EXCERPT: Lionheart - Remembering Dan Wheldon

BROTHERLY LOVE

By TONY KANAAN
IndyCar Series champion, 2004; Indy 500 winner, 2014
Dan connection Andretti Green teammate, 2003-2006

As teammates they were close, yet Tony Kanaan's relationship with Dan was sometimes more like sibling rivalry – at a distance

The different sides of Dan Wheldon most people didn't know about were discovered by the three of us – Dario Franchitti, Bryan Herta and I – when Dan joined us at Andretti Green Racing in 2003. There was a fun side of Dan, a crazy side, and a complicated side.

When I first met Dan, he was exactly like my young son Leo. I took Leo to the park today, and he kept saying, "Dad, are we there yet? Dad, are we there yet?" When we got there, he said, "Dad, when are we leaving? Dad, when are we leaving?" When I first met Dan, he was just like that. He asked me 4,000 questions a day about racing. "What do you do in this situation? How do you save fuel? What do you eat? What time do you go to bed?"

He was always eager to learn, and I think he thought if he did exactly what the rest of us did, he would become a champion. At the time, he simply wanted to get better.

Personality-wise, Dan and I were similar, or at least our personalities were closer together than his was to Dario's or Bryan's, so we bonded right away. But as I got closer to Dan, I discovered odd little quirks about him. He was anal to a bizarre degree. Every shoe he owned had to be in a box and sorted, probably in alphabetical order or by color. He knew where everything he owned was at all times. If it got scratched or messed up somehow, he threw it away. He was insanely organized about things that really didn't matter, and I simply could not understand that.

How could I like this guy? In many respects, despite the similarities in our personalities, I had absolutely nothing in common with him. I have no hair; Dan was obsessed with his hair. He had 15 hair products with him at all times. It took him longer to get ready to go out than most women. He had face creams and anti-wrinkle serums. I was like, "Who cares?" But that was Dan. It was part of what we all started to enjoy about him, if for no other reason than to give him a hard time.

He spent a lot of time at my home in Miami in those early days, and he started taking an interest in some of the things I was into. I'll never forget the time we were looking at cars at a local Ferrari dealership before the 2006 Indianapolis 500. He really wanted an Aston Martin they had. I went to help him with the negotiation, and when they settled on a price, the salesman said, "Do you have a car to trade?"

Dan said, "I have four."

The salesman thought he said, "I have a Ford." No, sir, he had four cars to trade for the Aston Martin. What's really funny about the story is that he got money back from the deal. Afterward, he thought he was the king of all car dealers.

Dan was Dan. If he was happy, he was happy. If he was mad, he was mad. He could be simple and complex, sometimes simultaneously. He didn't speak to me for more than a year and a half at one point. He thought I was trying to take his seat with Chip Ganassi's team, which wasn't true. Chip had talked to me about the possibility of joining the team, but it had nothing to do with Dan. I told Dan at the time, "I don't have the power to do that, bro. Chip was the one who approached me." Dan was like, "Well, he should have told me."

I also never heard Dan apologize. After a year and a half passed, he just started talking to me again. There was no production, no apology, and no explanation. It was as if it never happened.

He had a very strong personality. If you were his friend, you were his friend for life. If you were not Dan's friend, he could be a complete jerk. That's just the way it was. He was great with race fans and with most of the people around him, and he had a clear vision of what he wanted to be and what he wanted to accomplish, but there were times – especially early in his career – when he could come across in a bad way.

We all can be jerks at times, but early on when he was with Andretti Green, Dan was pretty full of himself, so much so that Dario and Bryan and I had to set him straight. Three times in the first three months we were teammates, we had to sit down with him and tell him what was what. The last time, Bryan made him cry. We basically had to impress on him that his nonsense wasn't going fly with us. He listened to us, and he grew up quite a bit after that.

If Dan was going to be something, he was going to be the best he could possibly be at it, and in those early days, there were times when he was the best jackass around. He could also be the best person around. I've never seen anyone as attentive or responsive to fans. He truly got that part of it – that the fans were responsible for what he did for a living and the life it gave him.

One of my favorite stories about Dan involved a trip to New York City. Back in the day, all the drivers in the Indy 500 would do a media tour in New York the day after qualifying. Well, one year we all qualified on Saturday, so we decided to go to New York early because Dan wanted to party. So Dario, Bryan, Dan and I rented a plane and flew there.

When Dan drank, he got aggressive. Since I'm not much of a drinker, I was often in charge of babysitting him when he drank. This was one of those nights. We went out and had dinner and drinks, then went to find a nightclub, but we couldn't get a taxi to stop for us. Dan started getting mad. At one point, Bryan was trying to hail a cab, and Dan jumped on his back.

Well, that didn't sit well with Bryan, who shoved him aside. Dan, being half lit, decided he was going to fight Bryan in the middle of a Manhattan intersection. I had to referee. It never turned into a fistfight, but Dan wanted it to. Needless to say, the night was wrecked, but somehow we managed to find three different cabs to take us back to our hotel.

On the track, I always felt like Dan raced me harder than he raced the other two guys. I never asked him about it, and I never really spoke about it with the other guys. He'd known Dario since he was a kid, and he respected Bryan because he was the oldest, but I always felt like he saw me as the competition. That said, he always knew what he was doing on the track, and he was always fair.

When he won the Indy 500 the second time in 2011, he passed me with about 15 laps left in the race. I didn't know it at the time, but he thought I chopped him a couple of times during the race. I hadn't, but he perceived it that way. While he passed me, I saw what appeared to be a wave. I thought, "What the hell? Why is he waving?"

He ended up winning and I finished fourth, so I walked to Victory Lane to congratulate him. I went to hug him, but he swore at me. He started yelling at me that I had cut him off. I said, "Dan, you just won the Indy 500. Let it go." He wouldn't, so I had to apologize. "I wouldn't do that to you," I said. "You know me."

Then I said, "Didn't you wave when you passed me? I thought you were happy."
He said, "No, I was flipping you off."

At the awards banquet the next night, I congratulated him and had some fun with it. I said, "I noticed you waving when you passed me. Sometimes when you stick your hand up at 200mph, you can't control all of your fingers. It looked like you lost a few of them."

I'll always be grateful that Dan decided to start talking to me again in 2011. It happened out of the blue. No explanation, no apology, just a simple greeting that washed away 18 months of silence. We were right back to where we were before. Best of buddies, brothers who occasionally tangled but always got over it, two guys who were alike and unalike.

Most of all, we were friends for eternity.