"BRUNO ENDS UP ON INDY POLE,            
BUT WAIT IS NERVE-WRACKING"                   

Published, in edited form, in the Johnson County (Ind.) Daily Journal, May 13, 2002 ©

[*Second-place, News Writing, annual writing contest of American Auto Racing Writers and Broadcasters Association, May 2003*]

         The glare of the TV lights Saturday afternoon was probably the brightest young Bruno Junqueira had ever faced.

         He tried to settle into the seat placed strategically behind a bouquet of microphones, squirming like a first-time national spelling bee winner, a nervous twitch tugging at the right corner of his mouth. He sat up stiff and straight, his dark eyes darting around like a kid's looking to see if anybody was watching him.

         They were, of course. Everybody watches when you win the pole at Indianapolis.

         "These were the longest seven hours of my life," confessed the 25-year-old racing driver from Brazil, where his boyish face probably was being scanned onto every front page of his home country's newspapers and Web sites as he spoke to the media in his heavily accented and lightly broken version of English.

         Junqueira's longest day of his life followed the shortest two minutes and 35 seconds of same, four fast laps at 231.342 mph in his red-and-white Ganassi Racing Indy-car. First out Saturday morning, the speedway sophomore whose youthful face looked perfect for the part of Potsie on a Brazilian remake of "Happy Days" had set up the target for all those who followed him out onto the big Indy oval on opening day of qualifications.

         All would miss it. Only one would come close enough to make Junqueira squirm a little.

         "It was a really long wait," he said, recounting the 420 minutes of pacing the speedway grounds that preceded his taking his seat in front of the glaring cameras and spotlights. "I went to the motor home; I went to the truck; I went to the garage; I went to the pit lane and went back again.

         "I couldn't really stop more than 30 minutes in one place."

         The longest stop in his maternity ward waiting room-like pacing had come at mid-afternoon when Robbie Buhl, the only non-Brazilian to intrude in the echelon of top five qualifiers Saturday, started his run that included three 231-mph laps. Junqueira had been standing inside the Ganassi team's garage, arms folded tightly across the chest of his brilliantly red driving suit, staring intently at a small TV set like a spelling bee contestant waiting to see if his main challenger got the final word wrong.

         "I was in the garage, and I said, 'Oooooh!" he related later, eyebrows suddenly raised, of his reaction to the run by Buhl, who had saved his best times for a second qualifying attempt that came within a quarter of a second of Junqueira's total time.

         "He did the first 231, and I hope he goes low and keeps it there," he continued, eyebrows still at full tilt. "And then the last one, the last was close."

         Junqueira then put one hand on the front of his driving suit, so red that the cameras couldn't reproduce its brightness, and clutched it like he was having chest pains. "It was really difficult with this system to have to watch," he said. "When it was over, it was really big relief."

         By slightly misspelling the first lap in his dark-blue Dreyer & Reinbold entry, 229.5 instead of 231, Buhl had barely missed his chance to face the media glare and have his name put on a $100,000 check (which, in Junqueira's case, was misspelled).

         All the American driver's surprisingly fast run accomplished was to put the Ohioan in the middle of the front row for race day May 26 and keep the front four in the 33-car field from being colonized by the largest Portuguese-speaking nation in the world. At race time, Buhl will be surrounded by Junqueira and three of the Brickyard's other boys from Brazil, Raul Boesel, Felipe Giaffone and Tony Kanaan.

         For Junqueira's part, he welcomed the prospect of seeing familiar faces, most of whom he raced against in go-karts as a youngster, around him at the front of the Indy 500 grid. "Yeah, it's really nice," the Belo Horizonte native said, smiling a Potsie look-alike smile, "because you grow up together and race against each other.

         "Being friends, you want to see everybody succeed, and racing together in highest level of motor racing and doing well is really nice."

         Even nicer, perhaps, was the knowledge that he had pushed any questions about his own ability to compete at Indianapolis into the shadows beyond the spotlights. Junqueira had been relegated to "second team" status a year ago, when team owner Chip Ganassi put veterans Tony Stewart and Jimmy Vasser into his primary cars.

         The young Brazilian, forced to wait for second-day qualifying, started 20th and finished fifth, right behind Vasser and just ahead of Stewart.

         Since the 2001 Indy race, he won two Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART) events, at Elkhart Lake, Wis., last fall, and at Motegi, Japan, last month.

         "I think I learned from last year," Junqueira said Saturday. "I think I am intelligent person, one that learns from mistakes and keeps learning and improving."

         Whether he has learned and improved enough to win the world's most spotlight-friendly race will have to wait until May 26 for an answer. "Today is a pole," he said, straightening up in his chair a bit more, as if there was one more word to spell perfectly. "A victory in a pole does not win the race.

         "For sure, this one means more than all of the other ones that I've had in my career. But, as a racing car driver, I always want to win races."

         Until the final round of the Indy racing bee in two weeks, he can only relax his posture, play his Rolling Stones CDs, surf the Internet and enjoy the second biggest prize found at the big track on Indy's west side. "Very often when you race, you qualify Saturday and you race Sunday," Junqueira said, flashing a boyish, half-moon smile brighter than anything the TV cameras had to offer.

         "Then you are having 24 hours of happiness, and then you go race. The good thing of winning the pole here is that you are going to have two weeks, and, until the race starts, you are going to be really happy."

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 Copyright 2002 by Jerry Miller ©

 Color photo courtesy of Target Ganassi Racing

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