Destined to run dry before the finish, Rossi got the call to try something crazy. Leaning out the fuel mixture is a common way to save fuel, which he did, but it wasn't enough. The one electronic option left was to use the fuel map designed to use little more than drops of fuel while running at reduced speeds behind the pace car. Take the tiny amount of fuel provided for puttering around at 75mph, then try holding position with it while racing well over 200mph, and you have Rossi's reality as the 500 sped toward its conclusion.
"So...we were running our yellow map, which normally you only run around for yellow," Herta admitted. "Yeah, we were running our yellow map."
Racing on the yellow map is a perfect way to get swallowed by a pack of angry cars, but Herta wasn't done. If that task sounded impossible as the finish line drew closer, the next instruction to arrive over the radio was on a whole new level of crazy.
"The last few laps, because we still weren't going to make it, I don't know...divine intervention...what put it in my head, but I started telling Alex, 'I want you to clutch the engine and coast down the straightaways,'" he added. "And he said, 'You want me to what?' I said, 'Trust me, drive the corners and then clutch and coast on the straight. Clutch and coast.'
"So he started doing that, which was really eerie. I had a lot of people come up to me, corner workers, marshals, they were watching the car because at different times he would come by basically sounding dead stick, like the engine wasn't running. They kept thinking, we have to go yellow because he's not running. Then he would go again and they couldn't figure out what the hell was going on.
"So he started clutching and coasting. And Alex was asking – because the more we did that the slower we were going – he's like, 'But we're going so slow...'
