P.J. Chesson ran into serious bad luck in his debut drive in today’s Indianapolis 500, and his race ended pretty nearly as soon as it started. Just minutes after the green flag waved to begin the 90th running of the greatest spectacle in racing, with 300,000 people looking on at Indianapolis Motor Speedway and millions more watching on television and the web, Chesson’s run was cut short when Jeff Bucknum, who started on the inside of row 8, lost control of his car entering turn two on the third lap of the race. Bucknum spun into Chesson’s machine, sending car and driver into the outside wall. Chesson was not injured.
The pre-race story (Friday, May 26):
P.J. Chesson ’01 will be busy this Memorial Day weekend. No time for barbecues, picnics. He’ll be working. Hard.
But he likes his job.
He’ll be driving in the Indianapolis 500. It starts at 1 p.m. Eastern Time Sunday on ABC.
On Saturday, when members of the class of 2006 were receiving their diplomas at the 171st Commencement, Chesson spent a couple of minutes laying down four hot laps around the 2.5-mile oval at Indianapolis Motor Speedway — 2 minutes and 42.4724 seconds, to be exact — to qualify for a place among the 33 competitors in the 90th running of the world’s most famous auto race. Your calculations are correct: that’s 221.576 miles an hour.
One of five rookies in the field (including a pair with racing names more recognizable than his own, Marco Andretti and Arie Luyendyk Jr.), Chesson, 27, will start in the middle of the seventh row, next to Eddie Cheever, the 1998 Indy winner and, at 48, the oldest driver in the race.
Driving the white-and-blue No. 91 Dallara/Honda machine for Carmelo Hemelgarn Racing, owned in part by National Basketball Association star Carmelo Anthony of the Denver Nuggets, Chesson debuted in the IndyCar series this year after running the past two years in the developmental Indy Pro Series, where, in 2004, he won three races and finished fourth in points.
He ran in the World of Outlaws series for four years beginning in 2000, and was a regular in the top 10. In 1999 he was the national sprint car rookie of the year.
This year Chesson, a native of Bedminster, N.J., who majored in history at Lafayette, ranks second in points among rookies, trailing Andretti by 48-44. In his first race, the Toyota Indy 300 March 26 at Homestead-Miami Speedway, Chesson finished 12th. He finished 17th in the series’ two starts since, the Honda Grand Prix of St. Petersburg April 2 and the Indy Japan 300 April 22. Mechanical problems plagued him in the first two races, and an accident cut his day short in Japan. Overall he ranks 17th in points among 23 drivers.
“Regardless of what happens Sunday, Chesson already considers this the best month of his life,” writes Michael Marot of the Associated Press in a May 24 story on the free-spirited Chesson. “He rode in an F-16 fighter jet, even instructing the pilot to buzz the towers at the 2.5-mile oval. He qualified 20th for Sunday’s race and added a new tattoo on his left shoulder.” He got the tattoo right at the track with cameras rolling; see the video at indycar.com. (Click on “video highlights.”)
The same day Damian Dottore wrote in the Orange County Register, “[Chesson’s] not intimidated by the Brickyard. ‘Hey, I am going to gas it and go. I am not a guy that cruises and collects,’ he said. ‘If I can win, I am going to win . . . or crash trying.’”
Chesson also has been profiled in a Washington Post article, in which IRL Vice President of Marketing Mike Ringham says, “He certainly is not afraid to say what he thinks, and that’s something that we probably haven’t had here since A.J. Foyt was on the track.”