Buddy Lazier still plugging away 20 years after winning Indy

— -- INDIANAPOLIS -- Buddy Lazier has seen and done it all at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Got the T-shirt too, but he sold it so he could go back and do it all again.

Twenty years have passed since Lazier won the 1996 Indianapolis 500, the peak of an Indy car career that started with small, part-time teams and has come full circle. He's 48 now and part of an old-school, family-run shoestring effort for the 100th running of the historic race.

Though it now has the latest Chevrolet aero kit, Lazier's four-year old chassis started life as the development mule for the defunct Lotus engine. The team calls it "Large Marge." It carries No. 4 and has a simple white and red paint scheme that is evocative of Indy cars from the 1960s.

While the Team Penske and Chip Ganassi Racing cars arrived at the Speedway in a fleet of gleaming transporters, Large Marge was delivered in a Dixie Chopper lawn mower trailer towed behind a pickup truck.

The Lazier-Burns Racing team is a throwback to when Buddy broke into Indy car racing in the late 1980s, working with his father, Bob (himself a former racer), to scrape together the funding to compete on a part-time basis against the giants of the CART era, such as Penske, Patrick and Newman/Haas.

The CART-IRL split in 1996 changed the landscape of Indy car racing, and Lazier quickly emerged as one of the top stars on the IRL side. His triumph in the 1996 Indy 500, just weeks after breaking his back in a crash at Phoenix International Raceway, still ranks as one of the most remarkable stories of overcoming physical adversity in the long history of the race.

Lazier won the 2000 IRL championship and his most successful season came in 2001, when he won four races and finished second in the IRL standings to rising star Sam Hornish Jr. His last full season was 2003, and since 2013, the Lazier family has run their own car at Indianapolis.

"Through the years, you learn if you don't have a car that can win, you try to be first in class," Lazier said. "Back then, if we had an older race car and a limited budget, we tried to beat superbudgets. If we embarrassed a couple superbudgets, well, that was a great weekend."

"Though on any given Sunday, anybody can win, you try to be the best that you can be and make the most out of what you have," he continued. "I'm particularly proud of this team, because we do have ownership in the team and it's growing for the future. We're in a building mode, and this team is getting better. I think it's the best that it's been in the last four years and we're headed in the right direction."

Indianapolis contractor Thom Burns is the "savior" that got the Lazier team to the grid this year. After being involved in Mel Kenyon's midget team, Burns entered cars in the Indianapolis 500 in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and Burns Racing eventually transitioned into the PacWest Racing team that competed full time in the CART series from 1994 to 2002.

Ironically, Burns' last year of involvement at Indianapolis came in 1994, when he was a sponsor for Hemelgarn Racing. When Jeff Andretti struggled to get up to speed, Burns suggested putting Lazier into the car, and while Lazier didn't qualify, it rekindled a relationship with team owner Ron Hemelgarn that led to much greater success in the late 1990s.

Burns decided he wanted to be a part of the 100th running of the Indianapolis 500 and stepped in to help the Laziers acquire the latest Chevy aero kit and chassis updates.

"I've had a good time so far," Burns said. "When I had Buddy in a car in 1994, we probably been in the third row if Buddy would have had more time in that car. Then after he won the 1996 race, my phone rings. It's Bob Lazier. He says, 'Tommy, thank you! If it wasn't for you giving that ride, he wouldn't have got noticed and he wouldn't be here.'"

"It was amazing that Bob would remember that, but this sport is so big and there are so many people that use it in a positive fashion," he added. "I like being back here. I'm not ready to be a Walmart greeter."

And neither is Buddy Lazier, though only a handful of older men have competed in the Indianapolis 500. He'll make his 19th Indy start on Sunday from the back row of the grid, disappointed that he and the team were not able to extract more speed out of their Chevrolet.

"We could run 225s and 226s comfortably and really thought we were peaking at the right time, even though we've been focusing on our race package all week," Lazier said after qualifying with a 222.154 mph average. "It's a small team that's growing and getting bigger. We have limited resources, but we just want to make the absolute most of them. We've done that this week but just had a little misstep there in qualifying."

"In a multicar team, you have four different drivers and four different engineers and you're all working together to a certain extent," he added. "When there's just one, you have to make very good decisions and you do kind of pick your battles. So I think we've done a really good job with the resources we have, no doubt about it, and I think people do underestimate how difficult it is."

The Laziers would ultimately like to grow their team to the point where they can field a full-time entry in the Verizon IndyCar Series, along with a car for Buddy at Indianapolis for as long as he wants to continue driving.

"I've had to work with small teams, where you have to make the most of it, and when you work with big teams and make the most of it, you win," Lazier said. "I've probably gone around that full circle, twice. For me, it's part of doing what I have to do to be here.

"I would be open to driving here as long as I feel like I'm competitive. I don't feel like I've ever been with a teammate who had an advantage over me, and as long as I feel that way, I'll continue to participate."