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IndyCar Firestone 600 Resumption Preview

Will Power and Simon Pagenaud lead the field into Turn 1 during the early stages of the Firestone 600 at Texas Motor Speedway. [Photo by: Chris Owens]

Will Power and Simon Pagenaud lead the field into Turn 1 during the early stages of the Firestone 600 at Texas Motor Speedway.  [Photo by: Chris Owens]

 

 

The original running of the Verizon IndyCar Series’ Firestone 600 (km) race at Texas Motor Speedway will be resumed this Saturday night, more than two months after rain caused the event’s postponement. Scheduled to be run on June 11 and moved to the 12th after continuing weather concerns, it was decided that the best rescheduling choice would be to move it to this Saturday, August 27, and pick up the race in the order the field was running when the red flag halted the proceedings on Lap 71.

The current race leader is James Hinchcliffe (Arrow Schmidt Peterson Honda), with the Hondas of Ryan Hunter-Reay and Mikhail Aleshin following. Will Power and Ed Carpenter in Chevrolets round-out the current top-five. Josef Newgarden and Conor Daly tangled on lap 30 and will not restart. Prior to the race being stopped, Carlos Munoz led 37 laps and Hinchcliffe 31.

The teams will practice earlier on race day with one new set of tires and they will be allowed to change the front wing angle. They will be allotted six sets of tires for the race.

Simon Pagenaud, whose Penske Chevrolet has scored four wins in 2016, has seen Power cut his point lead to just 20 points after Power’s June-August wins at Detroit, Road America, Toronto and last week at Pocono.

Indy cars have raced in Texas at various times since 1947 when they first ran in Arlington on a one-mile dirt track. The circuit moved to the 2-mile Texas World Speedway in 1973, but seems to have found a permanent home in Fort Worth at TMS.

Scott Dixon won here in 2015 in a race he dominated, leading 97 laps as he defeated Chip Ganassi Racing teammate Tony Kanaan by almost eight seconds.

Dixon’s race-winning speed of 191.940 mph was a track record, aided by just one caution period for debris. Penske’s Will Power had the fastest in-race lap, 216.676 mph, short of the record 222.501 turned by Buddy Rice in 2002.

This will be the fifth oval track raced by Indy Car this season with Chevy-powered teams winning three (Phoenix, Iowa and Pocono), while Honda pushed Alexander Rossi to a fuel-mileage win at the Indianapolis 500.

Chevrolet and Honda shared top-10 finishes at Texas last year with Chevy placing 1-4th and 7th.

The Texas track is unique on the Indy Car schedule, but oval-track results here and elsewhere tend to equalize any engine advantage between the two manufacturers; giving neither much of an advantage here.

Honda has shown signs at times of being Chevrolet’s equal; something Indy Car covets as they seek a more even playing field than in 2017.

We’ll call Saturday’s race a toss-up as any driver can find the winner’s circle depending on track and pit situations that might develop over the remaining 177-lap run. Honda/Chevy? Will it be Hinchcliffe, Pagenaud, Power, Aleshin? We’ll see.

NOTES:

  • Twenty-two drivers were entered, with Ed Carpenter back in his oval-track-only ride. Daly and Newgarden are out after contact during the rain-halted June beginning.
  • Andretti Autosport announced this week that hhgegg, an electronics and appliance retailer, has signed a multi-year deal to be a co-primary sponsor of Marco Andretti beginning in 2017. hhgregg got its initial exposure in Indy car racing by sponsoring Andretti at the Barber race in April.
  • Only two events, Watkins Glen and Sonoma, remain on the Verizon series calendar.
  • Five entered drivers have won previously at Texas: Castroneves (4 times), Dixon (2), Power, Tony Kanaan and Carpenter (1 each).
  • The Firestone 600 is really 600 kilometers, not 600 miles.
  • TV: NBC Sports Network, Race- 9:00 p.m. ET. (Live)

 

QUOTES:

JAMES HINCHCLIFFE: (No. 9 Arrow Schmidt Peterson Honda) Current Race Leader “I’m excited to get back to Texas to finish-off the Firestone 600. Certainly we hope that our car ends up where we are now; in the lead. But we know it’s a pretty unique situation with the restart and the parc ferme, so we will see how it plays out. I’m going to miss people reminding me (on Twitter) that I’m leading.”

 

MIKHAIL ALESHIN: (No. 7 SMP Racing Schmidt Peterson Honda) “I’m happy to finally (go back to) finish the race in Texas. Both of our cars looked good there last time with James in the lead and (our) car in third. So we just need to do the same job we’ve been doing already and we’ll be up there in the front. After our second-place finish this weekend in Pocono, we know we have the speed to do it.”

 

WILL POWER: (No.12 Verizon Team Penske Chevrolet) “Texas is one of my favorite races. The car was awesome in Pocono (last week where they won) and restarting fourth in Texas puts us in a great position to continue our momentum. Everything has been going great recently after starting off the season in such a bad place personally.”

 

SIMON PAGENAUD: (No. 22 Hewlett Packard Enterprises Penske Chevrolet) Current Series’ Point Leader “Pocono didn’t go very well (for us), but that happens. We have to move on and put it behind us. (Our car) will restart 15th, but that’s not indicative of the car we had or will have. We pitted later in the sequence than some of the other teams. There’s a lot of racing left. We don’t lose sight of the big (points) picture, but that’s not the strategy…We’ll focus on winning races.”

 

 

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