James Hinchcliffe climbed out of his car, moved towards his parents and hugged them as hard as he ever had before.
“We did it,” he said, arms wrapped around his mom and dad.
Hinchcliffe was fresh off his final run during trials for the Indianapolis 500, and his four-lap average of 230.760 mph had earned him pole position for the 100th running of the historic race.
It was a dramatic win, coming by the narrowest of margins: Josef Newgarden, the next fastest driver, came in at 230.700 mph. Taking the pole for the historic race was that much sweeter for Hinchcliffe because of how neatly it bookended one of the most remarkable comeback stories in sports.
Programming Note: Watch the 100th running of the Indy 500 on Sunday with coverage beginning at 11:00 a.m. ET on Sportsnet 360.
There is no way to overstate the severity of the injuries Hinchcliffe suffered when he crashed during a practice run for the Indy 500 last May. Impaled by a severed suspension rod, he nearly bled to death before reaching the hospital. His pulse was undetectable as he was rushed in for emergency surgery. That he survived at all was a medical wonder. Then doctors thought it unlikely he would ever race again. Defying doubt, he set out on relentless quest to get back on the track.
So there was much more than a potential pole position fuelling the suspense as Hinchcliffe’s camp waited for the results to come in. And when the numbers finally flashed and the emotional celebration erupted in pit lane, Hinchcliffe hugged his father so hard he nearly choked him.
“We did it,” he said. He hadn’t even taken his helmet off.
By “we,” he meant so many: his family, his friends, his team at Schmidt Peterson Motorsports, his trainer, his surgeon, the emergency workers who pulled him from the wreck a year ago.
“It wasn’t just me that was effected. It was the family, it was the team, it was everybody,” Hinchcliffe says. “So this was just as much of a comeback for them as it was for me.”
It was the first pole position Hinchcliffe has won in IndyCar, though he’s come close several times before. He says that missing the majority of last season while recovering hasn’t slowed him down a bit. He finished third at the Grand Prix of Indianapolis on May 14, and is racing as well as he ever has.
“It’s the perfect script,” said Hinchcliffe’s father, Jeremy, about the emotional qualifying run on Sunday. He didn’t see son again for several hours after their embrace, as Hinchcliffe was swallowed in a storm of media, but they reunited and relived the moment later Sunday night, after pizza with double-cheese and pepperoni, on Hinchcliffe’s motorhome.
“To put the car on the pole in the 100th running of the Indy 500,” Jeremy said proudly, still astonished by the journey his son took to get back to the Brickyard. “He’ll to be immortalized someplace—in magazines, in the museum there, wherever they’ll play it. He’ll forever be there.”