When you see something awful happen to another person, you feel sympathy, empathy, and your brain momentarily considers how you might deal with that situation. But then your brain goes into denial, and moves on. It won’t happen to me…

In 2011 I was on the other side of this coin. In a year with 42 cars competing for 33 starting spots, I was one of the people who fought their way in. I had to be brave, my laps had to be big, and I have always felt I drove my way in. I have always thought I could…

This year, on the evening of Fast Friday I still believed I could. We knew something was dragging down the speed of our beautiful handling and beautiful looking Donate Life car, and we spent Friday evening trimming any excess areas of wrap from the car, re-sanding the floor and all leading edges where there might be dimpling that slowed her down. The crew also went through the brakes again on every corner. We found one that was dragging, and prior data said this would be a big influence on our numbers returning to where we expected them to be the next day.

I still went to bed anxious. I didn’t sleep much—waking up twitching and unsure throughout the night. Everyone else on the team had been through our data—everything about it looked great. Except the speed. It had to be that dragging brake.

We weren’t able to run on Saturday morning during the warm-up because this year’s engines have been reacting badly to the heat-soak, and given we didn’t know how much speed we’d get by solving the brake issue, we needed every 0.3 of a mph we could get.

We rolled into qualifying tech line at 10:30 with everyone else, despite the fact my run would not be until 2pm in the afternoon. The rules say you have to be there at that time even if you do not have the opportunity to run until the end of the day. And from the moment you get into tech line on time, you may change nothing on the car other than downforce levels. So as the conditions change, you just sit there and watch, and wait. If you need to make a change you lose your guaranteed chance to attempt to qualify, and with weather coming in, that’s not a risk you can afford to take.

So when weather did intervene, we, like everyone else had to stay in line. Then after we got through around twenty cars, weather intervened again.

By the time we finally took to the track there was just over an hour left until the gun would go off signifying the end of the day. On the warm-up lap the car handled just as beautifully as she had done every time I had driven this Donate Life car, but the speed just wasn’t there. In fact, we were now going even slower—an entire mph slower—than our no tow speeds in similar conditions on Fast Friday and as I finished my very first lap I knew we were staring down the barrel of going home.

Bumping on day one of qualifying was a very contentious issue for me personally long before we were in this position. Two months ago I was trying to have a conversation with IndyCar about the position this year’s rules were putting the smaller budget, stretched teams in with bumping on day one. I had actually used my personal experience in 2011 as an example of why bumping on day one was fundamentally wrong. You see, in 2011 it did not all go smoothly. Despite being inside the fastest 33 every day I was on track that month, on day one of qualifying we fought a speed sapping issue, that took us overnight to put right, and the next day I put us into the show.

But in 2018, these are not the rules. We had one hour to try and diagnose, and solve a problem, on pit-lane, without going back to the garage area to make any major changes, because going through tech would take too long, we wouldn’t be able to run again. Under 2018 rules the only tool we had available to us at that point in time, in that situation, was to trim. And with the amount of speed we were losing, we only had one viable trim option: everything.

My husband who also works in the IndyCar paddock just happened to be walking past when we made the call. And he saw what we were doing with my car. He confessed to me later that evening when we were both at home that he thought he would be coming to find me later that night in the medical center, or even worse in the hospital downtown. But he wasn’t going to interfere because firstly he’s not on my team, and secondly he knew I would have been the one making the call. There was no way I was going home without giving it absolutely everything we could.

The story of what happened next has been covered. We still simply had no speed, but then when Hinch withdrew his time from the race, we had to run one more time before the gun went off simply so I could be 34th, and first in line should someone fail tech. All the while, every time we ran, we just kept losing speed.

To say I was devastated was an understatement. Not only had nothing I was able to do in the car been able to make any impact on our numbers what-so-ever, and not only was I going home, but I was convinced this was the last time I would ever sit in an IndyCar.

As most of you know it takes me all year to put together the budget to be at this race, and I work my tail off for every partner who supports me throughout the entire year as well. I have never over promised and under-delivered to the people who support me, and I’m always realistic about our chances. This year we had a top 15 race car, but due to an issue outside of our control (an issue that we were not able to find in the data until the post-mortem late that night), along with no bumping on the second day to prove we belonged, we were not going to be in the race.

This was the moment I was asked to take my qualifying photo. With tears streaming down my face, I was asked to sit, on my non-qualified car, and take a photo so they could sell them at the museum. If you’re a fan of mine, this is me asking you please not to buy one. Of this entire experience that was one of the cruelest moments of adding insult to injury I’ve had to live through in a while.

The press conference I was asked to give was also brutal. I know that had to be done, and I understand why. As most of you who watched it could tell, despite the fact the media were kind enough not to torture me with questions, I barely made it through.

Back in the garages there were more hugs, and more tears, and I gathered my entire crew around the Donate Life #63 in our garage to make sure they knew how proud I was of them for trying everything to make her go fast enough in that last hour we had, and to thank them for trusting me when my response to the trim question was to take everything off.

Even now, several days later, knowing what caused our problems, and knowing we had no chance of solving them in that situation on pit lane no matter what we had tried, I am still gutted. However I am also trying to rise up and be thankful.

I am thankful I have the incredible support of amazing partners who have stood by me both publicly and privately through this difficult time, and who have shown the empathy and ability to understand that yes, this is awful, but this is Indy, and that bigger names than I have missed the show due to things outside of their control.

I am thankful for the support I have received from inside the IndyCar paddock—from former drivers, to current drivers, to members of other teams. Those who have been there know we gave it everything we had, and know how fickle a place IMS can be. I am thankful to every single one of you who reached out to me, because before I even had the answers as to what happened, and while I was still as mystified as I was distressed, you all helped to lift me up.

I want to thank my team. I want to thank them for not shrugging their shoulders after this happened, but continuing to investigate the data until they found the cause. While it won’t put me back into the race, it does allow me to know that in a normal year we would have bumped our way in on Sunday, and that allows me to sleep at night.

I’m trying very hard to work on only listening to the voices that count right now, and not the many opinions being thrown my way by people who don’t know what really happened to us this weekend, but think they do. That being said I do also want to thank all of the fans who decided to reach out to me, to try and help lift me back up, who wanted me to know they still support me, and are standing behind me through this tough time.

And for those of you who support me, I want you to know. This is me serving notice. I WILL do what it takes to find a way to get back to this race in 2019. Despite what I thought when I first got out of the car on Saturday, I will NOT let this be the end of the story. I am going to do everything in my power to make this the beginning of the comeback story.