Inside the controversial racing move that earned a nickname, an Indy 500 win and a ban

Editor's note: This story was originally published in 2022. We are republishing it as part of our coverage of the 2026 Indy 500 . Some references may be out of date.

INDIANAPOLIS – Marcus Ericsson and Dario Franchitti sat inside a nearly barren Indianapolis Motor Speedway on Saturday night and plotted how the Swedish ex-Formula 1 driver would win the Indianapolis 500. Perhaps Franchitti, the three-time winner of the Greatest Spectacle in Racing, could foresee a future stranger than fiction, where Chip Ganassi Racing’s fastest two cars throughout practice, qualifying and the first 70 laps of Sunday's race would disqualify themselves from contention via mistakes centered around pitlane. And the driver who a year ago hadn’t won an IndyCar race but clearly had a bullet of a car in clean air, could leapfrog Arrow McLaren SP’s pair of challengers to string out a 3-second lead, all in 10 laps.

Then, to Ericsson’s dismay, his own teammate threw it in the wall with six laps to go, a mistake that, with Alex Palou’s strategy bad luck and Scott Dixon’s pit lane speed limiter bungle, painted a picture of Chip Ganassi Racing’s horrendous luck in the 500 over the last decade. Ericsson wasn’t the best car – until he was. Then, he was going to win – until he very might not.

While sitting in pitlane for 10 minutes waiting out IndyCar race control’s red flag to ensure the 106th 500 would end under green, Ericsson couldn’t believe his luck – the good and the bad. “Those were some of the hardest 10 minutes of my life, thinking about what to do, that I’m leading the biggest race in the world and that I could win it,” Ericsson said Sunday. “And I was angry, too.