Doyel: Why Pippa Mann is the most important driver in 2018 Indy 500

INDIANAPOLIS – When she can feel it coming, the gravity and honor of her Indianapolis 500 mission filling her heart and now her eyes, Pippa Mann looks away. She keeps talking but turns her head as her eyes redden, and stares at something only she can see. She doesn’t want to cry. You have no idea how badly she doesn’t want to cry.

But she’s talking about her former teammate, Bryan Clauson of Noblesville, who died in 2016 at age 27, whose death meant life to five people, five strangers, through his gift of organ donation. She turns her head and keeps going, talking about the privilege of representing Donate Life Indiana, which has outfitted her No. 63 car, once so famously pink, in blues and greens.

“It was a really big honor for me,” she says. “It does come with a lot of weight, it comes with a lot of responsibility. Just as with my former program where we ran the pink car, I’m very aware that the Donate to Life car …”

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She’s pausing. Looking away. Pippa doesn’t want to cry. As she tells me later, she understands her position “as a female athlete in this sport, which means guarding your emotions to an extent.” And she never was one to cry, either. Not until … well. Not until all of this.

“This isn’t just about my friend,” she says, softly. “This is about everybody. But at the same time, it is deeply personal. It is about my teammate. My friend.”

We talk on Wednesday for 30 minutes, 30 hectic and crazy minutes in a month that is so hectic for Pippa, so crazy, other IndyCar drivers marvel at her workload. And in those 30 minutes Pippa looks away five times. This is emotional, what she’s doing and why she’s doing it. In a sport where speed is everything, where all that matters is faster faster faster, speed is just a side note to Pippa Mann. It’s a detail, a small one, which is why I believe this to be true:

Pippa Mann will be the most important racecar driver in the 2018 Indianapolis 500.

Which makes it all the more heartbreaking that she has almost no chance — and she knows it — to win the thing.

* * *

Pippa peels off a thin sheet of sticky plastic and lays it flat on the table. She does this as we’re talking, turning her pink phone face down and placing it on top of the clear plastic, smoothing it out to remove the air bubbles, because multi-tasking is what she does — what she has to do — in the month of May. She turns her phone over to show me the shattered screen she is trying to protect.

“I drop my phone pretty regularly, and it was already looking pretty tatty, but last night I managed to give it a proper drop,” she says in her British accent, and I’m asking her if she drops things often.

“All the time!” she says. “My phones only survive about one year. Unfortunately, I’m on a contract where they need to survive for two years, so I’m going to have an iCrack for a while.”

Did you say iCrack?

“Yeah,” she says. “I’m so clumsy.”

No, I’m telling her: You’re so busy. People with too much on their minds tend to drop things because their brain is going here, and here, and there, and pretty soon the brain forgets what the fingers are doing and … the phone gets a proper drop.

“I shall tell my husband that,” she says. “He won’t believe you, but thank you!”

There should be time for that discussion later, say 10 p.m., which is so much better than the last four years, when Pippa was really scrambling. The last four years, her No. 63 car was all decked out in the pink of Susan G. Komen, pink being the color of breast cancer awareness. That, too, was personal: Breast cancer had come after her grandmother, and Pippa was a teenager when it killed her aunt.

Racing under the Komen banner, Pippa wasn’t receiving funds — she was generating them. Pippa’s Dale Coyne Racing team offered up the car’s livery as an in-kind donation to Susan G. Komen, and Pippa took care of the rest, raising more than $200,000. And believe me when I say: Pippa took care of it. She is a one-off driver, trying to qualify for the Indianapolis 500 and only the Indianapolis 500 on the 2018 IndyCar Series, and as such she doesn’t have “people.” She is people.

Pippa does her own marketing, branding and public relations. She finds sponsors, signs them up, makes sure they’re happy, and does whatever it takes to fulfill their agreement. Most drivers, they slap a decal on their car — a sponsorship their sales team found for them — and that’s where it ends. For Pippa, that’s where it starts. She gets her sponsors their garage pass, speaks at their banquets, poses for their pictures. She entertains sponsors in a suite at IMS, then invites them down to the track for a tour of the garage. Meet the tour guide: Pippa Mann.

“Running that kind of campaign during the month of May, it really is a job,” she says. “It’s almost a full-time job that I didn’t really have time to be doing, and I was stretched so thin in so many directions. It’s amazing to raise so much money and have so many people involved, but there’s actually some relief to have more brain space to be able to focus on being a racecar driver this year. This is the first May in three years where I’m regularly being able to switch off my laptop at 10 or 11 at night. Previously I was up past midnight, and then up again at 6 a.m. every morning, back with my laptop open.”

She’s sleeping more, but issues remain. Like the decals on her car, some that weren’t quite right. Pippa discovered that during the wrapping for her car. Indy cars aren’t painted; they’re wrapped.

“Like a Christmas present,” Pippa says. “And they were wrapping the car, and some logos had to be re-printed. I’m the one who knows how much these people paid to be here and in these positions (on the car), I’m the one who’s going to hear about it if it’s not right, so I’m the one who’s here to make sure it’s right.”

