Fuel pump stops great run by Servia

Oriol Servia’s charge through the Indianapolis 500 field was almost too good to be true as the driver of the #17 Rahal Letterman Racing DAFCA Special needed just 97 laps to storm from 25th to ninth.

But happens normally when things appear too good to be true, things went bad in hurry as a failure with the fuel pump feeding Ethanol to the team’s Honda powerplant stopped the car in its tracks. Servia had just moved into ninth place, owing to Tony Kanaan’s crash, but as he described it, ‘the car just shut off like someone threw a switch’.

The engine stopped running on the backstretch of the 2.5-mile Indianapolis Motor Speedway, leaving Servia to coast back to the pits as the RLR squad waited to diagnose the problem. The team quickly diagnosed the problem and tried a couple of remedies before discovering that the problem was terminal.

“The car was really good and I was faster than most of the people around me all day," Servia said. “I was just waiting on the race to play out but I honestly felt that we had a car that could win the race. Everything was going according to plan. The car was amazing."