Gregg Doyel

gregg.doyel@indystar.com

Two minutes. That’s all James Hinchcliffe had before dying in the shock room of IU Health Methodist Hospital. That’s what his surgeon, Dr. Timothy Pohlman, was thinking after he lost Hinchcliffe’s pulse on May 18, 2015.

“Come on, Hinch,” Pohlman remembers thinking. “Give me two minutes.”

It was the week of the 2015 Indianapolis 500. The right front suspension of Hinchcliffe’s car had failed during practice, sending his Honda into the wall at about 220 mph. The right side of the car broke apart. A piece of it went into his left thigh, puncturing the artery on its way out the other side of the leg.

Hinchcliffe had two potentially mortal wounds, both spewing blood, and in the ambulance on the way to the hospital Pohlman was wadding up rolls of gauze and stuffing them into both holes. The gauze kept filling with blood. Pohlman removed it and shoved more in there.

Come on, Hinch. Give me two minutes.

* * *

Two-and-a-half minutes. That’s all James Hinchcliffe had to finish this weekend the right way. That’s what he knew as he climbed into the cockpit of his car on Sunday, the last qualifier in the Fast Nine shootout, the last IndyCar driver with a chance to unseat Josef Newgarden for the pole of the 2016 Indianapolis 500.

“You know what you have to beat, which is an advantage,” Hinchcliffe said Sunday. “But when it’s a really quick time, it’s a disadvantage because sometimes you can get into your head.”

Newgarden averaged 230.700 mph for his four-lap sprint around the gusty IMS oval. One lap into his turn, Hinchcliffe was running faster. The scoreboard showed his Lap 1 speed at 230.885 mph.

On pit road, Hinchcliffe’s father started to hyperventilate.

“I was afraid I was going to pass out,” Jeremy Hinchcliffe told me Sunday. “My heart was beating so fast.”

On the track, Hinchcliffe was churning out pole-worthy laps. He went 230.940 mph on Lap 2. Then 230.765 on Lap 3. When he was finished with Lap 4, barely 2½ minutes after he started, the clock showed his average speed at 230.760 mph — six-hundredths of a second faster than Newgarden. Only three times in the previous 99 runnings of the Indy 500 was the gap smaller between the pole and the No. 2 qualifier.

On pit road Hinchcliffe climbed out of his car, pulled off his helmet and flame-resistant hat and looked for his parents. There was his mom, Arlene. He hugged her. And there was his dad. Hinchcliffe squeezed Jeremy on the shoulder.

“We did it, Dad,” he said. “We did it.”

* * *

The best laps of the day absolutely belonged to James Hinchcliffe’s team. The question is, did they belong to James Hinchcliffe?

Several hours before Hinchcliffe’s ride, his boss had gotten behind the wheel of a 2016 Chevrolet Corvette Z06 and taken it for a spin around IMS. Sam Schmidt, co-owner of Schmidt Peterson Motorsports, drove that thing around the oval at an average speed of 108.642 mph.

“Frankly,” Hinchcliffe was saying later, “what I did today pales in comparison.”

Maybe so. Hinchcliffe had been driving with his hands and his feet. Schmidt was … not.

A January 2000 crash at Walt Disney World Speedway in Florida left Schmidt, a former IndyCar driver who won the 1999 Vegas.Com 500 on the old IRL circuit, paralyzed from the neck down. He always did want to drive again, though. He wanted to do a lot of things after becoming a quadriplegic. He wanted to own a team — check. Wanted to drive again. Check. He also wants to walk again. Hopes to accompany his daughter, now 18, down the aisle whenever she gets married.

On Sunday he drove that 2016 Corvette — modified into a semi-autonomous motorcar (SAM) developed by Arrow Electronics — at speeds reaching 152 mph. He turned his head to steer. Breathed into a mouthpiece to speed up or slow down.

Drove 152 mph with his head.

“I can’t wait for next year,” Hinchcliffe said, “when he makes it 175.”

This was a day to dream, because dreams clearly were coming true. All three Schmidt-Peterson drivers — Hinchcliffe (first), Mikhail Aleshin (seventh) and Oriol Servia (10th) — earned places in the top 10 for next week’s Indy 500. That put Schmidt Peterson on equal terms with the biggest, baddest teams in IndyCar, teams with bigger names and deeper pockets, teams named Penske and Ganassi and Andretti.

Leading the way was Hinchcliffe, who didn’t race again in 2015 after his wreck, but who was saying even from his hospital bed that he would be back.

“They said he’d be in ICU for 10 days — he was out in three,” said his dad, Jeremy. “They said he wouldn’t walk for 14 days — he was walking in four. They said he wouldn’t get into a car for nine months. It took him four.”

He was behind the wheel to open the 2016 season, he has finished in the top 20 in all five races, and he is getting better by the week: 19th in St. Petersburg, 18th at Phoenix, eighth at Long Beach, sixth at Birmingham and third last week at the Angie’s List Grand Prix of Indianapolis.

Now this. His first career pole. At the 100th Indianapolis 500. Almost one year to the day when he was two minutes from dying near this same track.

Neither Hinchcliffe nor Schmidt are satisfied, of course.

“I think it's a huge story,” Schmidt said. “I’d like to have a better one next week for sure. That would make a movie.”

Who, Hinchcliffe was asked, would play you?

“There’s still one big thing to check off the box before we start talking about movie rights,” he said.

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