"HORNISH MORE GROWN UP            
FOR THIS INDY 500 TRY"                   

Published, in edited form, in the Johnson County (Ind.) Daily Journal, May 25, 2002 ©

         The face of Sam Hornish Jr., for all its youth, looks decidedly more grown-up this year.

         True, the chin of the reigning Indy Racing League champion is still rounded like one of the Little Rascals' and bears the patch of dark hair that looks like a skid mark more than a beard. But the eyes are fixed with more focus on the Indy 500's silvery Borg-Warner Trophy, where they engrave your face if you win the big race, regardless of the age on your driver's license.

         As the IRL's leading driver and its unofficial poster boy, Hornish has his eyes on the one prize he hasn't yet come close to winning in his quick rise to the top of the Indy-car ladder. Even at the tender age of 22, Hornish thinks his time has arrived.

         "I want to win the 500," he says, with a bold smile and at least a remnant of his past youthful eagerness. "I'd like to be the first five-time winner, but I have to win it once before I do that."

         He will get that chance Sunday, when the 86th edition of the Indianapolis 500 bolts into action like a new video game under the late morning sun. Hornish will be in the thick of the new game, starting seventh in his bright yellow No. 4 Panther Racing entry.

         "In my mind, it's the greatest race in the world," the maturing young champion reports. "Definitely, if I could win one race in the world, this would be it."

         Winning at Indy has been on the Defiance, Ohio, racer's mind for the better part of a year and a half now. While he was winning five IRL races elsewhere in that span, the shyish yet confident Hornish has had Indy on the brain all the while.

         "I look forward to the Indianapolis 500 all year long," he admits. "After the race I had last year, I've really been looking forward to it.

         "You just have to try and come back to it and see if you can do a better job."

         On race day a year ago, Hornish had spun on cold tires early in the race and straggled home 14th, four laps down to the leaders. The older and wiser driver sees his fortunes doing a 180-degree turn this time.

         "I'm super-excited about the race," he now says, another bubble of youthful exuberance pushing aside the new-found maturity momentarily. "Last year, I made a mistake, and I'm going to try to go through this year's 500 without those problems."

         And, in the style that has marked his emergence as the IRL's top driver, he plans to go through the 500 from the front. Way out front, if possible.

         "I sure hope it's not that close," he says with a wider smile than usual, recalling his hair-splittingly close victories at Texas Motor Speedway last fall and Fontana, Calif., this past May. "It's good for the fans and that stuff, but that's too close for me.

         "I'd rather win by a lap or two."

         OK, so you can take the kid out of the grown-up racer some of the time, just not all of the time. Hornish - the new 2002 version - can just as quickly slip back into the more Abe Lincoln-like persona he is becoming as he speaks.

         "You do have to stay calm and patient, though," the new Sam Jr. soon adds, "and try to figure out how to get up front without taking too many chances and putting yourself in too many awkward positions. That's the hard part about Indy, whether you start back a little bit or start forward.

         "But I like to run up front. The least amount of traffic is up there, and you tend not to get caught up in people's accidents."

         Hornish's preparation, and that of his Panther Racing crew, has definitely been Lincolnesque, not Spanky McFarlandish, so far this May. "The whole month, we've been trying to take things easy and do things logically and not get ahead of ourselves and not peak until race day," he notes, with a quick stroke at the stripe of hair that passes for a beard on his rounded chin.

         Then, just as quickly, the fidgety child star takes its place back in Hornish's ever-changing voice. "I do wish you didn't come here and sit around for two weeks, and then not work the last five days," he impatiently adds during the interminable down-time that always leads up to race time at Indy.

         Hornish knows he can't be that impatient when the green flag waves the race into action Sunday, though. This year's race will actually require more patience, he estimates, given the tire-wear anomalies apparently created by the recent diamond-grinding of the Indy track surface.

         "It'll be a matter of how much track grip you have this year," he predicts. "It takes a little bit longer to get the tires up to where they get full grip. Once you've been running five or six laps, then you can run the higher speeds.

         "It's gonna be a little bit dramatic on race day because you'll have guys coming out of the pits that aren't gonna want to drive those speeds, even if they're right in front of the leaders."

         And count Hornish as one young driver who intends to be among those leaders as he goes for his last chance to be a 22-year-old Indy 500 winner - Joe Dawson in 1912 and Troy Ruttman in 1952 have been the only others. The maturing racer who had crashed out of his first 500 in 2000 knows, however, that even the best-laid plans of assured young men can go astray at 225 mph.

         "Indy's a totally different beast than we fight every other week," he observes, with a shrug of his yellow-uniformed shoulders. "You go into turn one with cold tires and 35 gallons of fuel, and the car definitely handles differently than it does normally, than it will 15 or 20 laps into the race.

         "You can say and plan that this or that is going to happen, but whether it ever does or not is another thing."

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 Copyright 2002 by Jerry Miller ©

 Color photo courtesy of Indy Racing League

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