With a masterly win in a rain-curtailed Indianapolis 500, Dario Franchitti stamped himself at last as a star -- and made a splash with wife Ashley Judd

	Franchitti took the checkered flag under yellow, but the low-speed climax didn't dampen Judd's (above) joy. AJ Mast/AP

She skipped across the most famous red bricks in racing, splashing into puddles and flashing a dimpled smile. As a springtime shower fell from the Indiana sky, Dario Franchitti's No. 1 fan held her high heels in her hands and bounded barefoot down pit road at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, searching for the man who is the self-described "invisible" driver of the IndyCar Series. "One by one, Dario picked those other drivers off," said actress Ashley Judd, Franchitti's wife, as she squinted into the rain. "This is waaaaaaay overdue."

On Sunday at the Brickyard, in the 91st running of the Greatest Spectacle in Racing, the struggling IndyCar Series got something it desperately needed out of its marquee event: a winner with potential star power. Since his debut on the Indy circuit in 2002, Franchitti -- a native of Edinburgh, Scotland, and a resident of Nashville -- had only four wins and had never finished higher than fourth in the final standings or sixth in the 500. Soft-spoken, with the contemplative manner of an English-lit grad student, Franchitti happily blends into the background at Andretti Green Racing, the organization that dominated the month of May at Indy. AGR boasts an A-list lineup of open-wheel drivers comprising a pair of Andrettis (team co-owner Michael and his 20-year-old son, Marco), Tony Kanaan (the 2004 IndyCar champ, who's also a champion talker) and Danica Patrick (who for the third straight year at the Brickyard sold more merchandise than any other driver and was everywhere in the prerace media coverage). Then there's the 34-year-old Franchitti, who married a movie star in 2001 but is as low-key as any driver in IndyCar.

"I don't have a big personality like some of my teammates, but I like my role," says Franchitti, the first driver signed by AGR, who frequently tutors Marco Andretti and the 25-year-old Patrick on the finer points of racing. "I've been waiting for this day, and today it's finally good to get noticed."

For most of the Indy 500, however, it was Franchitti's teammates who commanded the attention. Kanaan, Marco Andretti and Patrick were running first, second and third, respectively, on Lap 113 when the first rainstorm blew over the speedway, causing the race to be red-flagged for two hours and 57 minutes. To wait out the delay, the five AGR drivers, who had all qualified in the top 11, retreated to their engineering headquarters in the garage. As they munched on pasta, the close-knit group mapped out its strategy for the final laps -- assuming there would be any. If the race could not resume, Kanaan would be the winner. Franchitti, his best friend in racing, needled the 32-year-old Brazilian by jokingly asking if he was "stressed," which prompted an R-rated retort from Kanaan and a round of laughs.