KEN WILLIS: Marcus Ericsson wins Indianapolis 500, "the biggest race in the world"

INDIANAPOLIS — After two years of adapting to restrictive realities, Indianapolis got what it deserved Sunday. A sun-soaked day of the familiar and traditional, and an absolute mass of smiling humanity to enjoy it all.

And the Brickyard also had its chances to crown another feel-good champ.

But Scott Dixon erased his day of dominance by hitting the exit ramp with too much oomph.

Tony Kanaan, the Brazilian so beloved in his adopted hometown, didn’t screw up anything; he actually did quite well to put himself in the hunt. Didn’t have enough at the end, though.

A year ago, the Brickyard added popular Indy legend Helio Castroneves to its list of four-time winners. He didn't overachieve to that extreme Sunday, but cracked the leaderboard late in the day and came home a very respectable seventh.

Sunday’s Indianapolis 500 minted a new champ, Marcus Ericsson, a 31-year-old Swede who was thrilled to launch his racing status into a higher orbit. Yet, as the great Swedes from all sports tend to do, he kept his Indy celebration under control:

Wreath, ring, milk, kiss the bricks.

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“I can’t believe it, I’m so happy,” said Ericsson. “We all dream of winning this race — the biggest race in the world.”

Ericsson’s undecorated Formula One career, from 2014-18 in lower-tier equipment, preceded his move to America and IndyCar.

He got his feet wet in 2019, then was hired by Chip Ganassi and has steadily progressed  — including two wins last year — right up to Sunday on racing’s most historic stage, where he was both lucky and unlucky, aggressive with the lead and, in the end, had the best personality traits of all: Speed and nerve.

Let’s round it up . . .

• The lucky: The two drivers who quickly set themselves apart were done in by pit issues. First, Alex Palou was forced to pit after a yellow flag but before the pits were open. No choice, he was going to run out of gas. He battled back to finish ninth.

Dixon, the six-time series champ with “only” one Indy 500 win, was clearly the class of the field with Palou out, leading 95 of the first 176 laps before entering the pits a smidge too fast — an ensuing drive-through penalty ruined the biggest Sunday of the year, and his face showed it at day’s end.

“Just heartbreaking,” he said.

• The unlucky: Ericsson was leading by a wide margin — three seconds — when Jimmie Johnson joined the Turn 2 Wall Testing Company on Lap 194. Making his first Indy 500 start, Johnson had a workmanlike day cut short when he became the fourth driver to lose control in the second corner.

Given the nature of such things, Ericsson was likely going to coast home under caution, but race officials, in a move you have to assume they borrowed from their NASCAR cousins, unfurled the red flag to halt proceedings and guarantee a post-cleanup return to green-flag action.

“Some of the hardest 10 minutes of my life,” he said of the delay.

• The aggressive: Each time off Turn 2 following the restart, Ericsson blazed a serpentine path down the backstraight, trying like hell to keep the two men behind him — Pato O’Ward and Kanaan — from latching onto a draft and using it to gather timely momentum.

You normally associate aggression with the guy doing the chasing, not the protecting. It was a plan, Ericsson said, cemented during a Saturday night dinner with former Indy winner Dario Franchitti.

“I went out and tried to execute the plan I had in my head,” he said.

• Fast and brave: O’Ward followed Ericsson through the twin blankets of packed grandstands down the frontstretch as they approached Lap 199.

Passing the stripe, O’Ward darted to the outside of Ericsson and nosed ahead, but with Turn 1 approaching in very quick fashion, he knew he didn’t have enough to fully clear for the lead and, most importantly, hold it through the corner with Ericsson on his left.

“I had one shot. Have to go flat,” O’Ward said. “You go flat and hope to God the car doesn’t snap. It still wasn’t enough. We have to come back next year and give it hell again.”

O’Ward thought “flat” was his only option because he felt Ericsson wasn’t going to give an inch, and he was right.

“I was not going to lift,” Ericsson said matter-of-factly.

Four of the aforementioned names — Dixon, Kanaan, Johnson and Palou — are all Ganassi Racing teammates of Ericsson’s. It was quite a month of May for Chip, who sold off his NASCAR holdings after last year.

Ganassi’s NASCAR exit might’ve had nothing to do with Sunday’s Indy results, but fact is, his team’s fifth Indy 500 win was its first in a decade. And yes, the win swamped any and all disappointments the team experienced during the first 199 laps.

“You have to be realistic when you have multiple cars,” Ganassi said in the afterglow. “You can have a good day and a bad day on the same day.”

But when it’s Indianapolis, both of the extremes are magnified, and Sunday was a day built for magnifying.

Following 2021’s limited attendance and 2020’s empty seats, the 2022 Indianapolis 500 was a packed-to-the-gills, sun-splashed gathering of 300,000, give or take. A spectacle, for sure.

And when the weatherman cooperates, as happened Sunday, and all the familiar and brilliant pageantry gives way to all of Indy’s mood swings, it reminds us all how the Indy 500 reached its lofty status and why it remains there.

The new champ, though largely unfamiliar to the casual American race fan, had two IndyCar wins before Sunday — both last year on street circuits — and plenty of wins in the off-Broadway circuits of Europe on his climb up the career ladder.

This latest checkered flag, as you’d imagine, tops all that came before for Marcus Ericsson.

“By a million miles,” he said.

— Reach Ken Willis at ken.willis@news-jrnl.com

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Indy 500 provides usual emotions, and first-time winner in Ericsson