IndyCar At Pocono: ABC Supply 500 Preview

Will Power and Simon Pagenaud lead the field into Turn 1 at the start of the ABC Supply 500 at Pocono Raceway. [Photo by: Bret Kelley]

Drivers call Pocono Raceway the “Tricky Triangle” and on Sunday, the track that first opened in 1971 and was originally designed for Indy cars, will play host to the Verizon Indy Car Series’ ABC Supply 500.

Mark Donahue won that inaugural 500-miler for Roger Penske over forty years ago, but Andretti Autosport’s Ryan Hunter-Reay returns to the 2.5-mile tri-corner oddity as the defending champion after his 2015 win over Josef Newgarden; an unusual 1-2 finish for American-born Indy Car drivers.

The 200-lapper will be race 13 of 16 on the 2016 schedule with events at Texas, Watkins Glen and Sonoma remaining.

Simon Pagenaud (484 points) leads the current standings as a trio of Team Penske drivers dominate the run for the championship. Will Power (-58) and Helio Castroneves (-111) trail their teammate who has won four times this season to go along with six pole starts. Josef Newgarden (-120) and Scott Dixon (-127) round-out the all-Chevy top-five.

Penske’s fourth driver, Juan Pablo Montoya, finished third here in 2014 and found the winner’s circle a year ago, but an inconsistent, bad-luck 2016 finds him 12^th in points with just one win (at St. Petersburg).

While Chevrolet dominates as they have recently, Honda-powered cars continues to struggle, having won about one-third (26) of the 80 races run since Chevrolet rejoined the circuit in 2012. Honda has won but once this season, albeit that win was the 100^th Indy 500. Honda also swept all three podium steps at Pocono in 2013 with Dixon leading Charlie Kimball and Dario Franchitti to the line.

Penske entries have won here a record eight times, while Hunter-Reay, Montoya and Dixon have each won once among active drivers. AJ Foyt is the all-time Pocono race winner with four. Nineteen of the 22 entered drivers have raced here previously.

Montoya holds both the 500-mile race record (202.402 mph) and the one-lap (223.920) and two- lap (223.871) qualifying records.

A Chevrolet team/driver will likely win this round, but as the mileage-race win by Alexander Rossi’s Honda proved at the “other” 500-miler at Indianapolis in May; anything can happen in a long race on a big track. Could Graham Rahal or Rossi win for Honda this Sunday?  We shall see.

POCONOTES:

• Hunter-Reay’s 2015 win here was his second win of the season and his 16^th career victory.
• Twelve drivers led one or more laps here in 2015.
• Twenty-two cars are entered for Sunday’s race with Pippa Mann in Dale Coyne’s #19. Conor Daly’s Coyne entry switches to #88 in honor of the team’s Indy 500 driver, the late Bryan Clauson.
• Last year’s Pocono 500 was marred by a late race crash that took the life of Justin Wilson.
• Indy Car and Pocono Raceway recently extended their contract for the 500 through the 2018 season.
• It is difficult for teams to set-up their cars for the three different corners at Pocono. Each turn was designed after a then existing series’ track with each having a different banking. Turn 1: (Trenton, 14-degrees), Turn 2: (Indy, 9), Turn 3: (Milwaukee, 6).
• AJ won the 1979 Pocono race by more than two laps. Pocono’s closest winning margin was in 1984 when Danny Sullivan edged Rick Mears by just 0.0270 sec.
• TV: NBCSN, Qualifying- Sunday, August 21, Midnight ET (delayed). Race-Sunday, 3:00 pm ET (live).

QUOTES:

JUAN PABLO MONTOYA (No. 2, Penske Truck Rental Chevrolet): “Pocono has been good to us the past couple years. We won in 2014 and were on the podium last year. I hope it brings us some good luck. The team definitely needs some of that right now. This season has been as frustrating as I can remember.”

MIKHAIL ALESHIN (No. 7, Schmidt Peterson Honda): “Pocono Raceway is not called the “Tricky Triangle” for nothing. It’s a good example of how different one oval can be from another. All three turns are different from each other and they all need a particular approach.”

Paul Gohde

Paul Gohde heard the sound of race cars early in his life.

Growing up in suburban Milwaukee, just north of Wisconsin State Fair Park in the 1950’s, Paul had no idea what “that noise” was all about that he heard several times a year. Finally, through prodding by friends of his parents, he was taken to several Thursday night modified stock car races on the old quarter-mile dirt track that was in the infield of the one-mile oval -and he was hooked.

The first Milwaukee Mile event that he attended was the 1959 Rex Mays Classic won by Johnny Thomson in the pink Racing Associates lay-down Offy built by the legendary Lujie Lesovsky. After the 100-miler Gohde got the winner’s autograph in the pits, something he couldn’t do when he saw Hank Aaron hit a home run at County Stadium, and, again, he was hooked.

Paul began attending the Indianapolis 500 in 1961, and saw A. J. Foyt’s first Indy win. He began covering races in 1965 for Racing Wheels newspaper in Vancouver, WA as a reporter/photographer and his first credentialed race was Jim Clark’s historic Indy win.Paul has also done reporting, columns and photography for Midwest Racing News since the mid-sixties, with the 1967 Hoosier 100 being his first big race to report for them.

He is a retired middle-grade teacher, an avid collector of vintage racing memorabilia, and a tour guide at Miller Park. Paul loves to explore abandoned race tracks both here and in Europe, with the Brooklands track in Weybridge England being his favorite. Married to Paula, they have three adult children and two cats.

Paul loves the diversity of all types of racing, “a factor that got me hooked in the first place.”

racingnation.com

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