Kanaan Says “It Wasn’t My Time”

Written by: Marshall Pruett  
 Date: 09/09/2011 - 06:55 PM
SPEEDtv.com

At a time on Sunday morning when many Americans were driving to their place of worship, Tony Kanaan was holding an impromptu prayer meeting of his own on Baltimore’s West Pratt Street.

Strapped inside an Indy car with failed brakes and hurtling towards a cement wall at 168 mph, Kanaan’s value system, priorities and approach to life were about to called into question.

Kanaan had hit walls at higher rates of speed, had been shot airborne before and knew what it was like to be on fire, but the situation he encountered in Turn 1 forced him to confront with his mortality in new and different ways.

After the spectacular crash—one where he made a split-second choice to steer left into his old friend Helio Castroneves to avoid the oncoming wall—Kanaan had his faith and resolve tested like never before.

Faith and worship are two topics that are rarely discussed in public by IZOD IndyCar drivers, but after what he encountered in Baltimore, Kanaan said he took it as a divine wakeup call.

“I had bad crashes in my life,” he said in the post-race press conference, “including the Indianapolis one, it was huge, back a couple of years ago, but this morning I woke up and I was in a bad mood, and I was complaining about things that didn’t really matter and I think [God] wanted to tell me I have a good [life], so I have to really think about that.”  

After a few days of introspection, and in one of his most raw and honest interviews to date, Kanaan shared his thoughts about what he learned from a crash that could have easily ended his life.

“You get greedy in life,” he told SPEED.com. “I should have learned a lesson. I’m a better person after what happened last year (when a tough season was capped by losing his lucrative ride at Andretti Autosport). The problem with racing drivers is this: If racing is good, life is good. If the racing is bad, life is bad. And that’s been a very difficult part for me to separate. If I have a bad race, I have a bad week until the next race.

“Usually, [racing drivers] are going to be competitive, and selfish, and alone and we’re not going to share anything. It’s hard to make friends because you can’t trust anybody. And I guess, over the years, me, Dario [Franchitti], Greg [Moore], Max [Papis], [Alex] Zanardi, Jimmy [Vasser], and some of the other guys, we changed that a little bit. But looking at the whole racing world, there’s still a lot of selfishness there. That’s a hard part of your nature to change.”

Kanaan’s weekend prior to the crash on Sunday hadn’t been a disaster by any means, but with the bar for happiness being set incredibly high--at accepting nothing less than a pole position or a win--he awoke in a bit of a funk.

“Five days before the season I didn’t have a job,” he said. “Now, before the crash, look at me. I was complaining about being sixth in the championship, I wasn’t having a good weekend at Baltimore, just had two DNFs, and yeah, it was just a brief moment, but you feel selfish and greedy. You want to win and to be competitive. After the crash, I could have said, ‘I’ve been successful; I’ve had a good career. I’m going to go home now and spend time with my family and play at the beach and do something different with my life.’ I’m not getting paid to race this year; that’s no secret. It’s the other way around. So I didn’t have to keep going after I crashed. But that was the first test on Sunday. I didn’t quit.”

After returning to the KV Racing transporter, Kanaan took some time to compose himself and then decided on how he should process the ordeal.

“The first thing that came to my mind was that I can’t come back being the same old TK. I’m not just saying that in a fake way. I believe that things are put in your path that will make you better for it. That’s how I saw it. And I thought about my son, big time. Having chosen to be a professional racing driver—and for anybody who chooses a life in racing—you have no time for anything else. I thought about losing my dad and growing up without him (cancer took Kanaan’s father when he was 11). So I thought about my son and said that I don’t want him to grow up like that. So I thought about it for half an hour to decide whether I wanted to get back in that car and keep doing this.”

Kanaan’s decision was befitting of a racing driver whose competitive fire is still burning bright.

“I asked myself, ‘do I NEED to do this?’ Not really. But to prove that I still WANTED to do this, I got in and drove the wheels off the car. There was no doubt in my mind that racing is still the No. 1 priority in my life. Selfish or not. Good or bad. That is my priority. For anyone who is in my life—my son, my girlfriend, my friends—they will have to understand this until I change my mind about what I want to do for a living.”

For those who know him, Kanaan’s choice to push aside his initial doubts fit his character perfectly.

“I don’t know how to think in any other way because I grew up having to do that. I had to prove people wrong, to fight every step of the way to go get the support I needed. If you put me in a race car, I’m going to fight. I don’t mean this to sound arrogant, but I don’t see myself getting afraid inside the race car. I just don’t see it. If God came up said I could choose the way I could go, I think everybody knows how I’d answer… The crash didn’t slow me down.”

Motoring from 28th and last on the grid to third by the end of the 75-lap race, Kanaan’s fighting spirit impossible to ignore on Sunday afternoon.

“I got in that car before the race and said, excuse my French, ‘Mother******, I’m going to get it done.’ The crash gave me more strength. It didn’t make me weak. There was never a split-second where I didn’t think I’d be back in the car. I never worried about the car. It was a sign to me—what did the crash mean? If I thought it was a sign I was supposed to stop driving, I would have gone back to the pits and told [KV Racing co-owner] Jimmy [Vasser], ‘thanks for everything, but I’m done.’ But that was never going to happen.”

With an intense weekend of high drama behind him, Kanaan is now able to laugh at some of what took place on West Pratt Street.

“I saw Dario in the driver’s meeting before the race and told him, ‘I’m too old for this sh*t!’…and he said, ‘Me too!’”

Kanaan’s teammate, Venezuela’s E.J.Viso, has long been considered the gold standard amongst the accident prone in the IZOD IndyCar Series, but after Kanaan’s acrobatic performance in the morning warmup, I pointed out that not only has Viso lost that crown to Kanaan, he’s no longer the best crasher in his own team…

“When I do it, I do it right!” Kanaan said with another hearty laugh.

As the conversation drew to a close, Kanaan said he appreciated all of the kind words and praise he’d received for making the hard choice to drive into his friend Castroneves, but says natural instincts and self-preservation had taken control of the steering wheel by that point.

“I’m not taking any credit for it. It was just a reflex. I’ve had some hard hits. When you hit that hard and you know that it hurts, trust me, you start looking for where the next hard hit might come and then you try to avoid them. My body knew it didn’t want to hit that cement wall, so next thing you know, I’m driving over Helio…”

Of the stories associated with crash that emerged last weekend, it was a Tweet made by Kanaan that was the most poignant and touching. As the KV Racing mechanics unbolted his Honda engine from the crashed car and prepared to install it in the backup chassis he’d race, Kanaan noticed the engine wore the serial number 99.

Kanaan’s dear friend Greg Moore, who used No. 99 throughout his career, died in a violent, high-speed Indy car crash more than a decade ago, and as Kanaan sees it, having the No. 99 engine behind him in the crash was a gentle reminder from his friend that he had more work to do in this life.

“I told Dario, ‘it wasn’t my time.’ I told him Greg [Moore] didn’t want me up there yet because I was going to beat him all the time once I arrived. I said, ‘he’s winning all the races up there and leading the championship, and he doesn’t want me to spoil that for him right now…”

Marshall Pruett is SPEED.com’s Auto Racing Editor, covering IndyCar and sports cars. He also contributes to Road & Track and Racecar Engineering.