Sam Schmidt, James Hinchcliffe turn tragedy into triumph at Indy 500

It was shortly after the 2014 auto racing season. I was sitting with Sam Schmidt at his well-appointed home at Lake Las Vegas on the fringes of Henderson. One of his IndyCar drivers, Simon Pagenaud of France, had just finished fifth in the series championship.

Pagenaud had started the last race of the season with a mathematical chance of winning the title. Which was remarkable. Because when it comes to budgets, Sam Schmidt’s team, called Schmidt Peterson Motorsports, is like Kmart, while Roger Penske’s team, and Chip Ganassi’s team, are Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus.

The only drivers who finished ahead of Pagenaud in season points were Penske and Ganassi drivers. And now Penske was going to add a fourth car to his squadron, and he was coming after Sam Schmidt’s guy to drive it.

Schmidt said he had offered Pagenaud a lot of money to stay. It was a generous offer; it was more money than he had ever offered a man to drive one of his racecars.

But it wasn’t Roger Penske money.

It wasn’t nearly enough.

Pagenaud signed with Saks Fifth Avenue. Now driving for Penske, he has won the last three IndyCar races. He’s leading the championship by a wide margin.

But he won’t be starting the Indianapolis 500 — the 100th running of the world’s most famous auto race — from pole position.

Pagenaud will start eighth. James Hinchcliffe, Sam Schmidt’s affable 29-year-old driver with the maple leaf stitched onto his flame retardant overalls — the Canadian driver he signed to replace Simon Pagenaud — will start from pole position.

What a great story this is, and not just because the smaller team edged out the power brokers for the honor of leading the field to the green flag on Sunday. It’s a great story because last year at this time, James Hinchcliffe was battling for his life, just as his car owner once had.

While driving Schmidt’s No. 5 Arrow Electronics Honda, he crashed hard — 125 Gs, which is a lot of Gs — going into Turn 3 in the practice session a day after pole day qualification runs. A suspension part pierced the carbon fiber of the car, and then the suspension part pierced Hinchcliffe, severing an artery.

He nearly bled to death right there on the track.

Everybody says Hinchcliffe is lucky to be alive, and a lot of people say that about Sam Schmidt, too.

Just months after winning his only IndyCar race — at Las Vegas Motor Speedway at the end of the 1999 season — Schmidt crashed during preseason testing in Florida. He suffered a spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed from the shoulders down.

When I greet him, I usually touch his hand that is strapped to his wheelchair, out of habit, and then I touch him on his shoulder, where he still has feeling.

A lot of people were touching Sam Schmidt on the shoulder Sunday, and this was even before Hinchcliffe won the pole with a final four-lap banzai qualifying run. His speed: 230.760 mph. Hinchcliffe was on it, as the old track announcer Tom Carnegie was fond of saying.

Earlier in the day, Schmidt had topped 150 mph behind the wheel of a specially equipped Chevrolet Stingray. Sam Schmidt was on it, too. No, it wasn’t 230 mph, not even close. But James Hinchliffe could feel the gas pedal with his feet, and the vibration of the steering wheel in his hand. Sam Schmidt turned the Corvette by looking left or right through 3D camera glasses. He controlled the brakes and throttle by blowing and sucking through a tube.

After topping 150 mph in the speed traps, Sam Schmidt even did a small celebratory burnout.

“Every time I see that I get tears in my eyes,” Eddie Cheever, the 1998 Indy winner, said on national television, or at least ESPN3.

A couple of hours later, the ABC cameras were focused on Schmidt as his driver Hinchcliffe put his foot down hard and outraced Josef Newgarden, the young American lead foot from Nashville, to earn a check for $100,000 and the coveted first starting position for the most anticipated Indy 500 of them all.

Schmidt said it was unbelievable, and an all-out team effort that put Hinchcliffe on the pole, and those are things you’d expect a car owner to say. And then he said, in a self-deprecating wit, that maybe it wasn’t a total team effort, because he couldn’t turn the wrenches himself.

You could tell the announcers were happy for him, considering all he has been through. Same for his affable Canadian driver.

As ABC was taking its last commercial break, racing people were coming up to Schmidt to offer heartfelt congratulations. One of those racing people was Roger Penske, who has won the famous 500-mile race a record 16 times and will drive the pace car on Sunday.

Penske came right up and said way to go, and then he tapped Sam Schmidt on the shoulder.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski