Santino Ferrucci has declared himself a future Indy 500 winner after finishing third in this year’s 107th running of the event.
The podium represented a career-best IndyCar result, three days before his 25th birthday, and he is bullish about his prospects.
“It’s one of those things to where I’m very happy with how everything went,” said Ferrucci.
“We had a hell of a month. Couldn’t have asked for a better day at the end, but also it could have been a hell of a lot worse, all things considered, so just very thankful for that.
“I think it’s pretty clear that we’ll win that race one of these days.”
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The half-second deficit to the winner came in a single-lap sprint to the chequered flag, but it belies just how close Ferrucci came to pulling off victory.
It looked like he had pinched second place on the penultimate restart, which saw literally seconds of green flag running due to a crash in the back of the field.
However, a review during the subsequent red flag period found that Ferrucci had just been pipped by the timing of the yellow flag and hence Josef Newgarden was repositioned in second place.
Newgarden would, of course, go on to pass Marcus Ericsson on the final lap and triumph in the Indy 500 for the first time himself, while the Foyt driver cast a seemingly downbeat figure straight after the race.
“I wouldn’t necessarily call the emotion sad,” he explained.
“It wasn’t just like one particular thing when I got out of the car, and as everybody saw on national television I was basically crying.
“It’s just one of those competitor things in you that there was so much riding on that race, and it was going so well up until that – it finished really well.
“When you have that kind of … it wasn’t just pressure to perform but emotional pressure to just be there and to know that we probably had that race won, had it gone yellow two seconds later, it’s just kind of heartbreaking.
“But still, at the end of the day, you come home in third, to join Helio [Castroneves, now a four-time Indy 500 winner] and one other driver, I believe it’s Henry Fultz or Henry Hines, in five for five of your first five starts in top 10s, and then you really start to look at what you’ve accomplished at the 500 in your first five starts with four different teams and what we’ve done at AJ Foyt Racing, who hasn’t had a podium or top three since the year 2000 at the speedway.”
The IndyCar Series continues this weekend on a new street circuit in Detroit.
Every IndyCar race is streamed live and ad-free on Stan Sport in Australia.
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