The Australian’s decision to use his second pit on lap 58 proved to be the difference on Sunday as Power captured his third Honda Indy Toronto title and 28th victory of his career.
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Scott Dixon, the pole sitter and two-time champion of the race, jumped out to a good start and maintained an nearly two-second difference between himself and Pagenaud after 54 laps.
“Everything”, Hinchcliffe said, rolling his eyes while answering for his competitor, who was sitting next to him in the media zone.
If you attended the race in the early years, when it was known as the Molson Indy, you wouldn’t recognize the town or the track. And the Oakville native is not shy in expressing what it means to back racing in front of his home fans, calling the series’ lone Canadian stop “Christmas in July”. It also was Hinchcliffe’s best qualifying result in seven career IndyCar starts in Toronto. Newgarden won last year’s race here.
“It’s great to be back on the pole”. It’s like a big family of insane. “Running in this series is something fun for me to do, cool for me to do and it also helps me out and gets me a little more experience”. “I watch him picking his nose playing XBox at my house”.
“As a team we have to work on it, because we shouldn’t be here”, said Hunter-Reay. “It’s unbelievable. We’re so lucky”.
“I was just trying to get the most out of it, man”, Dixon said.
The changes made back then opened up the track and addressed concerns resulting from a 1994 crash in which driver Bryan Herta fractured his pelvis.
Their misfortune was Will Power and his Penske teammate Helio Castroneves’s gain.
Scott Dixon has taken the pole position of the Honda Indy Toronto.
“We were one lap away (from pitting)”, Ganassi Managing Director and Dixon race strategist Mike Hull said. “My memory is still pretty good”.
Pagenaud had the fastest time on Friday and has three wins this year but has never won in Toronto.
Hinchcliffe just squeaked into the second round of qualifications by six hundredths of a second, completing his best lap in 1:00.6291. I can’t believe it”, the Brazilian sighed, “What is it, [four] hundredths of a second?
“A win is a win, you can’t take that away”, he said of his performance on Sunday. It’s not what we planned on, we just planned to do three laps. “If there was something major wrong, I think they would have seen it already”. “If we can do that then we just need to have a clean race and then we’ll fight for a podium or a win”.
Castroneves was second, followed by series points leader Simon Pagenaud, Will Power, Sebastien Bourdais and James Hinchcliffe. “We’re coming off having to move around the date previous year and working around this hotel being built, so I’m looking at this as a fresh start for the race. The atrocity of the act is incredible, especially on Bastille Day”.
Newgarden enters this weekend’s race on the streets surrounding Exhibition Place as a favourite.
“The hand is really what’s bothering me, it’s going to be a problem”, Newgarden said. “At the least, we don’t have a railroad in the middle of the tracks, like we did in the past. One day it’s going to play on your side, another day it’s not going to be on your side”.
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It hasn’t always been good times and checkered flags for IndyCar driver Josef Newgarden.
