INDIANAPOLIS (AP) – With time running short and Buddy Lazier needing a burst of speed, he asked his old friends for some help Sunday.

His crew adjusted the car, Dan Wheldon gave him a pep talk and then Lazier took his No. 91 car back onto the track and bumped his way into the 33-car starting grid for the Indianapolis 500.

To the 1996 Indy winner, it was a harrowing, emotional day.

“They made some quick calculations and said ‘Well, if we’re going to make it, this is what we have to do,”‘ Lazier said after posting a four-lap average of 219.015 mph. “They ripped off and counterbalanced it in five minutes. It was a hairy run, no doubt.”

Lazier’s courageous run highlighted a frantic finish to the fourth and final day of qualifying, which ended with rookie Mario Dominguez skidding down the track between the first and second turns after a wild crash.

It was an improbable sequence of events.

Lazier, the 1996 race winner, was bumped from the field by Marty Roth at 1:30 p.m. on the day’s second qualifying attempt. Four hours later, Lazier tried to requalify and waved off after turning three straight laps at less than 218 – not quite enough to make the field.

So Lazier’s crew scrambled, and while he waited to drive out of pit road, Wheldon, the 2005 race winner, offered some moral support.

“We just talked about what the car was doing, and he helped reaffirm what I needed to do,” Lazier said. “Dan is a class act. He was a previous winner and he was just trying to see – he was seeing if he could help. I appreciate that.”

Tougher yet were the conditions.

As Lazier sped around the track through the gusty winds, he was using up his tires. That translated into a substantially slower speed on Lap 4, but not enough to keep him out of the race. He will start 32nd, the middle of the 11th row and his lowest starting spot in 16 career starts at Indy.

“As it was, we were really hanging it out on the last lap,” he said. “Firestone tires are awesome tires, but we really burned them off.”

Others were not as fortunate.

Max Papis, who crashed during practice Saturday, never got a shot Sunday because of mechanical problems. The final chance disappeared when Papis pulled out of line because he couldn’t the car in gear.

“Unfortunately, when we were getting ready to go, I selected first gear, dropped the clutch and then I’m not really sure what happened,” said Papis, an Italian who was driving for Jason Priestley’s Rubicon Race Team. “They said it was an input shaft or something like that.”

Roger Yasukawa, who spent most of the afternoon on the bubble, was finally knocked out of the field on Dominguez’s second run of the day. He failed to requalify on his final two attempts, and the American Dream Motorsports team couldn’t find a car to replace the one wrecked Saturday when Phil Giebler hit the wall and wound up in the hospital.

Then there Dominguez’s plight.

First in the race, then out, his team made some last-minute adjustments to get him back in.

Initially, it appeared to work. Dominguez’s first lap speed was 219.780, good enough to knock Roth out of the field. But on the next lap, as Dominguez came through the first turn, the rear end of his car spun around, hit the wall and sent him skidding down the track – his third crash of the month.

His day, and Indy hopes, were gone.

“We took down something to make the car go faster, and the car couldn’t take it,” he said. “I thought it would be OK, and we had a near perfect first lap. But as I went around, I just lost it. There wasn’t enough downforce.”

That provided Lazier, and Roth, with a sense of relief as they held onto the final two starting spots.

“It was a wicked day,” Lazier said. “That racetrack – I’ve seen it like this before and it’s probably very similar to race day and what’s going to happen with the heat and the barometric pressure – but it was certainly not ideal conditions for qualifying. Emotions are running deep.”

AP-ES-05-18-08 2020EDT