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IndyCar
GURSS: Helio’s Underwear
The big news of the week was the acquittal of Helio Castroneves, who made an emotional return to the IndyCar Series at Long Beach...
Jade Gurss  |  Posted April 20, 2009   Mooresville, NC
Faster. Louder. The weekly column on SPEEDtv.com by Jade Gurss. (Harold Hinson Photo)
Dario Franchitti’s dominant victory at Long Beach was impressive – though it would have been interesting to see if Will Power could have challenged him without having to conserve fuel for the final half of the processional race around the ocean-side streets. But the big news of the week was the acquittal in the federal tax evasion trial of Helio Castroneves, who made an emotional return to the IndyCar Series at Long Beach.

Castroneves’ tenure with Penske Racing since 2000 has been successful from the start, but it took a series of events and a tragedy for the pairing to take place.

On the morning of the final CART race of 1999, Helio’s then car owner, Carl Hogan, announced he was shutting down his race team after the season. Castroneves, a very popular young man within the Mercedes-Benz contingent, was slated to join a brand new Mercedes-backed team owned by Morris ‘Mo’ Nunn (who, after a long career, had engineered great success with Alex Zanardi at Chip Ganassi Racing).

However, only 10 laps into that day’s race at Fontana, Calif., Greg Moore, who had signed to drive for Penske in 2000, crashed horrifically and was killed. Within hours, Castroneves was tapped as the new Penske driver. Moore’s name was scratched from the contracts and Helio’s was added.

Though the lil' Brazilian sparkplug is now known for his two Indianapolis 500 rings, climbing fences after each win, and his popular victory on “Dancing with the Stars,” perhaps his funniest anecdote comes from 1998, when he was being introduced as a CART rookie with the tiny team owned by Tony Bettenhausen.

At that time, he was known as Helio Castro-Neves, and had turned heads as a teammate of Tony Kanaan, driving for Steve Horne’s team in the Indy Lights Series. At the news conference, Helio explained how he became associated with the Bettenhausen team because of his hero, Emerson Fittipaldi.

Fittipaldi, an Indy winner, two-time Formula One world champion, and larger-than-life legend in his home country of Brazil, had retired from driving and was a consultant with Bettenhausen’s team. Emerson wanted to hire Castroneves, and picked up the phone to make an offer to the young driver.

"Hello, this is Emerson Fittipaldi..."

"Is it really?!," Helio asked skeptically.

"Yes, it is," said Fittipaldi, only to be met with total silence from the other end of the line. Helio hadn't hung up on his idol - but was not on the handset.

"I had to go put on pants!," Helio explained breathlessly when he returned to the phone moments later. "I cannot talk to Emerson Fittipaldi in my underwear!"

The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SPEEDtv.com, FOX, NewsCorp, or Speed Channel

Jade Gurss is the owner of fingerprint, inc., a sports publicity company. He has written two New York Times Best Sellers, including what is believed to be the biggest-selling motorsports book in American publishing history (Driver #8 with Dale Earnhardt Jr.). His two decades of publicity and marketing experience involves nearly every category of motorsports, including nine innovative seasons as NASCAR publicist for the Budweiser brand and Earnhardt Jr. His blog can be seen at: http://fingerprint.typepad.com

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