Texas: Kanaan beats Dario

Five cars were forced out of the sloppy race because of damage from accidents, and 11 separate collisions occurred. None of them involved Kanaan and Franchitti, however.

Kanaan passed Franchitti for the final time as both drivers passed their Andretti Green Racing team-mate Dan Wheldon on a restart with 14 laps remaining. Franchitti tried to work the outside as he closed to within one-tenth of a second of Kaanan in the final four laps, but eventually tucked behind and settled for second place.

"I thought to myself, 'Today, I am not going to lose'," Kanaan said. "Even if I'm going to lose to a guy I really want to see win, I'm wasn't going to lose."

"We both knew what we had," Kanaan said of himself and Franchitti. "I was comfortable, but you never know. Anything can happen on the last laps. You can have a cough in the engine or anything, I raced him to the end, for sure. I knew exactly what he had."

Franchitti said: "I almost got Tony on the outside, but I didn't have enough. I saw this gaggle of cars coming up behind us. When I got back to about where my front wheel was level with his rear, I just pulled back into line behind him. I thought, 'The best way to do this is to go single file and see if I can catch him'. I was sitting there with absolutely nothing for him. Unless he made a mistake and gave up the inside, I wasn't getting by him."

Alex Barron, who started last in the 22-car race after his gearbox blew up during qualifying Thursday night, raced through the field to finish third. Sam Hornish Jr, nearly caught in one of the accidents, nursed a broken car to a fourth-place finish, while Adrian Fernandez, who thumped into Scott Dixon while leaving the pits late in the race, finished fifth.

"We just kept plugging along and keeping after it," Barron said. "We were at the right place at the right time. The guys gave us three extremely good pit stops. That's what gave us track position. It would have been hard to try to win this thing because of how fast those two guys were at the end."

The first IRL race at TMS since Kenny Brack's crash last October race was clouded by more harrowing incidents in spite of the League's new, slower engine/chassis formula. The most costly was a wheel-touching incident that ended a strong run by Indy 500 winner Buddy Rice.

Rice, hired as Brack's replacement but now a permanent fixture in the Rahal Letterman Racing Panoz G Force-Honda, brushed wheels with Darren Manning while the two cars were heading into the third turn on the 180th lap. Rice saved the car before it hit the wall, but the driveshaft had broken, ending his effort.

"I don't even know who it was out there," said Rice, who finished 15th. "Maybe I came down a little and he came up or something else. I had to save it. I need to see the video to know what happened, but I didn't hear that anyone was near me or beside me."

Rice had led twice in the race and stalked Kanaan and Franchitti in the lead pack for most of the event. His incident also cost Manning, who faded to an eighth-place finish, and Hornish, who bent rear suspension pieces on his Marlboro Team Penske while trying to avoid Rice's slowing car but soldiered on for fourth place.

"The car ran almost as well after the accident," Hornish said. "I have to hand it to my crew. It was one of those races in which anything that could happen did happen. I'm happy with a fourth-place finish."

Other incidents included contact between Fernandez and Dixon on the final pit stop that launched Dixon's Target Chip Ganassi Racing G Force-Toyota in the air and ended his race. The IRL's defending champion finished 14th and is now sixth in points, 88 behind Kanaan.

"It cost us staying with the leaders and fighting for the lead," Fernandez said.

Mark Taylor, Ed Carpenter and A.J. Foyt IV also were sidelined by crashes during a race that featured a surprising number of close calls. The slowed speeds afforded by the new formula, along with the first race with the Speedway's new SAFER barrier, helped everyone depart in good health.

"When you crash 15 or 20mph slower, that helps a lot," Kanaan said. "We went the whole month of May [at the Indianapolis 500] without anybody getting hurt. Tonight, I saw some nasty crashes. Everybody walked out."

Including Kanaan, who mugged for cameras while wearing the cowboy hat and relished one of his contingency prizes, a pair of cowboy boots. "I tried on the boots this weekend," Kanaan said with a grin. "I've been practicing."