INDY DIARIES: Parnelli's redemption song

 Over 99 runnings, the Indianapolis 500 has become the most famous event in motorsport. That iconic status is built on a bedrock of hundreds of small stories, and to celebrate the centennial race, RACER.com has asked some of the people who are part of Indy's fabric to share a few of those stories with us. Check back every day between now and race day for a new 'Indy Diary' entry.

Any Indy 500 win is special, but for Parnelli Jones, victory in 1963 was the perfect antidote for the pain of having victory slip away a year earlier. Even so, Jones still had to survive a post-race protest from Lotus's Colin Chapman, whose car finished second in the hands of Jim Clark. Chapman was convinced that Jones was spared the black flag because he was American.

"Winning the Indy 500 in 1963 was the highlight of my career. But in my rookie year, 1961, I led for 27 laps until I lost a cylinder, and in 1962 I had almost a lap lead when I lost the brakes. Not winning that race really hurt me, maybe more than losing with the turbine because I hadn't won Indy yet at that point. [ED: In 1967, Jones led all afternoon before suffering a mechanical failure with three laps to go],

"What also happened in my rookie year was, I came out of Turn 4, lost it, and I was barely able to save it. The tires were tall, so when you started sliding it would kind of roll the rubber under. And with the weight being on the left-hand-side, when it quit sliding and stood up ... Jack Turner flipped down the straightaway the year before when his car did that.

"They used to have a saying at that time: if you get it sideways, go ahead and spin it out. And it was to keep the car from doing that. But I corrected it, and almost did the same thing. And right then I learned something, and I said to myself that next time, I'm going to know what that feeling is going to be [when the car starts to step out].

"When I came back testing for 1963 ... you'd have understeer coming off the corner, which killed your straightaway speed. But I could come off looser, and that was the difference to what everyone else had. I had everybody covered by at least a mile an hour. And I did all the tire testing before that race, so when the time came, it was like everybody else was running under a yellow flag or something.

"Most of the race was pretty straightforward, but towards the end my oil tank cracked and started leaking oil onto my left-rear tire. Pretty close to the end, I nearly spun it. I slowed down and after two or three laps it finally quit doing it. Of course, what had happened was that the oil capacity had finally dropped below the crack. It quit spilling out and I picked up speed, and I ran some of my fastest laps after that.

"After the race I found out that the officials were talking about black-flagging me. I had no knowledge of that at the time I was in the car – there were no radio communications. The win did feel better coming off the back of the disappointment of the year before. It gave me some redemption. Although the controversy afterwards did put a bit of a black mark against it."