On the first day of qualifying for the 1969 Indianapolis 500, Leon Duray "Jigger" Sirois ran three laps fast enough to win the pole position, and his own car owner waved off the fourth before he could finish it. Sirois, the open-wheel racer whose near-miss became one of the Speedway's enduring hard-luck stories, died September 23, 2026. He was 91.

Sirois was born April 16, 1935, in Shelby, Indiana. His father, Earl "Frenchy" Sirois, spent decades at Indianapolis serving on several race-winning crews while running the family's hardware store back home. The son was named for the 1920s racer Leon Duray, and the nickname "Jigger" came from a Speedway riding mechanic.

He started on the dirt, racing stock cars at Illiana Motor Speedway in Schererville, Indiana, then switched to open-wheel midgets. Driving for the United Auto Racing Association, he won the 1961 driving championship in Larry White's yellow No. 82, taking eight feature wins that season, according to SPEED SPORT. The following year nearly ended it: a midget crash at Springfield, Illinois, left him badly hurt and sidelined for six months of rehabilitation.

By 1969, then living in Hammond, Indiana, Sirois had worked his way into an Indianapolis 500 ride as a 34-year-old rookie, driving the No. 14 Quaker State Oil Gerhardt-Offy prepared under crew chief Bob Higman, later a USAC Hall of Fame inductee for his turbocharged midget engines, according to USAC Racing. On pole day, Sirois ran three qualifying laps at 161 to 162.5 mph, a pace that would have been good enough for the pole. His car owner waved off the fourth lap, judging the pace too slow to hold up. Rain then washed out the rest of that weekend's qualifying, and an engine failure ended his next attempt. Sirois never made the starting field at Indianapolis, that year or in any of the Mays that followed.

The hard luck outlived the disappointment. The American Auto Racing Writers and Broadcasters Association turned it into an annual honor, the Jigger Award, still presented every May to the Indy 500's hardest-luck qualifier. Sirois kept racing into the 1970s; on September 4, 1972, driving the only turbine-powered car in a USAC Silver Crown race at DuQuoin, Illinois, he led the first four laps before A.J. Foyt got past him, and finished third when rain ended the race after 52 laps. He retired from racing in 1977 and settled in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Away from the track, Sirois carried a stutter he traced to a tornado scare near his boyhood home when he was about three. In 2000 he pursued speech therapy and got past it well enough to become a public speaker. He signed on as an ambassador-at-large for the Stuttering Foundation, talking to audiences about early intervention for children who stutter; a 2006 AutoWeek feature on that work brought the Foundation a lasting surge of calls. In 2013 he was inducted into the National Midget Auto Racing Hall of Fame.

Sirois died September 23, 2026, at 91, survived by his wife, Juanita.

Every May at Indianapolis, someone still takes home a gold-colored whiskey jigger for the worst luck of qualifying, a trophy that traces back to one waved-off lap in 1969. The Stuttering Foundation still points new callers to the story of the race car driver who got past his own stutter at 65. Both outlasted the disappointment that made Sirois's name famous at the Speedway in the first place.