James Hinchcliffe: 'My Night Was Great Until About 8 Minutes To Go'

James Hinchcliffe had his heart broken on Saturday night when he dominated the 2016 Firestone 600 only to get beaten at the finish line. Afterward he spoke about just missing out on victory.

You have to feel for James Hinchcliffe. He returned to Texas as the leader of the 2016 Firestone 600, and he kept leading the race for the majority of Saturday night. Then on the last lap Graham Rahal found a way to literally beat Hinchcliffe by a nose.

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It would’ve been Hinchcliffe’s first Verizon IndyCar Series win in more than a year, and it was more devastating to lose after running up front all evening. After the race, the No. 5 Schmidt Peterson Motorsports Honda driver was still hurting as he spoke to Beyond The Flag.

“My night was great until about eight minutes to go,” he lamented.

“We picked up right where we left off in June,” Hinchcliffe continued. “The Arrow Electronics car was just an absolute rocketship. We got the lead the first half of this race back in June by really building a car to take care of tires, because that’s been always the name of the game here in Texas. And we did that. We did that better than anybody by a good chunk, too.

“I’m so proud of the guys. I’m so proud of the car they put together to roll off the truck still in totally different conditions…We had ten minutes of practice, which was [really] only six minutes of practice, and having the best car I’ve ever had at Texas – maybe we were trying too hard at every other race.”

Where did it go wrong? Hinchcliffe walked us through his night.

“Stops were great, strategy was great, I thought we were great in traffic,” he explained. “Like I said, we built the car for long runs so that first caution, I was like all right, that’s unfortunate but it’s the last stop, everything should be OK. We still have thirty-something laps to go.

“And then as they kept coming and the laps counted down and down, I knew it was going to be harder and harder, and we held off the charges from Ed [Carpenter] and from Tony [Kanaan]. But ultimately that call to come and get tires at the end there, that last stop, I think that was the difference for Graham, and it wasn’t much.

“I gave him the bottom into [Turn] 3. I had to make a decision because I thought he could get the run off of 2, and that whole last run, the last five, six laps I was side by side with Tony and I was timing the line. I’ve seen so many races won here on the high line, coming to the line because you just have that momentum off of 4, and I was thinking back to my IRL Classic days and Sam Hornish Jr.’s tricks and all the rest of it, but man, Graham just pulled through 3 and 4 like no one had all night.

“We made a run again on him at the end there and it got pretty close, but congrats to him, and like I said, big credit to the team,” he concluded. “It’s just tough having a car like that and leading that many laps but not the one that counted.”

Like Rahal before him, Hinchcliffe praised his fellow drivers for being able to race in close quarters without incident.

“Certainly at the end we put on a hell of a show for the fans, and that’s what we’re here for,” he said. “It would have been a lot more boring if some car just won by half a straightaway. But the racing seemed pretty good, and I can’t thank Graham and Tony and Simon [Pagenaud] and all the guys up there enough.

“We put ourselves in some pretty precarious situations tonight and everybody came out OK. Nobody did anything stupid, and everybody played nice, very respectful,” he continued. “I had a blast. That’s the problem. I had an absolute blast. Had I not led every lap of the race, I would be much happier than I am.

“But it was good old-fashioned mile-and-a-half racing. This is why I wish we had more mile-and-a-half tracks on the schedule. This is a lot of fun for us. People have got to pedal the car; it’s not just wide-open racing the whole stint like it was in days past with the car.”

Yet for as much as he enjoyed the competition Hinchcliffe wasn’t going to conceal how much he was disappointed that he wasn’t the driver in Victory Lane.

“Man, I really wanted to shoot those guns. And I wanted a hat. I’ve been running this race now for like eight years without a cowboy hat,” he admitted.

Asked if he thought he’d look good in the cowboy hat that Texas Motor Speedway traditionally hands out to its race winners, Hinchcliffe replied, “I’d look good with a winner’s trophy, man. I don’t care what you wear on your head.”

James Hinchcliffe: ‘My Night Was Great Until About 8 Minutes To Go’

By Brittany Frederick | Aug 30, 2016

James Hinchcliffe had his heart broken on Saturday night when he dominated the 2016 Firestone 600 only to get beaten at the finish line. Afterward he spoke about just missing out on victory.