"SHARP HURRIES UP ON INDY'S            
POLE DAY, THEN WAITS"                   

Published, in edited form, in the Johnson County (Ind.) Daily Journal, May 14, 2001 ©

[*Third-place, News Writing, annual writing contest of American Auto Racing Writers and Broadcasters Association, May 2002*]

         Scott Sharp paced the pit lane in a small, perpetual circle late Saturday afternoon, like an expectant father in a maternity ward waiting room.

         The delivery of his newest racing offspring, an Indy 500 pole position, was on schedule but still 45 minutes away. And Greg Ray was about to make it a more difficult birth.

         For Sharp, who for the last five hours had been experiencing the kind of labor only those who hurry up, then wait on pole day at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway have to endure, it was time to hope his chief rival wouldn't push quite hard enough, His own "preemie" speed run of 226.037 mph had stood that long as the top qualifying mark since shortly after noon, but barely, like an infant on wobbly legs.

         And Ray, last May's pole winner, had been the heir apparent, anyway, fastest around the two-and-a-half-mile oval most of the past week, and every handicapper's favorite for the most coveted starting spot for the May 27 Indy 500.

         It was all Sharp's car owner, Fort Wayne-based car dealer Tom Kelley, dressed all in black, and the gaggle of white-shirted Kelley Racing crewmen circling their driver like a team of nursemaids could do to keep his emotions contained.

         Then Ray's speeds starting sliding down the IMS's carefully timed birth canal. First lap, not quite fast enough. Second lap, faster but not fast enough yet. Third and fourth laps, slower by just a few stopwatch ticks.

         By then, the pole position was clearly going to be Sharp's healthy new baby, his first at the cradle of American auto racing. A smile crossed his boyish, firm-jawed face as steadily as a yard of bricks across a historic speedway.

         "He (Ray) was certainly the guy I was most scared of, obviously," Sharp reflected less than an hour later, when the final tick of the Indy clock had passed. "He clipped off a couple of good ones, and I really was waiting for him to keep stretching it. Luckily, when the second lap wasn't quite fast enough, I knew it would be harder for him to have to overcompensate and pick it up really big on the third.

         "I felt pretty good at that point, but when he first rolled out I knew he had a shot at doing it."

         Ray's personal race against the clock had been the most intense moment in Sharp's long, unsettled wait as the name and number at the top of Indy's scoring pylon, a wait that made the sandy-haired 33-year-old Indy Racing League veteran squirm like a patient about to get a sudden injection of reality. "I was fidgeting a lot," he recalled, with a relieved laugh. "I wasn't able to relax a whole lot.

         "I watched each car as it went out, went down to try to support my teammate, Mark Dismore. We watched minutes tick - 'OK, there's an hour and 50 left,' next thing it's an hour and 35 left. We did the whole countdown like that."

         But it was a rewarding minute-by-minute wait for the racing driver born in Connecticut who now lives in the Carmel area with his wife and two flesh-and-blood children - something in the neighborhood of $150,000 in cash and prizes and the best front-row seat on wheels since Ben Hur raced his chariot.

         Time of birth: 6:01 p.m., pole day at Indy, the day before Mother's Day, in front of what was left of a sparse delivery-room crowd of spectators. In the end, father and baby were doing just fine.

         The prime spot in the 500's starting lineup had started to come into the world at 12:12 p.m. Saturday, when Sharp sent his black-and-red number 8 Kelley Racing Dallara-Aurora around the big track faster than any of the day's other 26 qualifiers had or would. He watched the numbers then, too, but they were a mirror image of what Ray's would be later in the day.

         "When I saw the 225.7, I went, 'Hmmmmm,'" he recounted, "then I hung on a little bit, got through the second lap and saw 226.1, and I said, 'OK, this next one is the lap.' That was the lap where the whole car sort of settled in, balanced the best, and we ran a 226.3, and I thought, 'Wow, we have a good run.'

         "When it was good on that lap, I said I'll carry this thing sideways the last lap if I had to, and it still hung in there and we ran 225.9."

         The successful birth was not without its complications and uncertainties, however. In fact, it hadn't even been conceived until the previous Wednesday, after three days of mechanical failures had kept the Kelley entry out of the early speed derby.

         "It got pretty frustrating there," Sharp said Saturday. "We were watching guys get with their programs, running lots of laps, and we're back in the garage fixing the car. You start to get a little down."

         Laps of 224 mph, then 226 mph, Wednesday afternoon changed his outlook completely. "We had a great day that day, and that really rolled us into the rest of the weekend."

         Still, the 85th pole starter in Indy history wasn't completely confident when Saturday's annual baby shower unfolded. The Kelley team's strategy called for only a handful of warmup laps in the morning before joining the fraternal line of would-be qualifiers.

         "To be honest, I got up this morning and didn't know where we were going to sit," Sharp admitted at the end of the day. "I felt the best we could finish would be the pole and the worst we could finish was probably sixth or seventh.

         "It was just going to be how we could put our four laps together."

         And that would be something he wouldn't know for sure until he took to the track for his qualification run. "I was pretty anxious, pretty nervous, not really sure where the car was going to be," noted Sharp, whose best previous start in the 500 was fifth last May.

         "It was a little tough sitting there for an hour of practice watching guys run 224, 225, 226, thinking, 'Boy, maybe we should be out there.' As it turned out, it was a great call."

         Before he started passing out cigars later Saturday, though, Sharp, who has five victories on his IRL chart -- but none at Indianapolis -- reminded the others in the waiting room that the real golden child at Indy is a win two weekends after pole day. "For me, it really is a tremendous honor to be on the pole, but we didn't come here with that focus," he said. "We're here for the 27th, and we've worked toward the 27th."

         The $1 million, bouncing baby boy that awaits in Victory Lane is the favorite son for Sharp - and his 32 race-day competitors. "Today was the first race, and I guess we won that one," he observed, another brick-solid smile steadying his face again. "I'm ecstatic about that; it's a great accomplishment for the whole team.

         "And everybody's going to go home tonight and enjoy the moment, but the first thing tomorrow morning everybody is going to be thinking, 'All right, now how do we work toward the 27th and winning the Indy 500?'"

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 Copyright 2001 by Jerry Miller ©

 Color photo courtesy of Kelley Racing

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