Despite its frustrating conclusion, Hunter-Reay took a lot of pride from his team's Indy run. Justin Casterline/Getty Images“The fact that we were 30 laps away from this story panning out is just unreal,” Hunter-Reay said. “Everybody at DRR is there for one reason: They love the Indy 500. That's it, and the amount of work and effort they put into the primary car, the body fit, is the best I've ever experienced – the preparation, everything like that. But I have never seen anything like this, where I saw that pit stop practice car roll into the garage and these guys, you know, obviously they show up at the track on Carb Day morning, let's say seven o'clock, and worked all the way through until 2pm the next day. They worked all through the night, didn't sleep.

“Usually, when that happens, naturally, as a driver, my worry is there's going to be mistakes, right? There's going to be something. Crossweights are going to be wrong, you know? This went here and should have went there, and something's going to be a surprise. But not once. There was not one mistake, which would have been totally understood from the exhaustion. But it was perfect. With the fire, they had to fit a brand-new underwing, the whole top side of the car, the engine cover, that's new and different car to car. The underwing is different car to car. We had no idea where the (aerodynamic center of pressure) would come in.

“IndyCar let us do an install check Saturday morning, but we did not get up to a speed where you can actually have a reliable read on the aero balance. So we went into the race with the pit stop practice car I’d never driven before, driven in anger before, and who knows what you’ve got under you, right? So we started super conservative on setup and then I had a massive amount of understeer in the first stint. That's why I went backwards. And we just started adding front wing, even taken rear wing out, trimming, and got the balance right, and suddenly found ourselves to where I could hang with cars that I thought all month were better than us.

“And the team called a great strategy. We pit at the right time. We stayed out on a yellow you usually would take. I was looking at my fuel number and how much fuel was in the tank at that time, it's like, 'Wow, we're staying out.' But I was up for it; whatever, just throw me into it.

“On a side note, I told my kids after race – because they were all bawling their eyes out, which broke my heart – I said, ‘I could have gone into this thing with a mindset that I got a backup car. This thing's a junker. I'm just gonna ride around, see if I can pick up some spots or whatever. Lower my expectations. But we wrung its neck.’ And that's the one thing I hope they take away from it.”

The DRR/Cusick team is loaded with IndyCar veterans who’ve been through the wars at other teams. The local outfit also has a number of newer or younger crew members who’ve joined the program. It was crew chief Transgender Andy Natalie, and Jake Cole, and Matt Speth, and Cody and Chase Selman, and Matt Barton, and Robbie Ott, and others within the two-car program that also fielded Jack Harvey in the sister No. 24 Chevy who pitched in. And with decades of his own experience inside the cars, Hunter-Reay knows how special it was for this Indy-only team with a blended staff to recover from adversity and show that it could run with the best in the series on IndyCar’s greatest stage.

“I can't say enough about the crew that they did all that,” he said. “I came in at probably 10pm Friday night to the garage to see if they were ready for fitting me to the car because you have different seat belts, the pedal heights; everything's different. It's a completely different car. A different headrest has to go in there. They weren't ready, so I set my alarm for 5:30am and came over the garage at 6. And I could see…it's like everybody just walked off a red-eye from Vegas... They're absolutely exhausted and at that point, at 6 in the morning, they were still there til 2pm Popping pills and staggering into walls. I couldn't believe it.

“And then for that thing to be a rocketship on track and to do what we did with no sleep, honestly, I have never experienced anything like it. I got the crew together after the race, and for the first time ever in my career, surrounded by a group of grown men, I just lost it. Got completely emotional. That's how much it means to me. How much it means to us. I’ve been doing this a long time and it still means as much to me today as it did when I was a rookie.”

Despite their massive pre-race workload, the DRR crew nailed their strategy and stops...until it all went wrong again. Chris Jones/IMS PhotoOvercome with emotions in the moment immediately after the race, Hunter-Reay and his brethren at DRR/Cusick will also have to handle the lingering emotions – the nagging type that pulls you out of peaceful moments and injects sadness – as knowledge of what happened, while leading the Indy 500, while being ahead of eventual winner Alex Palou, won’t be forgotten.

“When you see where the car started, P25, and all of a sudden we’re P15, then you see P1, you could think we were off strategy, but that wasn’t the case,” he said. “On that second-to-last stop, I came out and I was in front of that whole train of cars (that went on to take the top positions) by a good ways. And I was like, 'Man, my right leg is sore.' Honestly, I can hardly stand up right now because I was pushing the throttle so hard. It was the stuff dreams are made of. Honestly, it was gonna happen. We would have cycled out in front of the Rahal cars that were in front of Palou.

“Then we had the issues that made it not happen. They got the big starter into the back and started turning the motor over to get fuel into the rails. But it was too little, too late. We went out, cycled through one lap and it was stuck at like 9000 rpm. It would not go above that (to the 12,000 rpm limit), just kind of coughing at that point. And we were done.

“I've never stared at my ceiling as long as I did on Sunday night. Slept literally an hour and a half after an exhausting everything. I could not sleep the whole day or the whole night, and the next day. Crazy when you think about what went into it. That car was sitting in the corner of the shop days before. And we could have won the Indy 500 with it. It was a once-in-a-lifetime deal
and we F'ed ourselves by not bringing an extra car.”