Turn of fortune

 It's the home office for "Wait, what?", this square-jawed old place. A century plus 24 years it's been around, two-and-a-half miles of tar-and-gravel and then tire-eating brick and then scrubbed asphalt, always the same and never the same. Perfectly symmetrical, and yet no two corners are alike.

No two corners. Or, no two turns of fortune.

And so there was Graham Rahal Sunday afternoon, face in his hands, after teammate Jack Harvey knocked him out of the Indianapolis 500 by a fraction of a fraction of a second.

And here he was Tuesday, back into the race for the 16th straight time, thanks to a couple of those turns of fortune and the sort of corporate generosity too little seen these days.

The first turn of fortune happened when Stefan Wilson got punted by Katherine Legge in Monday's practice, hit the wall a mighty lick and got carted off to the hospital with a fractured vertebra.

The second happened when Dreyer & Reinbold, for whom Wilson qualified 25th last weekend, decided to borrow Graham Rahal from Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing to fill Wilson's seat, seeing how Graham wasn't doing anything on race day.

And the corporate generosity?

That came from Honda, which decided to reward Rahal's career-long loyalty to the brand by releasing him to drive for D&R, which runs rival Chevrolet engines.

Understand, this was no small concession on Honda's part. Engine rivalries are the fiercest rivalries in motorsport, and date practically to the dawn of time. Scroll back to the turn of the last century, and here's Alexander Winton racing Henry Ford to see which of their two namesake creations was fastest.

The Ford beat the Winton, and off we went. Through Ford vs. Winton and Ford vs. Offenhauser and Cosworth vs. Chevy, and right on up to Chevy vs. Honda.

So, yeah, add Honda's release of Graham Rahal to the "Wait, what?" list.

And figure Jack Harvey is feeling better about things, because elation came hard Sunday after he put his teammate on the sideline.

And figure Stefan Wilson is as bummed as Graham Rahal was Sunday, because making the 500 without actually getting to race in the 500 is as cold as it gets even for Indy, whose cruel streak is always close to hand. 

No two corners. No two turns of fortune.