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Guerrieri Wins Indy Lights Freedom 100
- Updated: May 25, 2012
Speedway, IN – Esteban Guerrieri scored his second Firestone Indy Lights season win here Saturday, beating Carlos Munoz by 0.0352 sec. to win the Firestone Freedom 100, 40-lap sprint at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Guerrieri started last in the 18-car field after an engine change and avoided a five-car crash in turn two on the fourth lap to notch the fourth-straight Freedom 100 win for Sam Schmidt Motorsports.
The victory propelled Guerrieri into the series points lead by 14 points over third-place finisher Tristan Vautier.
“It was one of those weekends that I trusted I was going to finish well even though I qualified bad (11th, resulting in a precautionary engine change),” said the first Argentinian to win an event at IMS. “I’m overjoyed – from first to last.”
A red flag for a five-car incident on lap four slowed the winner’s march to the front, but by lap 23 he had secured second behind Victor Carbone and then the freight train fight for the lead was on as Guerrieri, Munoz, Vautier and Victor Carbone joined several other cars in a battle for top-ten spots.
“My engineer, Tim Neff, told me to be patient, that everything would happen on the last five laps,” said the now five-time career winner.
Guerrieri took the lead for good on lap 38, as Munoz snatched second in a daring high-low move around Vautier in turn one.
Neff was partly correct when Jorge Goncalvez car hit the SAFER Barrier in turn two one lap later, bringing out the final caution and securing Guerrieri’s win over Munoz as the race finished under the caution flag for the fourth time in ten races.
“I’m really happy in my first oval race to finish second. We were overtaking all the time for second, third, fourth,” said Munoz. “I knew the race was in the last laps, but he beat me to the win.”
The lap four crash involving five drivers, including Emerson Newton-John, resulted in a twelve minute red flag to clear the track in turn two. “It was just a gaggle of cars doing pretty ridiculous things. Two of them got together, but I was close to getting out of it, but the thing broke loose,” said Newton-John, the nephew of singer and actress Olivia Newton-John who is in town to be the Grand Marshal of Saturday’s 500 parade. She was also the honorary starter for today’s race.
Sebastian Saavedra finished fifth. He will race in the Indianapolis 500 on Sunday, the only driver performing double duty in the 100 and 500 this year.
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.”