It may only have been a one-off, second-week effort, but Townsend Bell's run to fourth place in the Indianapolis 500 put him firmly in the shop window should any team require a stand-in later in the season.


Pat Sullivan - MC
Listen, folks, I conned Townsend into sticking around because I believe we should talk to him about the incredible run he's had.... so any questions?

Q:
Townsend, I think in the very early part - and after your first pit-stop - you lost a lot of positions, eight or nine very early, 20, 22 laps, and then you stormed back with this great result. Do you think that it's maybe a restart for your career in open-wheel racing or you've become hungry to do more races?

Townsend Bell:
My career seems to have been a series of starts and restarts for six years. But doesn't matter, this was a great day for us. We did have some problems, I don't know what happened on the first pit-stop. The fuel wasn't going in, or something, so we had to go to the back. We had a good start, stayed out of trouble, got up to twelfth or something, I think, before the first pit-stop and then had to go to the back and fight our way back up. It was fun.

This was a great race team. This KV team deserves to be in the top five at the Indy 500. They worked tremendously hard. We've got a great sponsor in Herbalife. Those guys are pretty fired up, as you can imagine. I had a blast out there. It seems, strangely enough, that the diciest racing I had was with Paul Tracy. Twice I kind of bobbled it a bit on a restart, and I would just go straight for the inside because I wasn't going to give him an inch there. He went to the outside and, man, we went through [turn] one side-by-side. I didn't lift, he didn't lift. I know we're team-mates, but we've become such good friends the last year or so that it's like playing a video game with your buddy. You're just like no way am I going to give up.

It happened going into [turn] three also. I kind of knew where his set-up was on his car, was a little different than what I was running, I thought I would be a little quicker on longer runs and I didn't want to get caught behind him. I'm glad I stuck with it. We left each other room, but there were good times.

Q:
Townsend, with this good finish, do you feel that maybe you do have a shot to run, even if it's the road courses, maybe a lot more races a season because it would be great to see you back in the series?

Townsend Bell:
You're only as good as your last race, that's what they say, right? So we'll see. I've been doing it long enough to not plan or feel like I deserve anything, you just work hard and hope that things turn out. It was fun, you know. There at the end I'm running with Dan Wheldon - he and I raced in Indy Lights, and Scott Dixon, I think, was behind me. Danica I've known for a while, and these are people I know I can compete with in equal equipment. I'm just thrilled that I had the chance to do that today.

Q:
Townsend, follow up on that on the equal equipment side of that. How do you feel, you and Paul pretty much shared crews to get qualified and you guys both wound up in the top ten?

Townsend Bell: