INDY DIARIES: Remembering Scott Brayton

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.

In 1996, Scott Brayton qualified on pole for the Indy 500 for the second year straight. And he scored some bonus style points along the way: despite already having a second-row grid spot locked down, the Menard team dramatically scrapped Brayton's lap in the last half-hour and sent him out again in a back-up car. Any mistake could have derailed his entire Month of May, but four perfect laps later, Brayton was in P1, and erstwhile polesitter Arie Luyendyk was left wondering what the heck had just happened.

Less than a week later, and 20 years ago today, Brayton was dead from injuries sustained when his car suffered a right-rear puncture and snapped into the wall at Turn 2. Larry Curry, who was Brayton's crew chief, tells the story.

"We were out running race setups. Qualifying was over, and back then you had two weekends of qualifying, and we were on the pole, so we were just out there running race set-ups. Our race set-up with that Buick car at that time was still out there running right at 230 [mph]. So when the tire went down on the right-rear, there was just no chance to catch it.

"I knew how bad it was when Scott never responded to me ... I kept saying, 'Scott, are you OK? Are you OK?' And I wasn't getting any response. His dad, Lee, was in the pit with me, and of course he had a radio. Lee looked at me, and I looked at him, and I said, 'Lee, we'd better get over to there and find out what's going on.' You don't know at that time whether he'd just knocked the radio out of the car, or what happened. But once we got over there he wasn't even there, because they took him straight to the hospital.

"It was very, very unfortunate. Scott wasn't just my driver. He and I had formed a really strong bond; a really good relationship. I knew his family; he and his wife Becky had had a little girl, and it was just unbelievably gut-wrenching to go through all that. It was a tough time. We all took buses up to Michigan for Scotty's funeral ... it was just an emotional rollercoaster. Of all the different drivers I ran in my career, nobody was as passionate about Indy as him.

"I ended up putting Danny Ongias in the car for the race. I had to get a driver, and back then the rule was that you couldn't put a rookie in the car; you had to find a driver that had at least started the Indy 500 before. Well, there were only two guys that I could come up with, and that was Al [Unser] Sr, and Danny. And Al Sr wasn't going to come out of retirement to do it. So I got Danny on the phone.

"It was so hard, the first day that we took that car out to run it without him in it. I knew Scott well enough – and I know you hear this cliché a lot – but Scott knew how hard we'd work to build a pole position car, and he would have wanted to see that car race.

"I think Danny finished seventh after starting dead last. He got out there and just kept his nose clean. Actually, he spun it once during the race, on a restart. Those Buicks were sensitive when you got on the throttle; they'd light the tires up like a dragster. So you had to be careful to kind of even the boost into it. He did an incredible job."