nearly got away from one of Ferrucci's changers on his last and most critical stop. More shenanigans.
And, finally ...
* Welcome to "Live From Saturday Night At The Local Half-Mile, It's Trophy Dash Time."
Which is not the way you're supposed to decide the Indianapolis 500, some would say. That includes Marcus Ericsson, who got hung out to dry on that dash-for-cash and wasn't at all happy about it.
The Blob's position on this is he had a point.
The Blob's other position is, what would you have rather seen? Ericsson walking it across the line under yellow, or the hectic drama of that last lap?
I'll take Door No. 2.
It is, after all, the Greatest Spectacle In Racing. And that last lap was, if perhaps ill-advised, Spectacle.
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