2. Alexander Rossi put on another impressive performance and it only was good enough for second but his fuel conservation was breathtaking. He went a lap down within the final 25 laps and came home second. And he is calm. He was preaching patience on the first stint of the race and he practiced it on the final stint. Could Rossi have won it had he gone all out? We will never know but after races where he wasn't on the podium when he should have been he finally had a night where he ended up on the podium when it looked like it wouldn't be in the cards. On top of it, it took a few points out of the gap in the championship, three to be exact.
3. Scott Dixon did all he could not to lose ground to Rossi and for the first 45% of this race it appeared Dixon was going to run away with it but this race got mixed up with lapped traffic playing a crucial role and one pit stop under caution. Dixon responded late to Power's decision to sprint and he finished 2.8 seconds behind Power but 1.4 seconds behind Rossi. He only lost three points in his championship lead and he leads by 26 points but we know how crucial points are. Three points can be the championship decider. It wasn't a bad night. It was a night where the big dogs went at it and none of them had a misstep. This is what it is like when everyone is at the top of their game.
4. Simon Pagenaud went from racy to out of sorts after one lap getting out of the groove to back to racy when it came time for the late decision to go for it and make a fourth pit stop. This has been a frustratingly good year for Pagenaud. This is only his third top five finish of the season and yet he has eight consecutive top ten finishes and 12 top ten finishes in 15 races. It just hasn't been good enough.
5. Zach Veach has been marvelous since the middle of July. If there had been qualifying he might have started in the top five and he might have won this thing. Everyone seemed impressed with him this weekend and fifth seems right for him. He was competitive and making moves in this one.
6. Spencer Pigot was a bit of a surprise but he got the wave around and was one of the guys who were all out from the final restart with 66 laps to go. It is good to see him have a good night and another good short oval result.
7. Josef Newgarden was of two minds on the final stint. He was conserving and then he bailed out and at that point he had lost the front of the field and lost a handful of positions. He wasn't really ever a factor in this one. He seemed to have a similar race to Pagenaud where one stint was good but the next was off and he lost ground after getting out of the groove. He is still in the championship fight but he needs to do some work at Portland.
8. If Will Power was the first to commit to going all out then Ed Jones was second and he was up to third in the blink of an eye after that final restart. Unfortunately, Jones stopped early and he couldn't get back into the top five. An eighth place finish is respectable but it could have been much better.
9. Takuma Sato stretched it and did 66 laps on his final stint but still finished a lap down in ninth. It wasn't a great night for Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing but the team turned it into a double top ten night.
10. And now onto the second RLLR entry. Graham Rahal finished tenth on a night when he didn't really have it and this concludes a frustrating year for RLLR on ovals. Yes, Sato finished third at Iowa but this team was lost everywhere and when the team got results it was usually after overcoming poor qualifying runs. Ovals are the major area RLLR have to improve on in 2019.
11. Pietro Fittipaldi finally got off the bottom and he finished 11th and completed 247 laps. It was nice to see him get a full race under his belt and not have any adversity go against him. He was a bit off strategy for most of this one and it didn't look like he was going to finish inside the top fifteen but it worked out.
12. Ed Carpenter didn't have it and finished 12th while Tony Kanaan finished 13th and for the first time since 2000 Tony Kanaan will not have a top five finish on an oval in a season. Part of this fact is impressive and the other part isn't. Kanaan ran from 2003 to 2010 when the schedule was majority ovals and for many of those years it was a large majority but the first few years of that streak were CART when ovals weren't a more equal portion compared to road and street courses and then the last seven seasons where ovals have been hard to come by and on top of all that Kanaan has done it with top teams such as Andretti and Ganassi and middle of the road teams such as Mo Nunn Racing and KV Racing. This has been a rough year for Kanaan and it has been kind of difficult to watch.
13. Marco Andretti was in the top ten for most of the night and then the second caution comes out only a handful of laps after his pit stop, trapping him a lap down and he never had a chance to recover.
14. Quickly through the rest of the field: James Hinchcliffe tried to save on that final stint but it backfired. Matheus Leist was non-existent. I don't think he was mentioned once. Same goes for Max Chilton. Gabby Chaves started out great and was up to 11th early but something went wrong after that first pit stop and he wasn't mentioned again. Charlie Kimball brushed the wall exiting turn four.
