Herrington Captures 1st Indy Lights Win At Chicago 100

Pole sitter Wade Cunningham led the most laps Saturday in the Chicago 100 Indy Lights race at the Chicago land Speedway, but Daniel Herrington took the lead on lap 42 and held off a charge by James Davison to score his first series’ win and the first for Bryan Herta Autosport.
Herrington, who raced all night in a lead pack numbering up to 10 cars, drafted to the front in the first turn on a lap 41 restart and took the lead for good on the next circuit. “It was quite eventful. We were in a pack of 10-15 cars and everyone had their own ideas about where there’s room to race. I was happy to survive the first 20 laps,” said Herrington who claimed this to be one of the tightest races he’s ever been in. “From lap one I knew we could do it. Our car was really working well up high, so we slowly picked people off. Finally on that last restart I got a big run on my teammate (Davison) and Wade Cunningham and made it three wide around 3 and 4. I had a ton of help from James in the last 20 laps to bring home our first win.”

J. R. Hildebrand finished fifth and clinched his first Light’s championship, running a defensive race in the process. ” My strategy after the final caution was not to crash. I was really hanging on and trying to be opportunistic. It was really tough to get by guys,” said the Indianapolis resident who started thirteenth. “I came into this year with Andretti Green Racing knowing I had every opportunity to make this happen. We worked our way through the field and got to the front. But when they’re four wide there’s no place to go.”

A major crash on lap 32 involved Pippa Mann, Anna Beatriz and Mike Potekhen. Though no one was injured, the resulting caution bunched the field and allowed Herrington to make his final run to the front.

The winner averaged 138.490, edging Davison by 0.0613 of a second. There were two cautions, slowing the field for 14 laps.

Lights Notes:
? Lights Series Champion J. R. Hildebrand reported that there is some interest from his Light’s owner Michael Andretti in putting him in an Indy car sometime in the future. Decisions on what the team will do with Danica Patrick and just how the management shakeup at AGR will affect the 2010 team makeup will have much to do with Hildebrand’s future there and in the ICS.

? This was Brandon Wagner’s first pole in the Indy Lights series and he did it without Kingdom Racing’s co-owner Davey Hamilton, who missed the run. Hamilton, an eleven-time starter in the Indy 500, was on his way from the airport when Wagner gave the team their first series’ pole. Wagner is a former USAC National Midget Series pilot who recently attended Purdue University.
? While Brandon Wegner grabbed the pole for the Chicago 100 Indy Lights race at 189.954 mph, third-place starter Wade Cunningham turned a practice lap at 192.174 mph, a surprising 2.7 mph quicker than he qualified.

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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