INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Felix Rosenqvist’s long-awaited Indianapolis 500 victory lap started sinking in quickly.
After gulping the traditional swig of milk and dumping the rest over his head Sunday, the winner of the closest race in Indy 500 history started making the winner’s rounds. He spent two hours answering questions in his fire suit before heading to another photo shoot. Then there was a short celebratory night before hitting the early morning television shows, enduring additional photo shoots and, yes, Monday night’s annual postrace dinner where he’ll find out how much money he won.
Never mind that there’s another race next weekend in Detroit.
But the 34-year-old Swede who endured so much heartbreak at Indianapolis and in IndyCars wasn’t about to start complaining. No, he was too busy savoring the spoils of victory.
“I can sit here for 24 hours and do this, whatever you want,” Rosenqvist said with a smile. “It’s funny, someone asked me to sign their beer bottle a minute ago and writing Indy 500 winner was like, it kind of struck me that I’ve done it. I still feel like it’s a dream. I feel like I could wake up at any point and it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s race day, we haven’t run yet.’ I still hope I don’t wake up.”
Rosenqvist probably didn’t get much shut-eye Sunday night and not just because his newborn daughter, Stella, is less than a month old.
This was the moment Rosenqvist’s family dreamt about from the moment it started scraping together money for his karting career.
While he barely remembers the effervescent, guitar-playing Kenny Brack becoming the first Swede to win “The Greatest Spectacle in Racing” back in 1999, he does remember his father telling him how great Brack was and how great a victory it was for the country.
Twenty-three years later, Marcus Ericsson replicated Brack’s feat on Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s 2.5-mile oval. Ericsson celebrated his 500 win by taking the iconic Borg-Warner Trophy on tour across his home country, which has a population of less than 11 million.
The Meyer Shank Racing driver isn’t sure if that will be in the plans this time, but he was grateful for Ericsson welcoming him to the club.
“I’m pretty proud to be one of three Swedish (winners), which is a pretty small nation in the grand scheme of things, to have won the biggest race in the world,” he said. “(Marcus) came up to me when we were drinking the milk in victory circle and he said I earned it, that I deserved it. That meant a lot to me.”
Rosenqvist certainly earned his place in history with his unforgettably daring move — hurtling down the front straightaway behind David Malukas on the final lap, making a perfectly timed swing outside, catching a tow and edging his car across the yard of bricks, barely ahead of Malukas.
The victory margin of 0.0233 seconds was even smaller than Al Unser Jr.’s 0.043-second victory over Scott Goodyear in 1992, and even in the moment, Rosenqvist understood the significance of what happened.
“I thought I was second, to be honest. I was like, this is — this sucks, now we’re second in the 500,” said Rosenqvist, who made his fifth straight start in the top nine and placed fourth twice in the previous four years. “I thought I didn’t have it, and then I shifted up, and it was just kind of sucking up to David, and it was just enough to get me over the finish line, half a foot ahead of him. You can’t even dream up that stuff. It was just so cool. I’ll watch it a million times.”
But before Rosenqvist became a winner here, he was there in the shoes of Malukas and Pato O’Ward — two-time Indy runner-ups who have been unable to bask in their own milk bath. Rosenqvist’s advice: Never give up.
“That’s what I’ve done,” he said. “If you’re knocking on the door, it will happen.”
This year, it did thanks in part to this first-time father understanding that there’s more to life than racing. His wife, Emille, and his new daughter helped him learn that lesson heading into the biggest race of the IndyCar season, and one day, when old enough, Stella will see her father’s image on the trophy and understand what he did and how she helped.
And, to Rosenqvist, that will be the sweetest victory of all.
“It’s funny because if you go to our house, we don’t have any pictures of racing, you wouldn’t know I’m a race car driver because I tried to separate work and home,” he said. “But I think, yeah, this kind of changes that. I hope she’ll be proud of it, and for her to be our little lucky charm for the rest of her life.”
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