1. Simon Pagenaud did it again. While strategy played a little role this week, fortune came in the form of lapped traffic, which broke up a Penske 1-2-3, but Pagenaud positioned himself to take the lead when trouble befell the team.
Will Power dictated much of this race from the start and after the final round of pit stops Power led Scott McLaughlin with Pagenaud in third. It was looking good for the Penske trio with two seconds to Scott Dixon in fourth. In the final ten laps, the battle between teammates picked up. McLaughlin investigated taking the lead from Power and when the New Zealander made a significant move on the outside of turn three, Power had lapped traffic in the form of Oliver Askew diving in on the inside.
Askew set off the chain reaction, nudging Power up the track and Power sent McLaughlin spinning into the barrier.
Power held onto the lead but with front wing damage, Pagenaud struck and took the lead. Dixon came on through to second and put together a charge for the lead in the closing laps. Dixon's best attempt for the lead was into turn one on the start of the final lap. Pagenaud pinched him, contact was made, both cars stayed straight but Pagenaud was gone, unchallenged under the checkered flag with Dixon settling for second.
It was another race with Pagenaud stopping early in the final stint and picked up some time. He was in the top ten for most of this race. Third would have been a good finish. He was in the right place when two of his teammates were taken out. As gleeful Penske must have been for a possible 1-2-3 in the fourth event of this series, having cars in 1-2-3 allows for two mulligans though you hope neither will be necessary.
Down to the final bullet, Pagenaud hit the mark, as intended.
2. Where did Scott Dixon come from? No, really, where did he come from? The first two weeks were not the greatest for Dixon. He is not an iRacing regular. It was picked up after the birth of his third child, his son Kit, and in three weeks Dixon went from beginner to battling with the big boys.
During the second stint of this race it appeared Dixon was going to be the man to beat and drove to the lead. During the pit cycle he drop to fourth and lost a lot of ground to the three Penske drivers. It was probably fitting Dixon had a shot at victory on the final lap for how well his race had gone up until that final pit stop. Even if he had not finished second it would have been a day to be proud of with a top four finish.
3. For all his time at the front of the field Will Power has yet to score victory in this series. If this was a regular season and Power had a few podium finishes and basically been in the top five through the first four races we would be saying he has set himself up fantastically for a championship push and multiple victories are coming his way this season. There are only to rounds remaining in this series and it is hard to gauge if Power will breakthrough in one of the final two weekends or if he could be looking at another pair of top five finishes but frustration because he deserved more.
4. Marcus Ericsson was fourth and he spent almost the entire race in the top ten. Ericsson kept his nose clean and he got a top five out of it. He didn't do much stellar but after watching iRacing the last three weeks keeping it straight is more than half the battle, it is 66% of the battle. If you can do that you are going to be in the top ten.
5. Robert Wickens won pole position and finished fifth. Wickens' time at the front was short lived because he and Power had a moment exiting turn two early on and Wickens had to save the car, costing him many positions. How cruel motorsports can be where one slides backward due to actions of someone else while that person suffers no consequences. It is a pity but Wickens had another strong day and it is nothing to hang his head over.
6. Jack Harvey was another surprise today. Like Dixon, we had not seen much from Harvey in these first few races but Harvey was at the front for most of this race. The problem was he took a step back with each stint. In the first portion of the race, he was in the top three and occasionally mixing it up with Power and the leaders. After his first stop, he dropped to about five or sixth, after his second stop he was out of the picture and running seventh or eighth. Still a respectable outing but more practice will improve stamina over longer stints.
7. Sage Karam brushed the wall in qualifying and started 31st but he drove up to seventh. After two races where Karam started at the front only for incidents to sour his day this race sees him avoid all the trouble and truly drive to the front.
8. Zach Veach was in the top ten all race and was tenth. Santino Ferrucci and Graham Rahal both had strong days and rounded out the top ten.
9. Let's go over some other drivers:
Kyle Busch was 13th after spending most of the race on the tail end of the lead lap. Busch was trying to complete laps and while some drivers took different strategies or had incidents Busch climbed the order and finished solidly in the middle of the field.
