Tony Kanaan: A fighter and a people’s champion

Tony Kanaan is an IndyCar champion and Indy 500 winner – but there’s more to his legacy than that, writes David Malsher-Lopez, after speaking to some of TK’s key rivals, teammates and friends.

David Malsher-Lopez Oct 5, 2020, 9:29 PM

Upd: Oct 5, 2020, 10:24 PM

“I tell you, it’s been a crazy-busy last couple of days,” chuckles Kanaan on the Tuesday after his ‘final’ IndyCar race at Gateway's World Wide Technology Raceway. “All of a sudden people want to talk to me, just as I said I was gonna slow down. There will be opportunities, I know, but what they’ll be, I don’t know.

“Truthfully, when I made my announcement in February, I expected this year to be all the ovals, and then next year probably just the Indy 500. But because of how strange this year has been, without fans at most tracks, I want to do all the ovals again next year. And if the right opportunity comes up then for sure, that’s what I will try to do. But as I said about a thousand times over the weekend in Gateway, it doesn’t matter what I want. What I want is not going to control what happens.

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Author David Malsher-Lopez

David Malsher-Lopez is Motorsport.com’s U.S. editor, covering the NTT IndyCar Series and IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship. Since completing journalism college in 1994, he has worked for Autosport, TRMG, Motor Sport, Autosport (again) and Racer, before joining Motorsport.com in 2015… where he has found himself enjoying a third spell writing for Autosport. Over the course of those 27 years, he has served as a journalist, sub-editor, features editor, deputy editor and editor. In 2015, he also wrote Will Power’s biography. David lives with his wife Sophia in California and when not writing about racing, he will be found reading about planes and classic cars, attending airshows, listening to a wide variety of music or watching cop shows from the ’70s. He intends to one day own a grand piano, an Airedale terrier and a vintage Pontiac. He doesn’t do Facebook and doesn’t understand Instagram but can be found @DavidMalsher on Twitter.