Color this car owner happy

By Ron Kantowski

Saturday, May 16, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Pink is for elephants and flamingos and panthers and Cadillacs and slips from your boss and the little houses of John Mellencamp’s youth.

And, this year, for an Indy 500 race car owned by Sam Schmidt of Henderson.

Last week, during the dying moments of first-day qualifying for next Sunday’s big race, Schmidt’s driver, an Englishman named Alex Lloyd — aka “Pink Lloyd” — wheeled onto the track and immediately burned the retinas of the track stewards and a few thousand fans sitting in Turn 1. He also put the pink car into the middle of the fourth row of the starting grid with a four-lap average speed of 222.622 mph. It was a Herculean effort for a cobbled-together team that probably will run just this one race, unless sponsorship dollars start falling from the sky.

Danica Patrick, who drives for Andretti Green Racing, one of the sport’s best-financed teams, will start alongside the pink car. She’ll be driving a black-and-orange car. Go figure.

“Pink is the new red,” Schmidt said via cell phone Thursday from Gasoline Alley after Lloyd finished his practice laps and scorched a few more retinas.

Although it would be difficult — make that impossible — to envision tough-as-nails A.J. Foyt or crusty ol’ Bobby Unser strolling around the garage area in Lloyd’s pink driving suit, pink race cars aren’t exactly a recent phenomenon at the venerable Brickyard. In 1955 Bob Sweikert drove a pink car into victory lane. About 30 years later Emerson Fittipaldi, the two-time Indy winner, made his 500 debut in a pink car; more recently, Jeff Ward drove an Aerosmith-sponsored car that was painted pink mostly to call attention to the rock band’s song of the same name.

Schmidt, who has been coming to Indianapolis as a driver or car owner since 1996, said he never envisioned that Lloyd would qualify on the first day, usually the domain of gargantuan teams such as Penske and Ganassi and Andretti Green. Nor did he anticipate the torrent of publicity the pink car would receive.

The car was painted pink at the request of sponsor HER — Healthy Energy Revitalizer, an energy drink for women. On race day, HER models will be strutting around the pits in skimpy pink uniforms that will make Lloyd’s look absolutely pale by comparison. My prediction is that although most of the 250,000 fans in the stands won’t trade what’s in their coolers for a six-pack of HER in the skinny pink cans, those models and their skimpy uniforms should be able to cut into the winsome Patrick’s popularity with the male 18-34 demographic.

Once the race starts, it won’t be about the color of the car anymore, although the other drivers won’t be able to say they didn’t see Schmidt’s driver coming. As bright as his car is, they’ll be able to see Lloyd coming in Terre Haute.

But Schmidt says this will be the No. 99 car’s best chance of making some noise on race day since he was a teammate of Arie Luyendyk, another two-time Indy champion, in the late 1990s.

“Everybody has been clicking and it’s been fun working with Alex again (Lloyd won eight races driving for Schmidt in the 2007 Indy Lights series) — he’s confident and the car should be should be good on race day,” Schmidt said.

“I don’t know if we’ll have something for Penske and Ganassi (whose cars will start first, second, third, fifth and ninth). But we have put ourselves in a good position.”

Schmidt has put himself in a good position, too. When racing became too expensive and sponsors too hard to find a few years back, he was forced to focus on the less costly Lights series, and to pool his resources to put together an Indy effort. The pink car is a collaboration of Sam Schmidt Motorsports and Chip Ganassi Racing, which has Lloyd under contract. Schmidt is providing the car and the crew, Ganassi the money and the driver and an engineer to set it all up.

“I’d love to get back in the series full-time but without the proper funding, why bother?” Schmidt said Thursday.

In the meantime, he’ll keep rubbing nickels together and holding carwashes on 16th Street outside the track if it means continuing to race in the 500.

“Walking out of Gasoline Alley — I should say rolling out of Gasoline Alley — and seeing that enormous crowd of 250,000 people makes your hair stand up. It’s just a phenomenal feeling,” Schmidt said.

The reason Schmidt must roll out of Gasoline Alley is that he uses a wheelchair as a result of a testing crash in 2000 that left him paralyzed from the chest down. He doesn’t talk about his condition unless you ask, and you usually don’t ask, because his condition hasn’t prevented him from doing just about anything he wants. He has a wife and kids and a good life. People in racing admire Sam Schmidt. People outside of racing admire Sam Schmidt.

So if the sport that has taken from him decides to give something back next weekend, it would make a lot of people very happy.

Think pink.