By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor
(INDYCAR/NASCAR)—A good start, a couple of dream endings, and a closing controversy for the tripleheader at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway last weekend.
An INDYCAR race on the track’s 14-turn, 2.439-mile road course, immediately followed by a race by NASCAR’s second-tier drivers (the Xfinity series) and then less than 24 hours later, another race on the same circuit by NASCAR’s Cup competitors.
Will Power picked up his first win of the season, holding off the field in two late-race re-starts to finish 1.1 seconds ahead of Romain Grosjean, who was the runnerup in the May race on the Indianapolis road course. Power’s victory was the 40th of his career, putting him in a tie for fifth-most INDYCAR wins. Thirty-eight of those wins have come for Team Penske.
The competition was intense throughout the race with 269 on-track passes (changes of position during pit stops not counted), 190 of them for position. The 269 on-track passes set a new record for the road course and the 190 passes for position tied a record set on the IMS road course three years ago.
Points leader Alex Palou, who started sixth, had a disastrous end of his day with an engine failure than left him 27th in the 28-car field. Pole-sitter Pato O’Ward led the first 15 laps and finished fifth. Scott Dixon, who went into the race third in points struggled from a poor starting position and could do no better than 17th.
Nonetheless, Palou’s lead over O’Ward and Dixon has shrunk to just 21 over O’Ward and 34 over Dixon with four races left in the schedule.
INDYCAR runs its last race on an oval next Saturday, the last chance Midwesterners will have to see the cars and drivers this year. The evening race at Gateway Motorsports Park across the river from St. Louis precedes two weeks off before INDYCAR wraps up its season with three races on the west coast.
INDYCAR President Jay Frye told your correspondent Monday morning that the tight schedule between the open-wheel race and the Xfinity race gave the Speedway little time to clear all the INDYCAR gear out of the pits and to get the Xfinity pit boxes installed. The goal was thirty minutes, he said. It took 33. Frye says the track will work on eliminating that three-minute delay.
Speedway and INDYCAR series owner Roger Penske wound up with a two-fer for the day when Austin Cindric drove a Penske car to victory in the 150-mile race on the road course. Cindric is the son of the President of Team Penske. It’s his fifth win of the year, 13th of his career. But this win was at Indianapolis, an event he called, “amazing,” continuing, “I can’t even put into words what this means.”
Pole-sitter A. J. Almendinger was second for the second straight road-course race. But his Cinderella moment would come a day later.
The Sunday Cup race was the first Indianapolis road course race for the Cup cars and it came within six laps of being hotly-contested leading up to a breakthrough win for one of NASCAR’s top drivers who is still grasping for his first win of the year.
Eleven drivers led at least one lap with Kyle Larson and Denny Hamlin combining for 55 of the scheduled 82 laps. But six laps from the end, a disintegrating trackside curb led to crashes, caution flags and two red-flag race stoppages that consumed an hour and 24 minutes in all. Hamlin took the lead from Larson with seven laps left and held him off through two re-starts before being spun out of the competition by Chase Briscoe.
A. J. Almendinger was the beneficiary of the crashes and carnage, avoiding all the trouble to hold off Ryan Blaney for the 94th and 95th laps.
The crashes triggered by the deteriorating curb in turn number six drew quick criticism from some drivers, although the same curbs had survived the Xfinity race last year, the INDYCAR races, and Saturday’s Xfinity race, as well as practice and qualification laps. The troublesome curb was finally removed from the course for the last few laps.
NASCAR’s competition vice-president Scott Miller said after the race that the curbing had been installed at the request of several drivers before last year’s Xfiniity race “because that section (of the track) was way too fast.”
Miller said the curbing was the same style of curbing that has been used since the road-course was re-arranged seven years ago. “We looked at that curb between every session; we looked at it at night and in the morning and there was no indication…that there was really anything wrong with that curbing.” He called the delamination of it “a little bit of a surprise for us.”
Almendinger is a full-time Xfinity driver for Kaulig Racing, which fields a Cup car for a limited number of races. His win came in his fourth Cup race of the year. It does not qualify him for one of the sixteen playoff spots for the championship because he’s not a full-time driver in NASCAR’s premier series. The win is the first Cup win for Kaulig.
The win at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway was particularly emotional for Almendinger, who drove for Penske in the 2013 Indianapolis 500.
He had the lead with seventy laps left when a seatbelt clasp came loose and he had to make a pit stop to get it fixed. He finished seventh, about four seconds behind Tony Kanaan, who set a speed record for the 500 that stood until this year..
Hamlin, who won seven times last year, remains winless this year. He wound up 23rd in the race but has enough points to be in the playoffs. However, his end-of-race disaster coupled with Kyle Larson’s third-place finish leaves Hamlin 22 points behind Larson for the regular season points championship and the bonus playoff points that go with it.
NASCAR has two races left before the 16-driver shootout field is set.
(Photo Credits: Rick Gevers, Bob Priddy)