Tony Kanaan: 17 Wins, the 2013 Indy 500, and 318 Straight Starts
Welcome to the Happy Hour Racing IndyCar Driver Spotlight - where we pull one driver into the garage, look under the hood at their career, and tell you what makes them tick. This week: the Brazilian who never missed a race.
The Short Version
Tony Kanaan is a 2004 IndyCar Series champion, a 2013 Indianapolis 500 winner, and the most durable driver the sport has ever had. He made 389 Indy car starts across 26 seasons, second only to Mario Andretti, and 318 of them came back to back without a single missed race. These days he runs Arrow McLaren as team principal. If you only know one thing about Tony Kanaan, know this: he showed up, every single time, for two decades.
From Salvador to the Ladder
Kanaan was born on December 31, 1974, in Salvador, Brazil, and his father Antoine put him in front of a television showing races when he was five years old. By eight he was a karting champion. Then the bottom fell out. His father died of cancer when Tony was 13, and the night before, from a hospital bed, he asked his son for two things: take care of your mother and your sister, and do not give up racing.
Kanaan moved to Italy as a teenager to chase the career that would pay for all of it. He worked his way through European junior formulas, came to the United States, and won the 1997 Indy Lights championship. The next year he stepped up to CART, won Rookie of the Year, and in 1999 took the U.S. 500 at Michigan with Forsythe Racing for his first Indy car victory.
The 2004 Championship Nobody Could Dent
Kanaan joined Andretti Green Racing in 2003 and found the car that fit him. In 2004 he put together one of the most relentless seasons in the history of American open-wheel racing. He won three races in the No. 11, finished in the top five in 15 of the 16 rounds, and clinched the title with a race to spare, beating his own teammate Dan Wheldon by 85 points.
The number that still gets brought up is a different one. Kanaan completed all 3,305 laps that season. Every lap, of every race, start to finish. No crash, no mechanical, no spin into the gravel. He was the first driver in top-level motorsport to do it, and it told you everything about how he raced: hard enough to win, clean enough to finish.
The 2013 Indianapolis 500
Indianapolis broke Tony Kanaan's heart for a decade. He led laps in start after start and kept finding new ways to lose. Then came May 26, 2013, his twelfth attempt.
He started 12th and was still outside the top five late. On a restart with three laps to go, Kanaan drove around Ryan Hunter-Reay into Turn 1 and took the lead. Moments later Dario Franchitti, one of his closest friends in the sport, crashed and brought out the yellow, and Kanaan rode the caution to the checkered flag in front of a crowd that erupted for him. He became the fourth Brazilian to win the race.
It was a record-setting afternoon in more ways than one. The average speed of 187.433 mph was the fastest Indianapolis 500 ever run at the time, and the race produced 68 lead changes among 14 different leaders, both records. Kanaan also tied Sam Hanks as the most experienced driver to finally break through at Indy, winning in his twelfth start.
By the Numbers
Here is the career laid out in the parts that matter. These are combined Indy car totals across CART and the IndyCar Series, 1998 through 2023.
The Streak
The 318 straight starts are the stat that defines him. It began at Portland in 2001 and did not end until 2020, when he sat out a race during the shortened COVID season. Nineteen years of green flags without missing one. He raced through a broken arm, through bad cars, through team changes from Andretti to KV Racing to Chip Ganassi to A.J. Foyt, and he kept answering the bell. Nobody in the history of the sport has come close.
Off the Track
Kanaan is an endurance athlete who credits triathlon training for keeping him competitive into his late forties. He has completed half Ironman events and raced the full Ironman World Championship in 2011, finishing in 12 hours, 52 minutes and 40 seconds. He is married and has four children, and he is of Lebanese heritage on his father's side.
He was also part of the CART "brat pack," the tight group of young drivers that included Dario Franchitti, Max Papis and the late Greg Moore. Those friendships have outlasted all of their driving careers. Fans noticed the personality too. He was voted the IndyCar Series Most Popular Driver in 2013 and received the Scott Brayton Award in 2007 for the spirit he brought to the sport.
Life After the Cockpit
Kanaan made his 22nd and final Indianapolis 500 start in 2023 with Arrow McLaren, then stayed with the team. He went from special advisor to sporting director to deputy team principal, and in February 2025 he was named team principal of the whole operation.
Happy to take on this new challenge as Team Principal at @ArrowMcLaren ! It's an honor to continue this journey with such an incredible organization.
- Tony Kanaan (@TonyKanaan) February 20, 2025
The 2026 season was the proof. Pato O'Ward won three races and Christian Lundgaard won two, including the first one-two finish in Arrow McLaren history at Mid-Ohio. Lundgaard finished third in the championship and O'Ward fourth, behind only Alex Palou and Kyle Kirkwood. In July 2026, Kanaan also joined the strategic ownership group at Legacy Motor Club in NASCAR, alongside his old friends Dario Franchitti and Scott Dixon.
The Bottom Line
Tony Kanaan made a promise to his father at 13 years old and spent the next three decades keeping it. One championship, 17 wins, and an Indianapolis 500 that took him twelve tries to get is a great career on its own. The 318 races in a row is what makes it his. He never stopped showing up, and now he runs a team that is doing the same thing.
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