Dario Franchitti Aims for History at Indy 500

“Short hair and long hair twice,” he said, feigning a frown.

Then, turning serious, he said: “The winner on Sunday will get around $2.5 million, but this is it. This is why we race.”

Franchitti, 40, has won three of the last six Indy 500 races, including last year’s. Sunday, he will attempt to become the fourth driver — and first since 1991 — to claim a fourth title.

Such possibility has Indianapolis buzzing. The cover of the race day program is a photograph of A. J. Foyt, Rick Mears and Al Unser, the only three drivers to win the race four times. It folds out to include the four others with three titles, including Franchitti and Helio Castroneves, the Brazilian driver who will also race Sunday.

Franchitti is quick to brush aside talk of No. 4.

“I know it’s the big story,” he said, “but I’m thinking the same way I do every year I come here: how do you win?”

Only when the talk turns to history does he grow introspective.

“I can relate to it a bit more that way,” he said. “To have won three and to be in the company with the drivers I am, for a kid from Scotland, it’s quite something.”

Franchitti, raised in Bathgate, with Italian roots, seems an unlikely candidate for an IndyCar historian, someone who revels in the tradition of the 104-year-old Indianapolis Motor Speedway ahead of the 97th running of its most famous race.

He grew up watching Formula One races and first raced in the 500 in 2002. He is almost professorial in his admiration of the past, and famous for it, too. At Wednesday’s Community Day at the track, several fans presented Franchitti with mementos of his favorite driver, Clark, who died in a crash five years before Franchitti was born.

Franchitti’s sense of history extends to his own life. He has kept the suits he has worn in nearly every professional race, and he subscribes to about 20 automotive magazines. For his birthday last week, his father, George, tracked down Dario’s first childhood go-cart from a farmer near Bathgate. He restored it and presented it to his son in an emotional exchange that was filmed by ESPN.

George Franchitti was an ice cream manufacturer who raced recreationally and passed his devotion to cars to his children. Dario’s brother, Marino Franchitti, has raced in the American Le Mans Series, and a cousin, Paul di Resta, in Formula One.

It took Dario Franchitti until his fifth Indianapolis 500 to take the checkered flag, but it was during his first race that the track stirred something inside him.

“This is the hardest track there is,” he said. “Racing here is the only thing in my life that gets better the more I do it.”

After winning the 500 and the IndyCar season championship in 2007, Franchitti left for Nascar with an eye on a new challenge. He lasted only one season, citing his fondness for the Indy 500 and the thrill of open-wheel racing, where significantly higher speeds are reached than in stock cars. “It’s the difference between flying a normal plane and a jet fighter,” Franchitti said.

Two years after his return, he won at Indianapolis for a second time. He was first again last year in a thrilling finish, despite starting 16th and dropping to last after a spinout in pit lane early in the race. This year, he faces a similar task after Chevrolet engines nabbed the top 10 pole positions. Franchitti and his Honda engine will start 17th.

“He’s the most technical racer I’ve ever seen,” the driver Tony Kanaan said of Franchitti. “Everything has to be just so for Dario in his preparation, and that’s why he’s so good on the track. He’s meticulous. We call him Princess sometimes.”

Franchitti looks like the consummate racecar driver. He has flowing black hair, streaked by gray. His face is framed by thick sideburns and his dark eyebrows peer out from above sunglasses, which he almost always wears.

At the track Wednesday, he scooted around the infield in a golf cart, signing autographs for fans and sponsors. He signed posters, milk jugs, tires and giant vodka bottles. He posed with the Borg-Warner trophy, named after an auto supply company, for a promotional photo shoot.

Finally he returned to his trailer, for a minute to himself before meetings with his engineers. Tacked to a door is an old-looking photograph. What looks to be another homage to the history of racing is actually a joke — a Photoshopped image of Franchitti’s face on a driver sitting in a 1930s-era racecar. It was a gift from his crew for his 250th start earlier this season.

“I can’t tell you what it would mean to cross the finish line first Sunday,” Franchitti said, looking at the picture. “If I do it, it will be part of history; then come find me.”