Chevy 500 Pole Day Tickets

INDIANAPOLIS - While Tony Kanaan and Danica Patrick were stealing the attention on Indy 500 Pole Day, there was quite a bit of cheering and congratulatory high-fives coming from another area of Gasoline Alley. The Panther Racing team, with three cars entered for this year's race, put together a solid qualifying performance. The trio of Buddy Lazier, Tomas Enge and Tomas Scheckter qualified ninth, 10th and 11th, respectively on Sunday.

As the only factory-backed Chevrolet team entered at Indy this year in the manufacturer's final season in the IRL, Panther has established a solid beachhead for the General Motors/Chevrolet contingent amid a strong wave of formidable competition. The engineers at Panther over the years have shown, on occasion, that they just might be the best in the IRL garage. They have been able to make their cars, which Sam Hornish Jr. drove to two IRL championships - just as fast or at times faster than their more powerful counterparts from Honda and Toyota.

After dominating IRL competition since its inception in 1996, GM - first with an Oldsmobile engine and later Chevrolet - has fallen on hard times. Three years ago, its Chevrolet engine was by far the weakest of the three motors. GM's once-loyal teams began to jump ship and look elsewhere for their engines. As a result of that and Chevy's impending departure from the series, this season Chevrolet's factory support is down to one team - Panther Racing. Midway through 2003, GM engineers decided to scrap their own work and use an engine developed by Cosworth Engineering, which at the time was owned by rival Ford. Despite the odd coupling, the Chevy/Cosworth showed signs of potential. Some called it the best engine in the series.

After some struggles in 2004, the engine is better this year, producing much more horsepower and showing the kind of reliability expected of a championship-winning race engine. But in an era where more is better, Chevrolet finds itself with only one team. With just two cars from which to gather data during the regular season, the Chevy/Panther combination doesn't match up against the powerhouse Honda-powered Andretti-Green team with its four cars and mountainous amounts of data with which to develop its engine. As a direct result of its collaboration with Andretti-Green, Honda is, by far, the most successful engine in the IRL this year. Toyota also has many teams, including Team Penske, whom Hornish now drives for. But for this year's 500, it's possible Toyota will find itself as the third man on the totem pole behind Honda and Chevrolet.