Sunday, July 19, 2015

Opinion: 2015 IndyCar Series Iowa Speedway Talking Points


A short-track Saturday night race in the American heartland delivered a dramatic race as the IndyCar Series enters the final four-event stretch to the championship. Here are the major talking points from a busy weekend in corn country:

Master of Iowa

Ryan Hunter-Reay, driving for Michael Andretti, ended a winless streak stretching out towards twelve months, giving Honda it’s second win in three races after Graham Rahal won two races back at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, California. RHR, an Indianapolis 500 winner and IndyCar Series champion, won for the third time at Iowa Speedway and for the second straight year, and I can’t remember a more timely victory for the Floridian.

Andretti Autosport have been behind the times as far as developing their Honda engine this season, and Honda itself has lagged way behind those teams running Chevrolet engines, and RHR’s triumph represents a much-needed shot in the arm for team – Andretti Autosport has won six straight at Iowa – and engine manufacturer, not to mention driver.

Will Power once labelled Hunter-Reay as the most rounded driver in the IndyCar Series, and I definitely subscribe to that theory. The sad thing is that RHR just hasn’t had the car to do his driving talent justice this year, leading just three total laps coming in here. Hopefully Honda can improve on their package for 2016, and the Andretti group, one of IndyCar’s Big Three along with Penske and Ganassi, can be serious championship contenders again.

Championship Points Race

We’ve marvelled at Juan Pablo Montoya’s consistency all season. Even his bad days aren’t bad, but this Saturday night was a disaster for the only man to sit atop the IndyCar Series points standings in 2015. Not even twenty laps in, and the Colombian was hard into the wall and immediately out of the race.

It was supposed to be good news for Helio Castroneves and Scott Dixon, the two other drivers in the championship hunt, but late race restarts doomed Castroneves, who came home in eleventh on a night when he needed much more in order to peg JPM’s points lead back a little. For Dixon, a late-race pit stop became terminal and he finished at the back of the field.

Graham Rahal, third place in points coming in, had a forgettable night, stalling an engine on a pit stop and went down laps due to running over crash debris. But the second-generation star drove like a man possessed late in the race, took advantage of some timely caution periods, and roared back to fourth.

This race was supposed to be an absolute disaster for Montoya, but the upshot is that JPM has a forty-two point lead with three races left in 2015.

Great Racing

The aero package IndyCar has for the short ovals is perfect. We saw a great race at Milwaukee six days ago and another at Iowa. There was more side-by-side racing than you could poke a stick at but, crucially, there was none of the dangerous pack racing that we saw a lot of at Fontana. The last twenty laps tonight were as good as any we’ve seen all season.

Ganassi Struggles

Other than rookie Sage Karam, who came home third, the powerhouse Chip Ganassi squad had an uncharacteristically bad night. Scott Dixon finished in eighteenth, Tony Kanaan in twenty-first and Charlie Kimball in twenty-second. Expect a rebound from these guys at Mid-Ohio.

Even Field

Ryan Hunter-Reay became the ninth different winner in thirteen races this season. He and Sage Karam become the seventeenth and eighteenth drivers to stand on the podium. I can’t recall a better and more even IndyCar Series field than we have in 2015. It’s such a shame that the season has just three races left in it.

Stars and Stripes Success

What a day for American drivers in the American heartland! The Iowa Corn 300 saw a memorable 1-2-3-4 finish for local-born drivers, with Hunter-Reay leading Josef Newgarden, Sage Karam and Graham Rahal home. Saturday night was easily the best night for American IndyCar drivers in recent memory, and continues a season in which we’ve seen Americans Newgarden, Rahal and now Hunter-Reay visit victory lane.

Short Track, Short Tempers

In something approaching a post-race NASCAR scuffle that we see at Bristol or Martinsville, Ed Carpenter and Sage Karam were involved heatedly on pit road. The two were involved in some close racing in the last twenty laps, which Carpenter objected to – we saw him give a one-fingered salute to Karam at one stage at about 150mph – and that boiled over after the race, with Carpenter stalking pit road, looking for his fellow American.

Whilst we don’t want drivers coming to blows, a little more aggro between drivers isn’t a bad thing. IndyCar drivers seem too nice to each other most of the time. People like to see rivalry on the track, and, certainly, the confrontation between Karam and Carpenter is going to make news around the world, and IndyCar certainly won’t mind that!

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