Kimball satisfied with finishing 3rd

He had the best seat for the best show in the joint.

The laps unspooled Sunday afternoon, Scott Dixon and Juan Pablo Montoya and Will Power feinted and dodged and played poker at 220 mph, and Charlie Kimball sat back and watched.

Well, OK. So, not watched, exactly.

In truth, he was circling the Indianapolis Motor Speedway right behind them. And waiting for an opening that never presented itself.

“I thought I could be in the catbird seat here if they go three-wide into one and I go in the warm-up lane and come out the other side,” Kimball said jokingly.

Instead he wound up third, passing Dixon in the final laps as the latter’s handling went away. That was catbird seat enough for the 30-year-old Californian who until recently was more known as a role model for Type 1 diabetes than for his results on the race track.

In 73 IndyCar starts, he has one win and nine top fives, but Sunday represented something of a breakthrough for him. In four previous starts he’d never finished higher than ninth; last year he finished 31st.

Sunday, however, he started 14th, moved into the lead on lap 151 and hung around the top five thereafter. He also turned in the fastest lap of the race, hanging up a 226.712 on lap 102.

“It was a blast,” said Kimball, whose sponsor, Novo Nordisk, provides the insulin he uses. “I learned a lot from Dario (Franchitti) this month. Over 500 miles, the car changes all the time. The first couple stints, I couldn’t do anything wrong. You could have put that thing down through the grass and she’d have stuck.

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