Le
PA
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INDYCAR IOWA RACE CENTRE25 JULY 2019 AUTOSPORT.COM 35history as an IndyCar venue, with 868
laps led. This was a masterful display.
Newgarden had been very annoyed about
qualifying only third behind team-mates
Simon Pagenaud and Power the day before,
which seemed a tad disproportionate.
Honda-powered drivers Rossi and Ryan
Hunter-Reay at Andretti, James Hinchcliffe
at Arrow Schmidt Peterson Motorsports,
Takuma Sato at Rahal Letterman Lanigan
Racing or Chip Ganassi Racing’s Scott
Dixon could be forgiven for thinking, ‘Hey
Newgarden – you think you’ve got it bad?
Wanna swap cars?’ All of them started in
the top 10, but in the evening practice on
Friday none of them appeared able to use
the whole width of the track like a Penske
driver, nor was their speed as consistent
over a long run.
That hour-long session, starting at 6pm,
had been designed to give race engineers
and drivers a feel for the first hour of the
race the following night. In the end, it was
fairly meaningless since lightning and
rainstorms on Saturday pushed the race
start from 6.15pm back to 10.45pm, and the
cooler, denser air provided more downforce.
“I think the grip was higher overall, a
little more downforce, a little more power
from the engine,” reckoned Newgarden.
“That’s the biggest thing you notice with
the track temp and ambient coming down.
The balance got a little tougher as the
night went on – it became more difficult
to follow other cars as it cooled off. You
could carve people up really well for the
first half of the race but the last 100 laps
it got more difficult. The grip was coming
up but the balance went more loose. The
cars were a handful to drive.
“[But] I think we were still just a bit
better than most people at cutting through
the pack. That’s what matters here. A lot
of people were fast in clean air, but it’s
how you get through the pack – that’s
what this place is about.”
Indeed. After a video was shown ofs Will Power pulled into the
Iowa Speedway pitlane for
his final planned stop on lap
252 of the 300 last Saturday
night – actually, the early
flickers of Sunday morning, such had been
the race’s rain delay – he ran over some
tyre marbles that stuck to his worn and hot
rubber and caused the car to understeer. It
kept pushing out wide, so severely that his
right-front wheel skittered beyond the
outside line at the transition from
slowdown lane to pitlane entry.
Had Power not backed off he would have
struck the attenuator at the start of the
pitwall. Instead he brought his Team Penske
Dallara-Chevrolet almost to a halt, cranked
the wheel hard left and proceeded down the
pitlane, but the time loss had dropped him
from second place to fourth.
At that moment what little heat was left
in the fight for the lead of the 12th race of
the 2019 IndyCar Series disappeared into
the ever-cooling Iowan air. He had been
the only driver able to keep pace with
team-mate and championship leader Josef
Newgarden, and even then only tenuously.
Since Newgarden had passed Power
for the lead back on lap 49, he had
looked better able to deal with the
knots of traffic that seem almost
constant around the 0.894-mile oval.
Occasionally Power closed to within
one second of Newgarden, but more often
than not the gap between them hovered
around the 2.5s mark. Flat-out on a clear
track – a rare occurrence here – Power
could match him but not catch him.
It was now academic: IndyCar gave Power
a stop-and-hold penalty for an improper
pit entry, which dropped him outside the
top 10. When the chequered flag fell,
Newgarden had not only scored his fourth
win of the season and extended his
championship lead from four to 29 points
over Alexander Rossi, he had also become
the most dominant driver in Iowa’s 12-yearNewga rden dominates,
Power blunders,
Dixon saves
Thunderstorms delayed the start of the Iowa night race,
but nobody had an answer to Newgarden’s electric pace
DAVID MALSHER(^) PHOTOGRAPHY
A