Doyel: Going for the Indy 500 pole means choosing danger

INDIANAPOLIS – Someone Sunday will win the pole for the 2017 Indianapolis 500 because someone will choose to win the pole. Make no mistake, it is a choice. Yes of course, it requires smart set-up and a surplus of skill — in the first 100 years of this race, nobody ever started first without plenty of both — but winning the pole here also requires something less defined, more dangerous:

Audacity.

Fernando Alonso has plenty of that. He has plenty of skill and set-up, but talent and team can take a driver only so far, and can get him there only so fast. To squeeze out the final 2 or 3 mph needed to catapult from the middle of the pack to the Fast Nine, a driver needs a largess of audacity and perhaps a small dose of cluelessness.

Alonso also has that. The cluelessness, I’m saying. Well, hang on. It’s not me saying it; it’s Graham Rahal. And he was saying it kindly, I promise you that. We were speaking early Saturday afternoon during the rain delay that turned what is normally a nerve-wracking day — qualifying Saturday at Indianapolis Motor Speedway — into a neurological nightmare. The five-hour delay compressed the qualifying procedure from a handful of attempts to a single shot.

Go once, and go fast. Or go to the back of the line.

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Rahal knew what verified Formula One badass Alonso would do.

“Don’t be surprised,” Rahal was telling me. “You could see Alonso be very quick, because he’s never hit the fence yet. Sounds stupid, but it’s part of it. Once you’ve done that a handful of times you realize that doesn’t feel good. When I was a rookie, man, I’d go out there and I’d be all loose as hell and I didn’t care. You don’t think about those things.”

Alonso went out there all loose as hell. He didn’t care. He literally took his car apart to make it faster, removing not just one, but both winglets above the rear wheels. A winglet increases a car’s downforce, which makes the car safer. But slower. The 2014 Indy 500 champion, Ryan Hunter-Reay, removed one winglet on Saturday. So did 2016 pole winner James Hinchcliffe.

Alonso removed both. That was the choice he made. Sure enough his No. 29 car, the 15th car to attempt qualifying, went around the speedway like a tangerine torpedo. After one lap he was in first place. After four laps he was in third, and by the end of the day — when conditions cooled, making it easier to find speed — his 230.034 mph final average was still good for seventh, plenty fast enough for Sunday’s Fast Nine.

Before the race, Alonso told ABC: “Everyone is telling me those four laps, they will feel like the whole race. It will feel very long.”

Afterward, Alonso decided everyone was right.

“Short and intense,” he called the fastest 2½ minutes in sports.

Sebastien Bourdais’ two minutes were shorter, more intense. Barely two laps into his four-lap trek, he got loose in Turn 2 and made a beeline for the wall, going nearly nose-first into the SAFER barrier. Bourdais’ No. 18 Honda disintegrated into flames and scrap metal, and Bourdais was taken — awake and alert, having never lost consciousness — 4 miles east on 16th Street to IU Health Methodist Hospital.

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That was the choice Bourdais made. Not to go to the hospital, but to go for it. Again, a spot in the Fast Nine is not for the faint of heart. There are levels of courage out here — everyone who climbs into the car has more than a mortal amount — but to seek those extra 2 or 3 mph? That requires even more.

Apparently, Bourdais has even more. Because the headline news of his violent crash obscured the fine print: He was the 19th car out, and he was far and away the fastest of the bunch before his car burst into the wall, and then into flames. Two laps in, Bourdais’ average speed of 231.534 mph was on pace to be more than 1 mph faster than anyone else in the field.

He chose danger.

This is how qualifying savant Helio Castroneves — a four-time pole winner who qualified for the Fast Nine 13 times in the 14 years from 2003-16 — describes the choice:

“You put 33 drivers running to the limit,” Castroneves was saying earlier in the week. “We're talking about knife edge. We're going through four corners for four laps and absolutely doing everything you can to hang on.”

By Saturday’s end, nobody had done more than Indianapolis’ Ed Carpenter to find that last little spark of speed. Typical Ed, he wasn’t bragging about the nerve required to do what he did — an average speed of 230.468 mph for four laps — and so he wasn’t the one to mention the winglets he removed from his No. 20 Chevy. Nor did he volunteer any of the other configuration decisions his team employed to make his car the fastest of the 31 cars that finished four laps Saturday. Those are trade secrets, for one. But also, he’s not going to make himself out to be a hero.

“It’s not like I’m making those (set-up) decisions by myself,” Carpenter said, ignoring the fact that he is, in fact, by himself when he climbs behind the wheel and rockets around the 2.5-mile track in 39 seconds. “You have to be comfortable and confident out there.”

And yet, he wasn’t. Not as he was waiting in the garage, mentally preparing to make his qualifying turn, and watching on television as Bourdais crashed into the wall.

“It takes your breath away,” Carpenter said. “It’s one of the biggest single-car qualifying crashes I’ve seen around here.”

And then it was his turn. His team removed one winglet, then the other, then reduced the car’s downforce in other ways. And then Ed Carpenter went onto the track, alone with his thoughts and his car, at peace with the choice he had made to drive it faster than anyone else.

Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter: @GreggDoyelStar or at facebook.com/gregg.doyel.