Josef Newgarden stretched his fuel the longest on the final stint but he had to stop with 13 laps to go. This led to a 15th place result. Newgarden ran conservative laps to get the most distance out of his fuel but that time lost was never surmountable in the closing laps. You wonder if he stops ten laps earlier and does not have to run seven to eight-tenths slower than those behind him he could have pulled out a top ten.
A lap down and in 24th is brutal outcome for Scott McLaughlin. I do wonder if all this iRacing success inflates our expectations for when McLaughlin makes his IndyCar debut. Yes, he had a superb test at Austin and tested at Texas but his time in an actual IndyCar is slim. Simulators show only so much. He has been in the top five for every race in this iRacing series. His two oval starts have been stout. I am not sure anyone expects him to jump in and immediately be champion even for Team Penske but this is all people have to feast on and it will give the narrow-minded the wrong impression. I remain antsy for McLaughlin's first laps in an IndyCar but I worry the hoards will be angry if the results are not as glowing as seen the last few weeks.
Doubling back to Oliver Askew, I don't think that is something he would do in an actual race. It was a case of this being a simulation and a lapped car taking a risk with the only consequences being hurt feeling and not torn up race cars. Askew was at the front at the start of this race and then disappeared and that has been the case in every one of these events outside of Watkins Glen. Askew qualifies well but quickly he finds trouble and is out of the picture. I am not suggesting this is some kind of problem we will see when the IndyCar season starts but it is interesting to see the tendencies of drivers in iRacing. Some follow a consistent pattern and Askew's pattern is not flattering.
Oh, James Hinchcliffe had network connectivity issues again! And isn't Hinchcliffe's sponsor a tech company of some sorts? Not a great look.
10. This is just a side-effect of the situation but a downer in these races is the difficulty showing the pit cycles play out. Today, we had Dixon go from leading to behind the three Penske drivers and in a real race we would follow that in real time. We would watch the stops and see the Penske cars come out ahead of Dixon and note it immediately. In this arrangement it is unaddressed until five or six laps after the fact. There are limitations to this broadcast. This is being down with a skeleton crew spread around different parts of the country. Waiting to see the pit cycle play out is part of the game now but it is a change that is hard to adjust to when muscle memory has you conditioned to a rhythm.
11. It was fun to see Motegi again. I think Motegi's lack of appreciation came because it was always a race that started at midnight. Unless you stayed up late you didn't see the race and even if it was re-aired 15 hours later at 3:00 p.m. you didn't bother to watch it. It is a rare asymmetrical oval with a higher-banked turns one and two that allow for flat-out, side-by-side racing before a flatter turns three and four where cars have to lift and side-by-side racing cannot last long. It is bigger and wider than Darlington but has that feel. At is easy to clump 1.5-mile ovals into the same box but other than its length Motegi is nothing close to Homestead, Texas, Charlotte, Chicagoland, Kansas and Atlanta.
There are many hurdles in the way for a Motegi return. Unless Honda, NTT or Bridgestone wants to fund a trip for 26 IndyCar teams to go to Japan the track will not return. Roger Penske is not keen on flyaway IndyCar races. Majority of the sponsors have no business interest in Japan. Television does not want a Japanese race. It is all disappointing but it is reality. It was nice to experience it again.
12. It was great to see cars pitting entering turn three. It clear up 99% of the incidents. Thanks to Rinus VeeKay we cannot chalk this day up to one without any pit entrance problems but one spin out of 75 pit entrances is a massive improvement over last week at Michigan.
13. One caution in this one when about five cars had an accident exiting turn two on lap five. That caution happened too early for anyone to make it on two stops from there but some did use it to change up strategy. However, none of those drivers who stopped under that yellow can point to it being the main reason for their results today.
Outside of that incident there wasn't any others that really pointed to a caution being necessary. I even think the race could have gotten away with not throwing a caution for that early spin but it was at the back of the field and the leaders were coming around so it was an understandable call.
14. This was a good length in terms of the race, 113 laps or 175 miles. It was a two-stop race for everyone. We saw more tire degradation this week than Michigan. You could see drivers coming and going at the end of stints in this one.
15. Off to Austin. After two weeks of last minute announcements, we know we are going to Austin.
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