By alley - May 21, 2015, 6:31 PM ET

Indy 500: Sam Schmidt - “We keep racing”

The emotional hardships faced by teams after a major crash can't be quantified with a number, but the impact can definitely be measured on the faces of those involved. After James Hinchcliffe's terrible crash on Monday, it only took one glance at the weary Schmidt Peterson Motorsports crew members to feel their mental and physical exhaustion. But their resilience while preparing a new chassis to race in Sunday's Indy 500 has been remarkable – inspiring, even, and behind them, team owners Sam Schmidt and Ric Peterson have been working just as hard to keep everyone focused and uplifted.

The group's dedication to putting a new No. 5 ARROW Honda on track for stand-in Ryan Briscoe has been unwavering, and as Schmidt acknowledged on Thursday, the situation has also been incredibly taxing.

"It's the toughest thing you have to do in this occupation other than find money," he told RACER. "We have an amazingly experienced group of individuals. You bring them dinner and you bring them Long's donuts and you stuff them full of coffee and say, hey, I'd like to say you could have a week off after this, but you can't. We are all racers. Their wives are racers, their families are racers. We'll do what we have to do.

"My days haven't ended before midnight, and haven't started later than 5 a.m. Thinking of everyone here, I'm not worried about Ryan getting up to speed, but I'm a little worried about just the exhaustion factor over the last three months."

"It's been pretty good," added Peterson as he discussed the current spirit within the team. "Obviously, the first day or the day of the accident was different, but once the good news started coming out, everybody just said, OK, let's go out and get the car back on the track. They are doing what they usually do. Everybody's mood is pretty good – just because everybody's happy how Hinch is doing. That helps a lot."

Fortune has smiled on SPM many times since its IndyCar debut (as Sam Schmidt Motorsports) in 2001, and the team has already secured one victory this year with Hinchcliffe at NOLA Motorsports Park. The popular Canadian's crash on Monday will sideline the 28-year-old for the immediate future, but he's been vocal in his desire to return to the cockpit as soon as possible.

With a string of harrowing crashes dating back the 2001, SPM has been put through more adversity than most since it joined IndyCar. Drivers Davey Hamilton and Mikhail Aleshin faced long recovery periods after horrible crashes, and the late Dan Wheldon is a constant reminder of the sport's cruelest outcome. If Schmidt's prayers are answered, Hinchcliffe's accident will be the last crisis of its kind to test SPM's resolve.

"We dealt with it in 2011, we dealt with it in 2014," he noted. "Now we're dealing with it here. It's too much. But you just either decide to do it or not do it, right? You scratch your head and wonder why the situation happened. I still don't know why 2011 happened or 2014. Some good has come out of both situations. It doesn't make it any easier, but you can keep racing and enjoy what you're doing, or stop. We keep racing."