Indy 500 Notes and Quotes

Flyover for the 101st Indianapolis 500.  [Andy Clary Photo]

What They’re Saying

by Paul Gohde

• 500 Winner Takuma Sato: “It was obviously a tough, tough race. But (runner-up) Helio really drives fair. I can trust him…coming from the outside. What a race.” And when did he think he might win? “(Not) until three laps to go; you really didn’t know. Me and Helio went side-by-side with three to go. We did it and we pulled away. Fantastic.”
• Winning car owner Michael Andretti whose team won here for the third time in four 500s. “Takuma brought a lot to our team. He’s got a lot of experience and is very technical,” Andretti said. “There’s many times he was in a difficult situation and he would get out of that. There was one of the moves where he passed two cars on the outside in (turn) one, which was a very important move because that gave him the track position of the two guys that were in front of him. That was one of the moves of the race, in my opinion. When I saw that I’m like, Whoa, I think we’re going to win this thing.” The win put the Andretti Autosport team behind only Team Penske in 500 race wins.
• Helio Castroneves who was looking to become a four-time 500 winner: “I really wanted to get the fourth one for everyone. I was a little too hard with the (Chevy) power. Congrats to Takuma-san. He bumped me a couple of times. I was like ‘Man, this guy was not breakable.’ I really thought we had it. Even when I tried, now my car is going to get momentum again. But unfortunately I couldn’t do it…I think bent the throttle so hard. I think I broke something, (in the Howard-Dixon accident), in my front wing, in the back in the winglet. Oh, my God my car was so good. Unfortunately, Taku-san had the better end.”
• Ed Jones, about his surprise third-place result for Dale Coyne: “I ran over a lot of debris (from the Scott Dixon-Jay Howard accident), It damaged our rear wing, and we had to come in and replace that. So that put us in the rear of the field and made the race a lot more difficult, said the rookie driver. “We were very fortunate with that yellow at the end that got us to the front,” Jones explained, regarding the final Lap 184 caution period. “I couldn’t pass either of those two guys (Castroneves or Sato) because I think they were trimmed out quite a bit. Even in the draft I couldn’t stay with them.”
• Max Chilton on being the race leader in laps led: “I struggled like hell on the first stint. I was a lap down. But, you don’t win this race without some luck,” said the 2016 Indy Lights champion, “A couple things went our way and we ended up leading 30-40 laps (actually 50) today. We were quick out front, but as soon as they got past me I wasn’t as good in dirty air. We were a lap down 25 laps in and to finish fourth and lead the race is pretty good.”
• Scott Dixon, who took what was the worst looking crash in a race here in many years: “I’m just a little beaten up. It was definitely a bit of a rough ride, “he said with a great amount of understatement. “I was hoping that Jay (Howard) was going to stay against the wall (after he started to slide out of the groove). But obviously there was the impact. I had already picked that way to go, and it was nowhere else to go to avoid him. It was definitely a rough ride” explained the New Zealand native. “I’m bummed for our team and for (sponsor) Camping World.
• 2016 500 surprise winner Alexander Rossi who finished seventh: “Two years in a row to have fuel problems is pretty tough to swallow,” said the former F1 driver. “Obviously it worked out last year. You can’t rely on not fueling the car every year and getting results; it’s difficult. Then we didn’t have the downforce to be that far back.”

Paul Gohde

Paul Gohde heard the sound of race cars early in his life.

Growing up in suburban Milwaukee, just north of Wisconsin State Fair Park in the 1950’s, Paul had no idea what “that noise” was all about that he heard several times a year. Finally, through prodding by friends of his parents, he was taken to several Thursday night modified stock car races on the old quarter-mile dirt track that was in the infield of the one-mile oval -and he was hooked.

The first Milwaukee Mile event that he attended was the 1959 Rex Mays Classic won by Johnny Thomson in the pink Racing Associates lay-down Offy built by the legendary Lujie Lesovsky. After the 100-miler Gohde got the winner’s autograph in the pits, something he couldn’t do when he saw Hank Aaron hit a home run at County Stadium, and, again, he was hooked.

Paul began attending the Indianapolis 500 in 1961, and saw A. J. Foyt’s first Indy win. He began covering races in 1965 for Racing Wheels newspaper in Vancouver, WA as a reporter/photographer and his first credentialed race was Jim Clark’s historic Indy win.Paul has also done reporting, columns and photography for Midwest Racing News since the mid-sixties, with the 1967 Hoosier 100 being his first big race to report for them.

He is a retired middle-grade teacher, an avid collector of vintage racing memorabilia, and a tour guide at Miller Park. Paul loves to explore abandoned race tracks both here and in Europe, with the Brooklands track in Weybridge England being his favorite. Married to Paula, they have three adult children and two cats.

Paul loves the diversity of all types of racing, “a factor that got me hooked in the first place.”

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