Dan Wheldon was IndyCar’s great comeback story — the brash, British former Rookie of the Year who’d pulled out of a humbling slump to take the Indy 500. But last October, on a crowded Vegas track, the fairy tale came to a chilling end.

by Kevin Gray

On the night before his final race, Dan Wheldon and his wife, Susie, strolled into a tattoo parlor in the lobby of the Las Vegas Palms Casino, intent on doing something bold to celebrate their lives together. They spent an hour picking out just the right fonts for each other’s initials — small and frilly for Susie’s wrist, big and solid for Dan’s, in keeping with the oversize Ritmo watches he wore.

Susie, who was still breast-feeding their seven-month-old son, Oliver, inquired about the safety of the ink while her husband tried to relax. “I am seriously nervous,” he told tattoo artist Dave LePenske.

“Come on, man,” LePenske ribbed him, dipping the already humming needle. “You drive an open-wheeled car at 200 miles an hour. This is easy, dude. This is nothing.”

The week leading up to Sunday’s race had been epic. It was Indy’s first race in Las Vegas in more than a decade and IndyCar brass made sure to squeeze every bit of promotion from the event — and he’d been in the thick of it all. Sponsorship dinners, a parade down the Strip, a celebrity blackjack tournament where Wheldon outplayed Wayne Gretzky and almost made it to the final table.

Wheldon’s career had seen storybook highs and frustrating lows, but it was back on track. Though he was without a team during the 2011 season, he’d won the first race he’d entered — the Indy 500, for the second time. Now, at 33, he was one of the few superstars in a sport still fighting for relevance.

That week’s race, the Izod IndyCar World Championship, held an added incentive for Wheldon: To boost ratings and juice the drama of the race, he would start at the back of the 34-car pack and earn a $5 million bonus if he somehow managed to win. The stunt was already working: Though two other drivers were competing to win the season, and it would be Danica Patrick’s last Indy event, the prerace buzz revolved around Wheldon.

The rookie known as “Difficult Dan” for his perfectionism and self-assurance had been humbled over the past few years. Without a team to sponsor him, he spent the 2011 season off the track with his two young boys — Oliver and two-year-old ­Sebastian — and Susie, who’d  been his assistant. He also spent time with his family in England, visiting his mother, who’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

The break matured him, but he was itching to drive: “I’ve been just desperate, period, to get back in a race car since ­Indi­anapolis.It’s going to be phenomenal to come back.”

That weekend, the driver had shaken hands on a multimillion-dollar deal to join Andretti Autosport, the team owned by Michael Andretti, for whom Wheldon had first driven in his rookie season in 2003. That Saturday night, he and Susie went to an Andretti team party at the Palms. Afterward, they walked downstairs to Huntington Ink to get their tattoos. When they were finished, the couple posed for pictures, showing off their new ink. “I love yours,” he told Susie. “It’s awesome. It’s perfect.” Everyone wished him luck, and they left to join their sons at their hotel room.

“If you win tomorrow, you better come back,” LePenske said.

“I will,” the driver promised.

Wheldon exuded his usual prerace confidence, though he knew the next day would be a battle. The track was short and tight, a 1.5-mile oval that limited visibility and reaction time. And in 2006, the pitch of its banked corners had been increased, from 12 degrees to 20, allowing cars to run full throttle, at speeds in excess of 220 miles per hour.

Wheldon was disappointed with the speed trials of his car but managed to stay upbeat. “As long as I can find some speed and keep up with the pack,” he wrote on his blog the day before the race, “I’ll do everything I can to put on a show.”

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Dan Wheldon was the greatest thing to happen to Indy racing since Mario Andretti and A.J. Foyt dominated the sport in the 1960s, when the Indianapolis 500 was on par with single-day events like the Super Bowl and Evel Knievel’s rocket-powered canyon jump. But a bitter split in 1996 destroyed the league, and though it had essentially reconstituted by 2002, the organization struggled to find an audience. To attract sponsors and fans, they needed stars.

Wheldon was the whole package: a fierce and exacting competitor whom sponsors could rally behind. He was a master of the big ovals like Indianapolis and was skilled enough to ride the edge of control to hit winning speeds. “He was born for that racetrack,” says Michael Andretti. “He had a natural, quick ability. The guy was fast right away.”

Yet for all his intensity on the track, he had an easy, winning manner everywhere else, playing race fans and the media with a cheeky brashness he knew was part of the show. “I’m bigger than Beckham,” he boasted, and once told a reporter, “I do feel like I light up a room.” He had a British accent, an enviable head of highlighted hair, and a good-ol’-boy sensibility he’d soaked up during a decade in Florida.

“What made him more special than his driving was his stage presence,” Andretti says. “Sponsors loved him. Indy loved him. He did light up a room. He was a PR dream.”

Wheldon’s career — from the karts of his native U.K. to the brickyard of Indy — was powered by aggressive, fearless driving and a relentless need to prove himself. Though Indy drivers change allegiances often — seeking out faster cars, more skilled mechanics, sweeter deals — Wheldon’s team-hopping seemed more personal, a constant quest for validation. When he left Andretti after winning his first Indy 500, and only three years after joining as a rookie, it was the first time a driver had left a championship team in three decades. Wheldon did it solely to prove that he could win on his own — and even play the savior to a struggling team. “In racing,” Wheldon’s longtime manager Adrian Sussmann explains, “the question is always, ‘Is it the car or is it the driver?’ Dan wanted to prove it was the driver.”

In 1999, Wheldon arrived in the U.S. a nobody. His father, Clive, ran a successful plumbing outfit in Emberton, an hour north of London, and raced karts on the weekends. Dario Franchitti, the Scottish-born Indy racer who would later be a teammate and close friend, also raced in the kart circuit at the time. He was 11 when he first saw six-year-old Wheldon drive: “During breaks, Clive would put Dan in his kart. He was absolutely tiny, and he would tear around this track.”

