New ride, new story? IndyCar’s James Hinchcliffe comes to TMS with something to prove
Four years later and James Hinchcliffe still doesn’t know what he could have done differently to win the 2016 IndyCar race at Texas Motor Speedway.
He led the race on 188 of the 248 laps — as well as 76 days when the race was red-flagged after 71 laps because rain in June and completed in August.
“We by far were the most dominant car,” Hinchcliffe said during a virtual news conference last week. “If that race was one lap longer or one lap shorter, we would have won.”
Instead, Hinchcliffe settled for a runner-up finish and becoming part of track history by losing the closest race in its history. Graham Rahal led just one lap — the final lap — to win the race by eight-thousandths (0.008) of a second over Hinchcliffe. Third-place finisher Tony Kanaan was just 0.0823 seconds behind.
By comparison, the previous closest race had been 0.096 seconds when Sam Hornish Jr. beat Helio Castroneves in 2002.
That 2016 race is the closest Hinchcliffe has come to winning a race at Texas. He’s had two other top-five runs in 2012 and 2018, leading eight laps in 2012.
Hinchcliffe returns to TMS on Saturday night with something to prove once again, looking for his first career victory at the track in his 10th start. He’ll be driving the No. 29 Honda for Andretti Autosport in the Genesys 300 — Genesys is also sponsoring Hinchcliffe’s car. The race will air on prime-time TV on NBC with a scheduled start time of 7:10 p.m.
For Hinchcliffe, the 33-year-old Canadian who gained popularity by finishing second on “Dancing with the Stars” during Season 23 in 2016, simply getting behind the wheel again is exciting.
This is a driver who lost his ride late last year when Arrow McLaren SP cut him with one year left on his contract. That left Hinchcliffe scrambling, but he reunited with Andretti and landed enough funding to run three races (at TMS, the Indianapolis 500 and the road race at Indy).
Hinchcliffe said the realization of being without a ride hits a driver “pretty quick.”
“By that point of the year, there aren’t a lot of rides available,” he said. “But luckily we had an incredible partner in Genesys step up to the plate and an incredibly welcoming group at Andretti Autosport to bring me back into the fold. It’s a team I’ve worked with in the past [from 2012-14], so I’m very excited for the opportunity to get back there.
“When a door closes, a window opens, and this was a helluva window to open for us.”
Because of the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, Hinchcliffe now finds himself running in the season-opening IndyCar race at Texas. IndyCar is starting its season without fans at Texas.
It’ll be a strange season for all involved, something that Hinchcliffe was expecting for himself anyway with just his three-race deal with Andretti.
“Exactly, right? I haven’t missed a race yet,” Hinchcliffe said, smiling. “Let’s put it that way.”
Now he returns to Texas, site of his famous 2016 battle between Rahal. It was a bizarre race being red-flagged for 76 days and Hinchcliffe missed out on a Victory Lane celebration by the slimmest of margins.
But it’s not a race he’s lost sleep over.
“I’ve watched that race back 100 times, that sort of last 10 laps there, and there are a lot of races in my life that I lose sleep over because I could have done something different and maybe altered the results, and every time I’ve watched that one back, I look and say there was absolutely nothing I could have done differently,” Hinchcliffe said. “It’s a tough one to swallow in some ways, but I don’t lose any sleep over it because I knew that I had done everything that I could.”
