Hornish wins again at Texas

"It's been unbelievable," Hornish said. "If you would have told me 10 years ago that I would ever win 19 IndyCar races in my career, I would have told you that you were crazy. I'm really thankful that I've been given so much. Sometimes I don't think I deserve it, but for whatever reason I feel like I've been blessed."

Kanaan finished 0.0786 seconds behind to close within 13 points of series points leader and Andretti Green Racing teammate Dario Franchitti. Patrick posted a third-place finish, the best of her career.

"It's too bad Tony and I didn't have enough time to catch Sam," Patrick said. "It's just hard to pass around here. Unless you've got a problem, if you're in the lead, you're probably going to hang on right there."

That's precisely the problem Kanaan had at the end of the race. With Hornish staying primarily low, the only option for Kanaan was the second line. He couldn't get around him there, and couldn't pry him far enough off the bottom, so he was stuck in second. The more he tried, the more he dirtied up the air for Patrick.

"With two laps to go, Sam's car became a little wide, which is perfectly fine," Kanaan said. "He didn't do anything that was not in the rules, and then Danica started to understeer because Sam and I started to run too wide. I couldn't get close to Sam and she couldn't get close to me."

Driving without fifth gear, Franchitti finished fourth to maintain his points lead after the seventh race of the season. "We lost fifth gear after the first pit stop and we were sitting ducks on restarts," Franchitti said. "A lot of people passed us there, so we just kept soldiering on."

The race's storyline was altered dramatically by a multi-car crash on the 198th lap. The right rear wheel came off A.J. Foyt IV's car, causing several cars to crash trying to avoid it. Caught in the melee were both Target Chip Ganassi drivers Scott Dixon and Dan Wheldon, who had battled for the lead for much of the race, and Helio Castroneves, Darren Manning, Ed Carpenter and Sarah Fisher.

Somehow, Kanaan split the space between Foyt and his bouncing wheel and continued on.

"I'm not going to brag about it," Kanaan said. "I have no idea how I made it through. It was like 'Days of Thunder.' I kind of closed my eyes and went full throttle and made it through. Sometimes you've got to be lucky."

On the restart on the 206th lap, Hornish led Kanaan, Patrick and Franchitti, but two lapped cars were between Hornish and Kanaan, and more lapped cars were between the other leaders. Once Kanaan got past the lapped cars, he moved up to Hornish's rear wing. However, he couldn't make the pass.

"Tony didn't seem like he could keep it right down in there behind me," Hornish said. So instead of basically having a one-car draft, you're busting twice as big of a hole in the air. It really allowed Danica to catch up at times and run some good lap times."

Patrick said her slight fade at the end was a result of bad air. "I was pushing," she said. "But I was also trying to put myself in a position where I could get up behind Tony and get up behind him. When you're trying to do that, the car is not comfortable."

The late-race crash seriously damaged Castroneves' place in the standings, sending him to a 16th-place finish and dropping him to sixth in points.

"All I saw was smoke," Castroneves said. "My spotter said to go low, so I did. All of a sudden, bam. I was like, 'What was that?'"

Wheldon also took a major hit in the crash, both literally and figuratively. He appeared to have the fastest car early in the race and led 52 laps, but the 15th-place finish dropped him to fourth in the standings.

"We just ran into a little bit of bad luck," Wheldon said. "Unfortunately, we just didn't have the speed to stay up at that point. We just need to bounce back from this and be strong."

Until that point, the race had been fairly clean, with only a solitary spin by Jon Herb and a two-car incident involving Tomas Scheckter and Marco Andretti that sent Scheckter spinning through the grass on the frontstretch. After the crash, Scheckter ran onto the apron of the track and threw his gloves at Andretti's car.

"He's done it before," Scheckter said of Andretti. "He tries to swerve into people. The unfortunate thing is that Marco is my friend. He's a good friend of mine and obviously we are in the heat of the battle out there and he sees his teammates up there and obviously he needs to have a good race and it was probably just a little upsetting seeing a Vision car ahead of him."

Andretti, who later retired when his engine revved out of control in the pits, apologized to Scheckter. "I thought I gave him enough room but obviously I didn't," Andretti said.

Following Hornish, Kanaan, Patrick and Franchitti to the finish line was Vitor Meira, who was confused after the race by a strange incident during the first caution flag, when Hornish and several other drivers passed the pace car while chief steward Brian Barnhart screamed at them over the radio to stay behind the pace car.

Meira, who remained behind the pace car as instructed, found himself outside the top 10 on the ensuing restart.

"What an absolute mess," Meira said. "I wasn't one of the cars that passed the pace car, and somehow we end up near the end of the line? I was the only one to respect the pace car, and I was the one that was the most penalized.

"It might not have changed the final result at the end of the day, but I thought the Panther team was lucky and instead we were penalized. We still don't have an answer."

Hornish, who restarted fifth at that point, quickly found himself in the lead and maintained control for most of the rest of the race. The high-banked, 1.5-mile oval has long been a Hornish trademark. He won at Texas in 2001 and 2002, and also has finished second in '05, third in '01, and fourth in '04 and '06.

This race, however, was a bit different. Officials lengthened it by 28 laps because earlier IndyCar races at Texas were thought to be ending too quickly.

"I was pretty upset at lap 200 when the yellow came out and I knew Tony was going to have a shot to catch back up to me when I had a nine-second lead," Hornish said. "I was under yellow and would have won (under the old format). I was like, 'Man, all I need now is a tire to go down or something to happen.'"

Instead, he got the victory that had been eluding him this season at the track that has always been good to him.

"We didn't necessarily have bad luck this season, but we just couldn't get things to go our way," Hornish said. "I've said all season that we're right there. We're right on the edge, if only we can get things to go our way."

After a weekend off, the IndyCar Series resumes June 24 with its first visit to Iowa Speedway.

Pos  Driver             Laps
 1.  Sam Hornish Jr      228
 2.  Tony Kanaan         228
 3.  Danica Patrick      228
 4.  Dario Franchitti    228
 5.  Vitor Meira         228
 6.  Jeff Simmons        228
 7.  Scott Sharp         227
 8.  Buddy Rice          225
 9.  Kosuke Matsuura     225
10.  Sarah Fisher        221
11.  Milka Duno          221
12.  Scott Dixon         206
13.  Darren Manning      200
14.  Tomas Scheckter     199
15.  Dan Wheldon         196
16.  Helio Castroneves   196
17.  A.J. Foyt IV        195
18.  Ed Carpenter        195
19.  Marco Andretti      140
20.  Jon Herb             44