15. Ryan Hunter-Reay had a fuel pressure issue kill a top five result and it seems every year when we get to summer he has three retirements that are brutal when he is at the front and they usually happen in consecutive weeks. He had four consecutive top five finishes and since the calendar switched to July he has had four finishes outside the top fifteen in five races. When it hits the fan for him it hits hard. And then there was Sébastien Bourdais who slapped the wall exiting turn two on the opening lap. Hunter-Reay still has a shot at the title but I think he and Bourdais are two drivers who expected better from this season. Neither have been bad but both have more things go against them than for them.
16. Around lap 100, I was going to write about how disappointed I was in this race. I was going to write that while this was a great crowd for an IndyCar race it was down from last year and it would be down next year because you cannot have a race where it is single-file and where the leader catches the tail end of the field and then not be able to make a pass and in turn allow everyone else to close up and then not be able to make passes as well.
I was going to write that IndyCar needs to cut the road/street course boost levels and oval lost levels and realize the boost levels should correspond to the aero package, not the track type. The boost levels should be low downforce track and high downforce track. I was going to write these cars need more power into the corners and really force the drivers to lift and have drivers sliding in and stepping on the brakes when they get in too hot and allow another car to go by.
I was going to write that we should not be hearing from Firestone midway through the race that the tires look good after 60 lap stints and that the tires should look like garbage. I was going to write lap time fall off needs to be greater because you can't have everyone comfortably running between 170-173 MPH for 50 laps.
Then what happened was the same thing that happened at Phoenix and Texas. The sun went down, the track got cooler, lapped cars got in the way and the race got shaken up. Just like Texas a caution fell on the cusp of being able to make it on fuel and this had some drivers going and some drivers conserving.
Going back to Rossi's words in the opening laps, patience. It is hard. Fans are never patient. They want it now. They want 30 passes in the first ten laps. They want a lead change on lap two, four, six and 12. People aren't cerebral. They can't let the game play out. They can't wait. They could be doing other shit. Don't make them want to do other shit.
But with patience came an interesting race and passing did develop. It wasn't slingshot after slingshot move and that will never be the case at a 1.25-mile oval but it happened.
I still believe there should be changes to the boost level and tires should fall off even more but sometimes a race needs patience and it needs an hour after sunset to get good. Another thing against Gateway was it rained, then a practice was held then it rained again and then a practice was held and then it rained over night and the next time IndyCar was on track was the race. If IndyCar had three sessions to lay rubber down and that rubber was still there for the race the start might have been better. Sometimes these environmental factors go against you but fans don't care and even when the series deserves a break for something entirely out of its control IndyCar doesn't get it.
Part of this race benefitted from the mix up of strategy but you will not always get that caution. IndyCar needs to work on the oval aero package a bit. The leader should never be as stuck as Dixon was in lapped traffic where the same six cars can run on his nose and nobody passes anybody.
NASCAR has been reactionary when it comes to package changes and IndyCar hasn't. IndyCar has held firm but after seven seasons with the boost levels the way they are and the low downforce and high downforce aero packages I want to see something different tried even if it is only for one race. I want to see at least the higher boost level tried on the short ovals and but I really want to try higher boost level with the low downforce aero package at Gateway next year. Let's try it once and see what happens. Plan a test or two for it so all the teams are prepared. Let's try something different.
17. Quick championship breakdown before Portland: Regardless of what happens next week Scott Dixon and Alexander Rossi will be alive for the title. Will Power is 68 points back and unless he has a disastrous day he will likely at least be alive for the Astor Cup at Sonoma but it could be a Hail Mary situation. The same kind of goes for Josef Newgarden. Newgarden really needs to win at Portland as he is 78 points back. Finally, Ryan Hunter-Reay is the final driver mathematically championship eligible but he trails by 147 points and you will likely have to be within 94 points heading into Sonoma to have a shot at the title. Hunter-Reay needs to score 53 points at Portland. He is in a must-win situation and it is a must-win situation just to get into another must-win situation. Five are left standing but four are on sturdy ground.
