Newgarden cruised to a dominant IndyCar victory in Newton, Iowa, setting a series record by leading 282 of 300 laps for his first oval-track victory. He is now third overall, seven points behind another teammate, Helio Castroneves, who has yet to win a race this season, and 81 points behind Pagenaud with seven races remaining on the schedule.
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Will Power, who’d won the previous two races, passed Dixon in the late stages to finish second and Power continues to do all he can to get back into the championship hunt. “It took us all day to get to the front, basically”. No race cars were involved, just wedding attire.
“It was good”, said Power, the 2014 Verizon IndyCar Series champion who sits third in this year’s championship, 75 points behind Pagenaud. Fortunately for the competition, the first caution of the race flew just a few laps later, putting more cars back up on the lead lap, but nobody had enough to overpower the still-recovering Newgarden.
Power snapped a one-year winless streak by winning the last two races and is now focusing on teammate Simon Pagenaud in the driver standings.
“My view on that is, if you’re already a lap down and it’s coming to the end of the race, you need to make way for the lead coming through”, Veach said.
Newgarden admitted not being allowed to take part in the restarted Texas race in August is a blow for his title hopes.
If approved, the proposal could keep the team from moving to the Los Angeles area, where it has been approved by National Football League ownership to join the Rams in a new stadium being built in Inglewood.
Will Power finished in second place, 4.2828 seconds behind Newgarden. But Dixon quickly realized that neither he nor anyone else was catching Newgarden.
“It nearly seemed like he had another set of wings (for downforce) on that vehicle”, Dixon said through a smile. Huge credit to that team.
“They did a helluva job”. “Again, I just want to thank DeVilbiss, Chevrolet and Verizon for supporting us and we’ll look ahead to better results in Toronto”.
It would have been an especially remarkable accomplishment since he’s still healing from a broken clavicle and broken hand suffered in that Texas crash.
The rebound this quickly impressed his fellow competitors, to be certain.
“I wasn’t even thinking about that, to be honest”.
“My right hand was killing me”, Ed Carpenter Racing driver Newgarden said post-race.
James Hinchcliffe, Arrow Schmidt Peterson Honda: “It’s a fun little track and one of the toughest we do all year, not just physically, but also because you are always racing someone”. As he said after qualifying, if he didn’t feel 100 percent ready, he wasn’t going to race. If you go into the gym, hold up a 15-pound plate, it’s hard to hold that constantly for two hours. Yes, it captured the 500, but it’s watched Chevrolet take six races with Team Penske, one with Chip Ganassi’s team and another with KVSH.
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Anyway, if you saw it, you saw something that used to happen all the time – remember when David Pearson won the Rebel 400 at Darlington, South Carolina by three laps? [But] if you have as good a auto as I had today, it makes your race so much easier to drive. “Man, I was surprised I could hold on”. When I realized how good (I was) – I could tell in the first stint. The 0.875-mile Iowa track gives drivers nearly no time to rest because there really isn’t much of a straight to speak of.
