Crew chief Looper guides Armstrong’s Sunday fightback at Indy

Jimmy Looper is well-versed in repairing wrecked race cars. Marcus Armstrong’s crew chief at Meyer Shank Racing has deep roots in IMSA’s WeatherTech SportsCar Championship where damage is the norm and swift fixes are required to keep going throughout the days and nights of endurance competition.

His experience was needed Saturday morning when Armstrong spun in Turn 1 during practice for Day 1 of qualifying for the Indianapolis 500, and with the need to pull the engine from the battered No. 66 Honda and start building a new car using Armstrong’s road racing tub from the Grand Prix of Long Beach, Looper’s crew and a small army of helpers from technical partner Chip Ganassi Racing and Honda Racing Corporation US began the process of conjuring a new No. 66.

The process look longer than desired as the makeshift squad blended the road course chassis – still bearing its orange ROOT Insurance colors from April along with the surviving blue and white components featuring from Spectrum cable – with as many Speedway-optimized parts as possible, which resulted in the Frankenstein car appearing at 5pm to turn its first laps since the 8:41am crash.

“You know, it's amazing. Jimmy said to me on pit lane, while we watched them trying to extract Marcus out of the car, Jimmy looked at me and said, ‘We'll be fixed and we’ll be back on track today.’ I said, ‘You sure?’ He's like, ‘We'll be there. Don't worry.’ And we were ready,” Shank told RACER.

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Looper’s confidence was inspiring for Shank, as was the spirit displayed by his weary crew after a non-stop season that began in January with MSR’s two-car Acura ARX-06 IMSA GTP program at Daytona. The Ohio-based team’s crew pulls double duty helping at the long sports car races along with the full IndyCar calendar.

“It's just always amazing to me when struggles comes and no matter their mood or how they're tired of being on the road, they just click into another gear,” Shank continued. “I’ve just seen it so many times. It's just amazing to watch. And not only just our team. The Ganassi guys came over and helped everyone, the HRC guy. It just amazes me.

“It's just the craziest thing, because, you know, you get in these gluts of schedules and everyone's worn out. You can just feel people tightening up, right? And then something bad happens, and they all just lock in and go. It's an incredible phenomenon that I've seen in racing that blows my mind every time. The absolute camaraderie of inner team and outside team to come and help is just a beautiful thing to witness.”

Although Armstrong was unable to reach a speed during the final 50 minutes of qualifying to get him inside the top 30 and avoid today’s Last Chance Qualifying session, Shank is confident in his driver, in the build of the replacement No. 66 car which received an overnight wrap (pictured above) to match its pre-crash colors, and in their ability to muster enough pace to earn one of the three remaining spots on the grid among the four cars competing in the LCQ.

“We're confident we're going to be fine,” Shank said. “The tragic thing about this is, Marcus’s primary car was really fast before it got crashed, so we've got really fast cars. We had a couple things in our test runs yesterday that weren't working correctly, so that inhibited the whole thing. But now we've got that all tightened up. We've got some better body fit done. We all have a plan, everyone's cool and there's no one panicking, and we know we can get it done.”