James Hinchcliffe believes he was on his way to recovering from a rough start to Sunday's Indy 500 when he was eliminated in a late multi-car accident.

The Schmidt driver's afternoon came to an end on lap 189, when James Davison tangled with Oriol Servia, and Will Power spun while trying to avoid that accident and collected the Canadian in the process.

"It's not often that you're looking in your rear view mirror for the accident," Hinchcliffe told RACER. "Tough break – wrong place, wrong time. Oriol and Davison were going at it, and I guess Will lost it behind us. We were well down – I was aiming for the decel [deceleration] lane, and I was good to go. But unfortunately Will spun, which is so easy to do on an oval ... four feet to the left, four feet to the right, you avoid it. But that's racing."

Hinchcliffe was running in 10th at the time of the crash, but felt that the race was finally starting to come to him after a few frustrating spells earlier on.

"The car was getting better," he said. "We had a really up and down day. Some stints the car was really strong, some stints the car was really struggling. At one stage we had a vibration that cost us a lot of time. Pit stops – we had a couple of good ones, and a bunch of really bad ones. We were 13 places up in two laps on a restart, came into the pits and lost all of them. It was a really ebb and flow day, but we were trending up at the end.

"The last stop was really good – we'd gotten ourselves back into the top 10, we were only two or three places away from TK and these guys that had been leading all day. For the guys on our strategy, we were in the top five. We put ourselves in the position for a decent result. And unfortunately, we just got cut out."

Hinchcliffe heads into next weekend's double-header in Detroit sitting equal 10th in the points with Max Chilton.

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