With Help at Start, Goodyear Is Hot at Finish : Indy 500: He makes the field when Groff qualifies car, then comes from 33rd to take second place.

No one has won the Indianapolis 500 after starting last.

In 1980, Tom Sneva started last and finished second.

Scott Goodyear started last and finished second here Sunday by 0.043 seconds, and even though he didn’t win, he one-upped Sneva. He did it in a car he hadn’t even qualified for the race field.

The 33-year-old driver from Newmarket, Canada, near Ontario, is the contract driver for the team run by Derrick Walker, under whose direction as chief mechanic and general manager Roger Penske’s team enjoyed much of its success.

On the first day of qualifying for this year’s race, however, Goodyear’s primary car was under treatment for a practice casualty, a blown engine.

Eager to get into the field on the first day, he and Walker chose to qualify the backup car, which they did, at 219.054 m.p.h. That turned out to be the slowest qualifying speed of the weekend.

A week later, with the lead car repaired, Walker turned it over to driver Mike Groff of Northridge, who qualified it at 221.801. That gave Walker’s team two cars in the race.

Groff, however, had been given the ride with the understanding that if Goodyear’s speed failed to hold up, he would turn the car over to Goodyear.

And that’s what happened. Late last Sunday afternoon, rookie Ted Prappas, another Los Angeleno, bumped Goodyear from the field. So Groff returned his car to Goodyear. Because of the driver change, Goodyear had to move to the rear of the field.

Of his drive from worst to nearly first, he said, “I think the most important thing today was twofold: No. 1, staying out of trouble and watching all the traffic in front of us. And the second, probably most important thing, is with the temperatures being as low as they were today, it was very important to make sure the tires were warm for all the restarts.

“I saw what was happening on the start with all the cars spinning, so any time we had a yellow I’d be weaving and giving the motor a little squirt of throttle so I could spin the rear tires a little and get them warm.”

He said his late-race duel with winner Al Unser Jr. might have been different had it not been for a bit of traffic when he was running second to runaway leader Michael Andretti.

“I knew we were in a bit of trouble because I was in sixth gear, and there just wasn’t really much more there,” he said. “The car might have had just a little too much drag on it to get through a slipstream. I knew we’d pay for it because we came up upon a lapped car, and that’s when I got passed by Al.”

Had he not been passed, he might not have had to try to get past Unser at the end.

Fast pit work also aided Goodyear. He was in the pits seven times for 4 minutes 22 seconds, the best of the day by any driver.

The finish was his best in five years of Indy car racing--he was fifth in the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach in April--and Goodyear said he could envision other such finishes.

“This is my third year here and I’ve been building my confidence on ovals,” he said. “Now I’ve had an opportunity to run on superspeedways and short ovals, and I feel quite confident that--road courses or ovals--we’re going to be quite competitive for the rest of the year.”