Pit entry stumble
proved costly for
Power, dropping
him to 15thABBOTTLe
PAGERACE CENTRE INDYCAR IOWA
36 AUTOSPORT.COM 25 JULY 2019Gene Kranz, NASA’s mission controller for
Apollo 11’s historic visit to the moon 50
years ago this weekend, renaming the event
the ‘Apollo 11 Moon Walk 300’, engines
were fired. After a few laps under yellow to
allow the drivers to get the feel of the grip
level now that heavy rain had washed a lot
of rubber from the track, the green was
dropped and Power immediately carved
around the outside of Pagenaud to grab
the lead, with Sato pulling the same stunt
a couple of turns later. However, while
the RLLR car was fast, it was wearing
through its front tyres too rapidly. Despite
struggling with understeer too, Pagenaud
came back at Sato to regain second on
lap 11. Five laps later, Newgarden too was
through and into third, reassembling the
Penske 1-2-3 just before the first yellow
flew for Sage Karam looping his Carlin
machine out of Turn 4.
When the pits opened, a couple of
those who had started in the top 10
but fallen outside it – Hunter-Reay
and Graham Rahal in the second RLLR
machine – were among those who
stopped early. Ed Carpenter Racing,
which had been lamenting missing its
qualifying set-up by a mile, had two
strong race cars but wisely opted to split
strategy: Spencer Pigot, who’d started
19th, had got bogged down in 17th despite
his car’s pace and he was ordered to pit.
Team owner Carpenter stayed out since
he had already moved from 17th up to 12th.
None of the frontrunners saw any point
in pitting off-sequence and at the restart
Power pulled away from his team-mates,
although soon it was Newgarden rather
than Pagenaud in second. Sato gamely held
onto fourth ahead of Rossi, who found his
car was fast on the bottom lane but not
offering him the ability to run high without
trying to spit him into the wall. Behind
him, Hinchcliffe was having to defend from
Santino Ferrucci, who had fearlessly sent
his Dale Coyne Racing car rocketing
forwards from the start, and was now
holding off impressive fellow rookie Marcus
Ericsson in the other Arrow SPM machine.Dixon appeared quite unable to keep
up with these newbies and was soon to
tumble down the order behind a charging
Carpenter, Colton Herta (Harding
Steinbrenner Racing) and Conor Daly
in the second Carlin machine. Indeed, by
the time the yellow and then a red flag flew
for a passing light shower, on lap 51, the
champ’s #9 machine was down in 16th.
Up at the front, Power had struggled to
slice through traffic once too often, allowing
Newgarden to close up and pass just before
the race stoppage. Less visible but even
more impressive had been the progress
of last year’s Iowa runner-up Pigot, who
had taken great advantage of his new
tyres from his early stop to carve through
to the top 10, behind team-mate and
team owner Carpenter.
When the race resumed under yellow
and the pits opened, everyone stopped.
While the Penskes remained in theorder Newgarden-Power-Pagenaud, Rossi’s
crew got him out just ahead of Sato, while
the Ganassi team managed to vault Dixon
from 16th to 11th.
Rossi immediately lost his advantage to
Sato at the restart, and he lost a further
spot – after several laps of side-by-side
driving – to the irrepressible Ferrucci, who
had deposed Hinchcliffe. Ferrucci’s fifth
became fourth as Sato started feeling his
fronts give up once more. He had fallen to
12th by the time he pitted 15 laps earlier
than the other leading runners on lap 119.
Not long after, Rossi and then Hinchcliffe
reasserted themselves ahead of Ferrucci,
and the ECR cars – now with Pigot ahead- passed Ericsson for seventh and eighth.
That became sixth and seventh when
they too passed Ferrucci and then fifth
and sixth on lap 136 as Pagenaud became
the first of the runners to stop ‘on strategy’.
His understeer had become unsolvable with
any of his in-cockpit tools and at one point
he even dropped seven seconds behind the
Newgarden-Power battle. Getting onto
fresh rubber immediately conferred an
8mph advantage, however, and that had
allowed the off-sequence Sato to now
charge briefly into second as the others
stopped, although Power dismissed him as
soon as his tyres were up to temperature.
Still, Sato held third until his next
(off-sequence) stop, on lap 177. Then,
as he was tracking Power and the lapped
Hunter-Reay, he drifted up into the grey,
just about kept it off the wall, but needed
to come off the throttle so much that he
was hit by Karam. Sato struggled on but
eventually parked with odd handling.
Newgarden had lapped everyone up
to sixth place, including title rival Rossi,