Once Wheldon started winning, Clive gave up his own racing for his son’s, acting as mechanic, chauffeur, and cook as they traveled by van around the U.K. By 1996, Wheldon had graduated to cars, and though he had two rooms of trophies, his father didn’t have the $900,000 to buy a ride in Formula 3, a precursor to Formula One. So the 20-year-old Wheldon set out for Florida.

There, he joined Jon and Brad Baytos of Primus Racing, a top team in the F2000 Championship Series, a farm system for Indy. At that level, drivers usually pay their way, but Clive Wheldon cut a deal for his promising son: He would pay half the $200,000 for a Primus ride — and the Baytos brothers would keep any purses his son won. Though it put enormous pressure on the 20-year-old, the arrangement paid off. In his first year, Wheldon won the National Championship.

Jon Baytos recalls Wheldon as the hardest-working young driver he has known. “Dan was always on it,” he says. “He was diligent about training, research, communicating with engineers. Lots of kids — and I’ve had a stack of them — don’t do that. This was a huge investment for him and his family, and he wanted to make sure it paid off.”

But for all his success, the young driver was homesick. “Clive called me one day and said, ‘You got to take him out,’ ” says Jon ­Baytos. “So we taught him to drink.”

Soon, Wheldon and the Baytos brothers were regulars at St. Petersburg dives. With a bellyful of rum and Coke, Wheldon would get behind the bar “and do his Tom Cruise–in–Cocktail routine,” Baytos says. “The result was a lot of bottles on the floor.”

One night when they were out drinking, Wheldon had had enough, so he went out to the car, rolled down the windows, and went to sleep. A while later he returned to the bar, saying he’d been robbed of his wallet. “We chased the guy six blocks and got it,” Baytos recalls. “Dan had to get that wallet. It had all of Clive’s credit cards in there.”

Wheldon stayed with the Baytos brothers a single season, and with his winning record paving the way, he moved up the ranks. By 2002, he was begging Sussmann to get him a sponsored Indy ride.

He got him one of the best. At the time, Michael Andretti needed a rookie to replace him on his Andretti Green team when he retired from driving. Though rookies are given every opportunity to win races (they rarely do), dues need to be paid. While his teammates — Dario Franchitti, Tony Kanaan, and Bryan Herta — spent the winter at their vacation homes, Wheldon was on the track, testing AGR’s new Hondas.

Wheldon quickly latched on to the Brazilian Kanaan as a mentor. Wheldon was a fast learner — perhaps too fast. Franchitti warmly dubbed him “the little brother we never wanted.” In his first season, Wheldon won Rookie of the Year. The following year, he and Kanaan were racing in the Indy Japan 300 and Wheldon was struggling with the course. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t nail the corner on turn three, so he asked Kanaan for advice. “I took him over and showed him how to do it,” Kanaan says. “He was using the brake and I wasn’t. The next day, he put it on the pole and beat me.” Wheldon also won the race, his first victory for Team Andretti, offering a first glimpse of the greatness to come. Wheldon had a natural touch, a strategic brain, and the balls to keep his foot on the gas regardless of the danger around him. “He was a very self-confident rookie,” Herta remembers. “He knew how good he was before any of us did. Over time we came to understand the guy was a very special talent. It wasn’t clear yet. It was more, ‘Jeez, who is this cocky kid?’”

Drivers will say that anyone can win, but landing and keeping sponsors makes a winner. Wheldon’s second-biggest asset was his personality. “Dan was brilliant at schmoozing,” Sussmann says, “brilliant with a microphone in front of thousands of people.”

Wheldon was assigned a marketing specialist who oversaw the Jim Beam account. A pastor’s daughter from North Carolina, Susie Behm made sure the Jim Beam signage looked right, got Wheldon to the events on time, and kept an eye on him. “Her job was to try to keep Dan under control,” says Sussmann, “which was pretty impossible back then.” The two were soon inseparable, and Wheldon came to rely on her as he stretched out in his new role as spokesman.

Wheldon eventually hired Behm to work for him. As his personal assistant, her duties were wide ranging: She set up his media and business meetings and mothered him on the track, making sure his helmet fit, his shoes were clean, that he got to and from the pits on time. Wheldon had a string of girls at the time, including a sports newscaster. “He’d have one girl on one side of the track, one girl in the pits, another girl in the VIP box,” says photographer Michael Voorhees. “And Susie made sure they never ran into each other.”

It wasn’t until another driver asked Behm out that he came around. “It was pretty obvious to everyone that it was a more than a professional relationship,” Sussmann says.

Wheldon was in good company on the track as well: The drivers of the Andretti Green team — Wheldon, Franchitti, Kanaan, and Herta — became known as the Fab Four for their driving and their camaraderie. They teased Wheldon, who kept 350 pairs of all-white shoes and sneakers in their boxes, for his fastidiousness. He freaked out when someone touched his helmet with dirty hands. One time, before a race, as other drivers were walking to the pit, Voorhees spotted Wheldon in his trailer. He was in full uniform, wiping down the counter with paper towels and Formula 409. Voorhees asked what he was doing. “He said, ‘No way can I go out and race knowing this counter is dirty.’ ” The photographer snapped a photo and posted copies around the infield trailers with the tag­line “Wheldon’s cleaning services. We are so anal, your ass will pucker.”

“A lot of drivers are so quick-twitch in personality because they have to concentrate and make tiny movements to the car,” Voorhees says. “A lot of them are meticulous, but Dan took it to a whole other level.”

To continue reading The Fast Life & Fiery Death of Racing’s Brightest Star, click here.

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