INDYCAR: Ryan Hunter-Reay's Scripted Life

IndyCar

INDYCAR: Ryan Hunter-Reay’s Scripted Life

Everything about the Texas-Born, California-bred IndyCar championship contender reads like it was borrowed from the plot of a Disney movie.

Marshall Pruett | Posted September 12, 2012

Ryan Hunter-Reay carries a different outlook and life story into the Fontana finale than Will Power. (Photo: LAT)

(SPEED’s Marshall Pruett goes beyond the racetrack to delve inside the motivations and makeup of IndyCar’s two title contenders, starting with championship-leading driver Will Power and concluding today with Ryan Hunter-Reay.)

You can call Hunter-Reay many things. RHR for short, or “Hollywood” for his all-American looks, but as a writer, I prefer “The Script.”

Everything about the Texas-Born, California-bred racecar driver reads like it was borrowed from the plot of a Disney movie, and that isn’t meant to trivialize or diminish the 30-year-old’s journey in the sport.

As I’ve chronicled more than once, Hunter-Reay’s professional life has been more like a cautionary tale—a three-act story--than a road map to success. The first act, covering his time in a few different open-wheel feeder series, was filled with promise and potential, but the second act—the longest part of the story—set the stage for where RHR finds himself today.

Act 2, which covers Hunter-Reay’s hardest times, is loaded with everything needed for a big payoff in Act 3.

First, he drove for six different teams from 2003 to 2009--a giant red flag.

Two of the Indy car teams he drove for went out of business at the end of the season. Another red flag.

Between 2003 and 2005, he won just two out of 43 races in Champ Car. Not quite a red flag, but a yellow, for sure.

Coming off of his 2002 Toyota Atlantic championship, Hunter-Reay burst onto the Champ Car scene in 2003, winning the race at Surfers Paradise, but changes were coming for 2004...and 2005... (Photo: LAT)

He was unemployed—at least as an Indy car driver—for all of 2006 and half of 2007. Red flag once again.

And from the second half of 2007 through 2009, he scored a single win from 41 attempts. That makes red flag No. 4.

Act 2 reveals that he couldn’t hold down a job, didn’t win often enough and also managed to fall out of the sport for 18 months.

So why, then, did Michael Andretti sign him to a partial season for 2010? Well, that’s where Act 3 begins and “The Script” shifts into high gear.

On the surface, Hunter-Reay’s story reads like he was an Indy car drifter, which is hard to argue, but in reality, he was doing whatever it took to keep his career alive.

Strip away the veneer--the big smile and positive energy--and you’ll find that Hunter-Reay’s an irrepressible fighter. At his core, RHR’s a classic ‘you’ll have to kill me before I’ll quit’ sporting figure, and even that jumbled mess of a resume, when viewed with a bit of hindsight, helped to shape the person he’s become today.

Some of his contemporaries have only ever known success and fulfillment, but as the guy who expected to get his walking papers at the end of every season, Hunter-Reay had no choice but to embrace the chaos that awaited him. He chose to bend, rather than break.

If you’re searching for the pivotal moment in the life and times of Ryan Hunter-Reay the IndyCar driver, this was it.

Take away the constant adversity and turmoil, and it’s quite possible we’d be talking about RHR going for his second or third championship this weekend, but that wouldn’t have fit Act 2. Instead, it has taken almost a decade for Hunter-Reay to reach a position where the IndyCar Series crown is within his grasp.

At Andretti Autosport, he found stable footing for the first time in his career. That partial 2010 season soon turned into a full-season ride, and he followed it up with another full-season stint at Andretti—the first time he’d spent two complete seasons with an Indy car outfit.

And for 2012, an even crazier proposition developed: Hunter-Reay returned for his third season with Andretti’s dynamic team, sparking the turnaround—and possibly the fairytale ending—awaiting him in Act 3. What we have now is RHR’s personal version of the movie “8 Mile.”

By 2006, Hunter-Reay was out of Indy car racing, driving a variety of sports cars and for the American A1GP team. (Photo: LAT)

Like Eminem’s character “B-Rabbit,” Hunter-Reay had a dream, was met with doubt and disappointment at every turn, got the (figurative) crap kicked out him and now, with the championship-deciding race Saturday night, the stage is set for him to recreate the electric ending to the movie with Will Power.

We can’t script how that freestyle battle in Fontana will fall, but regardless of what happens during the 500-mile event, Hunter-Reay, 2012’s winningest IndyCar driver, will face the challenge with a radically different approach than his rival.

Power’s native self-doubt and insecurity is foreign to RHR, which shouldn’t be a surprise. The American has been given a half-dozen opportunities to tap out, but his natural response has been to adapt and overcome.

That degree of self-belief borders on fiction--it’s the kind of resolve found in Disney movies—which takes us right back to where this conversation started.

That resolve is Hunter-Reay’s defining feature. There’s no bitterness; no attitude; just an inner faith that refuses to let him back down.

“I am, [compared to Power], definitely more positive,” Hunter-Reay told me over the weekend. “I believe that if I work hard enough I can win at any level I feel like. That's not an arrogant thing to say or anything like that. It's just I believe that if I put the work in and I focus enough I can get the job done. It's a matter of me getting it right. Obviously, you need the right racecar, you need the right set-up, but all that comes from the work you put in too because you're getting back what you put in.”

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