Reflection / Sean Gallagher

This year’s Indy 500 provides a reminder to go all out in the life of faith until the very end

In every Indianapolis 500 run to its completion, the winner is the driver who crosses the yard of bricks at the start-finish line first after 500 miles, which is equivalent to 2,640,000 feet.

In the 110th race, run on May 24 at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Felix Rosenqvist finished first about 6 feet ahead of David Malukas (about half a car length), passing him for the lead only about 50 feet from the end of those 2,640,000 feet.

Rosenqvist completed the 500 miles of the race in three hours, five minutes and 9.6471 seconds. Malukas crossed the start-finish line just .0233 seconds behind Rosenqvist, making it the closest finish in the history of the Indy 500.

It’s a cliché to say that a race like the Indy 500 is a marathon, not a sprint. But, in most clichés, there is still an important element of truth. Most of the time throughout its history, the winning margin of the race has been wide enough that there was no real question of the winner in the final lap. There have only been 13 races where the winning margin was less than a second, and they’ve all happened since 1982.

The racing that ended up deciding the winner of the 2026 Indy 500 was definitely a sprint coming out of the last turn on the last lap. For much of that last lap, Rosenqvist and driver Marcus Armstrong were fighting tooth and nail for second place. Rosenqvist finally pulled ahead of Armstrong coming out of turn four and set his sights on Malukas, who had passed Armstrong for the lead at the start of the lap.

With the yard of bricks in view, Malukas did all he could on the final straightaway to keep Rosenqvist behind him, weaving back and forth to try to break his draft. But it wasn’t to be. Rosenqvist pulled ahead at the very end.

St. Paul, in several of his letters in the New Testament, compares the life of faith to a race. “Do you not know that the runners in the stadium all run in the race, but only one wins the prize? Run so as to win” (1 Cor 9:24).

Felix Rosenqvist certainly did this in this year’s Indy 500. Although he raced well at times earlier in the race, leading 25 laps overall, none of that would have mattered if he had not overtaken Malukas at the very end. Rosenqvist drove so as to win right up to the finish line.

In the life of faith that each of us lives with the help of God’s grace, we must keep our eyes trained on the finish line, our heavenly home. We must never rest on our laurels, thinking that the good we’ve done in the past is good enough to get us across the line. We need to race so as to win until our last breath, not so much out of a fear of losing out on heaven, but more from a love and gratitude for God.

As helpful as the racing analogy can be, “all analogies limp,” according to a saying attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas. The things of this world cannot completely explain the things of God.

And that’s a good thing for us in this instance because, in the life of faith, we aren’t competing against our fellow believers with only the one crossing the finish line first getting to heaven.

God offers an “imperishable” crown to each of us, no matter how this world might make judgments about winners and losers (1 Cor 9:25).

We need only be faithful to our heavenly Father, cooperating as best we can with the grace he daily offers us.

After the race, David Malukas sat in his car for several minutes, not taking his helmet off, his head bowed as he was filled with misery after having had a career-defining victory taken from him in a fraction of the last second of the race.

He did nothing wrong to deserve such a fate. He had raced so as to win. Felix Rosenqvist simply had a slightly better car at the very end.

If we apply what happened to both Rosenqvist and Malukas to the life of faith, we can say that both were faithful to the end and both would receive an imperishable crown.

But it’s being faithful to the very end that makes all the difference, as this year’s race showed so dramatically.
 

(Sean Gallagher is a reporter and columnist for The Criterion.) †