Three laps into his first qualifying run at Indianapolis, on May 17, 1969, Jigger Sirois was circling the 2.5-mile oval at better than 160 mph when his car owner flagged the attempt off. Leon Duray "Jigger" Sirois, the Indiana-born midget-car champion whose near-miss at that year's pole became one of the most retold stories in Indianapolis 500 history, died on September 23, 2026. He was 91.

He had drawn the first qualifying slot of Pole Day in the No. 14 Gerhardt-Offenhauser owned by Myron Caves, a car dealer from Fresno, California. Rain had kept the track quiet for most of the afternoon, and Sirois, a 34-year-old rookie in a field of more than 80 entries, went out late to make the day's first attempt. His opening laps ran between 160 and 162 mph. Caves, judging them too slow, waved off the fourth. Moments later Arnie Knepper rolled out for his own run, the rain came back during his warmup, and no one else turned a qualifying lap that weekend, as the Indianapolis Motor Speedway recounted in its tribute.

Had that last lap counted, Sirois would have been the only qualifier of the day and would have held the provisional pole. By the reckoning of columnist Gregg Doyel in IndyStar, his speed would have survived the following weekend's qualifying, putting him on the front row alongside A.J. Foyt and Mario Andretti, who went on to win the race. Instead he started over the next Saturday with everyone else. A second run in the low 162 mph range would have been quick enough to make the field, but his crew waved that one off too, hoping for more. His final try ended on its opening lap when the engine let go.

He never blamed Caves or the crew, and that grace is what turned a bad weekend into an institution. At the suggestion of Indianapolis News sportswriter Dick Mittman, the American Auto Racing Writers & Broadcasters Association created the Jigger Award, a gold-colored metal jigger presented each May to the driver with the hardest luck in qualifying. Sirois was its first recipient. In 1971 the qualifying rules were changed so that every car in line on opening day was guaranteed a chance in the first round, closing the door on any repeat. The award ran through 2018, and that year Sirois was there to hand the last one to James Hinchcliffe. Asked why it had ended, he offered his own theory. "I think they took a good look at me," he told Doyel, "and decided they better drop it."

He came to the Speedway by birthright. Born on April 16, 1935, in Shelby, in the corner of northwest Indiana known as the Region, he was named for Leon Duray, a two-time Indianapolis 500 pole winner. His father, Earl "Frenchy" Sirois, spent a 40-year career as an Indianapolis mechanic and worked on the winning cars of Lee Wallard, Sam Hanks and Jimmy Bryan, while also keeping the family hardware store in Shelby. The nickname arrived from two directions at once: his older sister took one look at the newborn and called him a little jigger, and his father counted as a friend Jigger Johnson, the riding mechanic who shared in two Indianapolis 500 victories. The boy saw his first race at 11, on a dirt track in Crown Point, and after finishing high school in 1954 he told his father he meant to drive. Earl tried to talk him out of it.

He did not listen. He began in stock cars on the dirt at Illiana Motor Speedway in Schererville, then moved to midgets and the United Auto Racing Association, which ran most of its shows at Joliet Memorial Stadium. In 1961, driving Larry White's yellow No. 82, he won eight features and the UARA title, as Speed Sport recalled; the Speedway counts four championships for him that year. A crash at Springfield, Illinois, in 1962 cost him six months of recovery, but he came back to race against the best of USAC's midget ranks and won a national feature at Joliet, according to USAC. He was later inducted into the National Midget Auto Racing Hall of Fame.

In Indy cars, his equipment rarely matched his ability. At the inaugural USAC Champ Car race at Michigan International Speedway in 1968, he ran as high as second in a low-budget car before a failed clutch forced him out, and that performance put him on the radar of Indianapolis owners. He made 10 Champ Car starts, with a best finish of fifth at Phoenix in 1969. On September 4, 1972, at the Du Quoin State Fairgrounds in Illinois, he led the first four laps on the one-mile dirt track in the field's only turbine car, Mike Riley's "Silent Screamer," and finished third behind Foyt and Knepper when rain ended the race after 52 laps. He kept returning to Indianapolis through 1975, including a 1970 attempt in the Jack Adams turbine that proved to be the last time a turbine car tried to qualify for the 500, and in 1974 he missed the field as second alternate.

"I was not an A.J. Foyt or a Mario Andretti, but I tried hard," he told IndyStar in 2022. "I gave it 100% effort and it just didn't work out." In the same conversation he pointed out that he had once passed Foyt in a midget at the Astrodome.

He stepped away from driving in 1977 and became a welder at the Standard Oil refinery in Whiting, Indiana. When a new plant manager, a racing fan, noticed the name on his hard hat and asked whether he was related to the driver, Sirois set him straight: "Sir, I am the racecar driver!" Not long after, he got the transfer to Virginia he had been hoping for, and he retired from the company in 1996. He and his wife, Juanita, made their home in Williamsburg for many years.

A stutter had followed him since the age of 3, when it began during a tornado scare near Shelby. In his mid-60s speech therapy helped him manage it, and he spent the years that followed working to raise awareness and money for young people who stutter. He came back to the Speedway often in May to talk with fans and reporters, who knew him for his courtesy and friendliness. At 87 he was still walking every day and logging the distance, which by then had passed 27,000 miles. "No complaints," he told Doyel. "I'm overjoyed. I'm eager to be 88, I'll put it that way."

What outlasts him is concrete: a qualifying rule rewritten because of one wet afternoon in 1969, a gold-colored jigger that carried his name through nearly half a century of hard-luck drivers, a UARA championship won in a yellow No. 82 midget, a lap-leading run in a turbine car at Du Quoin, and the children who stutter whose cause he took up in his 60s. The man who never started the Indianapolis 500 left his name on a chapter of its history that no winner could have written.