INDIANAPOLIS — At an eerily empty Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Takuma Sato snatched a second Indianapolis 500 victory in an odd and unsatisfying finish to “The Greatest Spectacle in Racing.”

Sato held off Scott Dixon and won under caution after teammate Spencer Pigot crashed with five laps remaining in Sunday’s race, run in front of empty grandstands for the first time in 104 runnings because of the pandemic.

Pigot needed medical attention on the track, the crash scene was a massive debris field and the cleanup time would have been lengthy. There were also just four laps left in the race, not really enough time to allow for a proper restart.

If it had been a NASCAR race, a stoppage would have been immediate to set up a final shootout. IndyCar tends to avoid gimmicks and a late red-flag in the 2014 Indy 500 incensed purists.

Dixon, the five-time IndyCar champion who had dominated the race, asked on his radio if IndyCar was going to give the drivers a final shootout.

“Are they going red?” Dixon asked. “They’ve got to go red. There’s no way they can clean that up.”

The answer was no, turning the end of the race into a game of what-ifs.

“It’s a little silly to predict what might have happened. The reality is Takuma won,” said winning car owner Bobby Rahal. “This isn’t the first 500 to be flagged under yellow and there was a hell of a mess out there.”

IndyCar said in a statement after the finish “there were too few laps remaining to gather the field behind the pace car, issue a red flag and then restart for a green-flag finish.”

Dixon was visibly disappointed after leading 111 of the 200 laps in pursuit of his own second Indy win.

“Definitely a hard one to swallow for sure. We had such a great day,” Dixon said. “First time I’ve seen them let it run out like that. I thought they’d throw a red.”