Will Power doesn’t have to do that, I tell Pippa with a smile. She smiles back, and gives another example: One of her merchandise vendors hasn’t come through with the merchandise. The Indy 500 is in 10 days, and her shelves — modest as they are — are mostly empty.

“Everyone else that you deal with understands that the wording ‘in time for May’ means that it actually needs to be here in time for May,” she says. “This specific company has the response that: ‘Well, everyone knows that in time for May means race day.’ It’s like: Head desk, head desk, head desk. I’m literally the person trying to solve this, because I don’t have a team of people to solve it for me.”

Did you say: Head desk, head desk, head desk?

“Yeah,” she says, huge smile, and now she demonstrates: Slowly slamming her head down on the desk. We’re cackling, but soon I’m going to ruin the mood by asking a personal question, one that has Pippa turning her head and seeing things only she can see.

* * *

Pippa is driving a Sebastien Bourdais hand-me-down. Well, she is. The road-course car Bourdais, her Dale Coyne Racing teammate, drove to fourth place Saturday at the IndyCar Grand Prix at IMS? Pippa’s team spent the next 48 hours turning it over, producing a car suitable for IMS’ superspeedway, a process so lengthy that Pippa missed her scheduled start time on Tuesday’s first day of practice.

Pippa’s not complaining, mind you. She’s telling me that Dale Coyne has put together a hell of a team, led by his former full-time IndyCar engineer (Rob Ridgely) and Ridgely’s partner, Luis Perocarpi, as crew chief. But the odds are stacked severely against a one-race driver like Pippa, and like her Dale Coyne teammate Conor Daly and a few others who will compete in the Indy 500 in converted road cars powered by one engine — most drivers have a second engine, a fresh one they bring out after qualifying — and supported by a part-time team.

Most years, her team hasn’t had a large enough crew to practice pit stops until Carb Day — less than ideal, given how much time is required on Carb Day to make final setup changes.

“I’m hoping to be able to do it Monday this year,” she says. “Fingers and toes and everything crossed. That would be really nice.”

Pippa’s the best, just the joy she brings to the track and the way she communicates that joy — when she’s not giving her phone a proper drop; or going head desk, head desk, head desk; or crossing her toes for good luck — and then you remember why she’s here: And she’s not here for Pippa. This is how I drag down the mood, albeit in an uplifting way, by asking Pippa the difference between racing to win … and racing for a bigger victory than the checkered flag.

She tells me about the people she meets, some in person, others on social media, fans who want to share their story: A loved one who died but saved others by donating their organs, as Bryan Clauson did in Aug. 7, 2016. Or in some cases, a person is alive because someone else had to die first. Last May, Pippa was in her suite with Clauson’s family and members of the Indiana Donor Network when Clauson’s father, Tim, pulled her aside. He had somebody Pippa needed to meet, a man named Dan Alexander, standing before Pippa, the organ recipient powered by Bryan Clauson’s beating heart.

In her garage on Wednesday, sitting at the table with her shattered phone, Pippa is looking away. She’s not talking.

Now she’s ready.

“A lot of people have reached out to let me know how (organ donation) has affected them personally,” she says, pausing, “and to let me know how happy they are to see another car in the race that’s standing up for this cause. It’s …”

Another pause. Another stare.

“It’s something fairly special. It’s very difficult to know what the right response is.”

She has given me a half-hour, which is a half-hour she doesn’t have to spare, and I’m trying to get out of her garage. She has more important work to do than talking to the media. Please, Pippa, get back to it. Faster faster faster, remember? Pippa stops me. She has something she wants me to know.

“Look at all the names and logos,” she says, gesturing at her car and then the sleeves on her shirt, long sleeves covered in sponsor names. “I sat down and worked it out: 90 percent of the funding making that racecar run originates here in Indiana: Indiana businesses, brands, companies, individuals.”

Picture my eyebrows raised. That car is 90-percent funded by Indiana?

“It’s a pretty cool statistic,” she says. She’s beaming.

You’re not just representing Donate Life Indiana, I’m telling her. You’re representing Indiana. Look at this London-born driver, representing us.

“I do feel like I’m an honorary Hoosier at this point,” she says. “But here’s the deal: I understand that I’m not a big-name driver. I understand that I’m going to have to work hard to be here, and I understand that barring miracles, quite frankly we are not competing to win the Indianapolis 500. We are competing for a top 15. If we get a top 10, you’re going to see us hugging each other and crying like we won the thing.”

Here, I remind Pippa that she has improved her Indy 500 finish every year: 30th in 2013, then 24th and 22nd and 18th and finally 17th in 2017.

Sorry, I say. Keep going.

“And when you’re in that position,” she says, referring to her longshot status, “in general the kind of people who want to get behind you are the people who support your story, who support what you’re doing.”

Pippa Mann will race the 2018 Indianapolis 500 with her pink helmet and pink mirrors, reminding fans to support the fight against breast cancer, and in a car raising awareness for organ donation. Who doesn’t support her story? Who doesn’t support what she’s doing? It’s what I said earlier: This is the most important driver in the Indianapolis 500.

Go get that miracle, Pippa. Go win the thing.

Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter: @GreggDoyelStar or at facebook.com/gregg.doyel.

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