Kanaan hurts wrist in warm-up crash

The right rear wishbone snapped on his Andretti Green Racing Dallara-Honda, sending the car tail-first into a barrier at Turn 6. Kanaan was checked by IRL medical personnel, who said x-rays showed no broken bones.

However, earlier in the day Kanaan and AGR officials said he had sustained a hairline break in an outer bone in the wrist.

"We'll try to manage the pain," Kanaan said. "It is bugging me right now, but it won't be the first time I've had a pain in my wrist, especially this one.

"I'm not really looking forward to the first few laps. It's going to be awful. But sometimes with the adrenaline, it goes away. If I can't do it, I can't do it, but I don't see that happening. I'm a fighter; I'm not going to give up."

Kanaan has a history of wrist and forearm injuries. In practice for a CART Champ Car race in Detroit in 2000, he sustained a wrist injury that required surgery and forced him to miss four races. In 2003 at Motegi, he crashed with Scott Dixon and broke bones in a forearm.

"It hurts a lot, but they said it was a hairline break of something on the top of the wrist," Kanaan said. "It's not like something is broken all the way through; otherwise they wouldn't let me race."

The Brazilian, who won last week's race at Richmond, qualified sixth on Saturday. His car is expected to be repaired in time for the race, maintaining his starting position. Had the car been written off and replaced by a spare, Kanaan would have been sent to the rear of the field for the start.

"If there's a positive to this, it's that it happened in practice and not during the race," Kanaan said.

The force of the impact was measured at 80 Gs, making it the second hard crash in two weeks for Kanaan. At Iowa Speedway on June 22, Kanaan crashed while running third, later calling it the "hardest hit of my life."

Today's crash was a result of a clean break in the wishbone while the car was on a downhill straight at 170mph. The crash was the latest in a string of wishbone failures on the Dallara chassis, something Kanaan says is a concern.

"We've got to do something," he said. "It has happened lately, but it wasn't happening before. It's not a lack of parts or that we're using old stuff. It's maybe just that we've added some weight. We've modified the cars over the years, so we have to think about where it is and what it is that's causing them to break.

"Dallara has given us perfect cars. If something is breaking, I'm sure they're on top of it and trying their best to fix it.

"Unfortunately, in motor racing sometimes bad things need to happen in order for us to make it better. It's a problem that's just come out lately, and they're on top of it."