In RACER Magazine: Back to Front

Setbacks don't get much bigger than James Hinchcliffe's near-fatal crash at Indy last year, but the Schmidt driver turned a disaster into a catalyst for improvement.

In 1971, a fan jumped onto the stage at a Frank Zappa concert in London and pushed the musician into the orchestra pit. Among his injuries – which kept him wheelchair-bound for almost a year – Zappa suffered a crushed larynx. His voice remained a third of an octave deeper for the rest of his life.

"Having a low voice is nice," Zappa mused in his autobiography years later. "But I would have preferred some other means of acquiring it."

Aside from a predilection for facial hair, the one thing that James Hinchcliffe and Zappa might have in common is the experience of finding a diamond in the rubble. The circumstances of Hinchcliffe's horrific accident during practice for last year's Indianapolis 500 have been covered to the point of exhaustion, from the speed (228-ish mph), to the forces involved (126G), to the amount of blood he received via transfusions (14 pints).

The popular version of the narrative reached a redemptive crescendo when he returned to the Brickyard in May of this year and put his No. 5 Schmidt Peterson Motorsport Dallara-Honda on the pole.

But the real story might lie below the surface. While Team Penske runs away at the front, Hinchcliffe has quietly spent 2016 putting together the most consistent season of his Verizon IndyCar Series career. Some of those gains have been found outside the cockpit: Hinchcliffe is benefiting from the continuity that comes with working with the same engineer (Allen McDonald) for two years in a row – the first time it's happened in his career. (He worked with Craig Hampson twice, but in nonconsecutive years.) And there have been gains with the car itself, particularly with the team's ability to squeeze performance out of the Honda road and street package.

"This year's aero kit behaves a lot more like a traditional racecar than it used to," he says. "The joke in the engineering office was that the 2015 kit was the 'anti-car,' because everything you'd traditionally do to fix a problem, you'd have to do the exact opposite with that thing. Now we have a car that behaves like a racecar."

But Hinchcliffe himself deserves some of the credit as well. Is he a better driver because of the crash? That's a stretch. But did the accident provide an unexpected springboard for improvement? Now there's an idea that might have some merit.

"Going through what we did last year, it makes you look at certain things differently," says Hinchcliffe, "and I definitely came into this season more prepared than I ever had before – physically, mentally, every way.

"It was one of those situations where, when something you love and that you've worked hard all your life for is almost taken away from you, you appreciate it more and take it for granted less."

In the Hollywood version of the story, the trauma of the accident and the months of rehab that followed built to a triumphant closure in qualifying at Indy, when Hinchcliffe strung together a four-lap average of 230.760mph to make pole his own. "Drama, redemption, heartbreak, exuberance," began one report. And it was true – for those on the outside looking in.

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