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They say everything’s bigger in Texas, and Saturday night’s race on the lighting-fast high banks of Texas Motor Speedway was – with apologies to the 101st Indianapolis 500 – the most compelling race of the 2017 season.
Here are the big talking points from a frantic weekend in the Lone Star state:
Will Power dominates
After a shocking start to the season, the Queenslander is right back in the fight after dominating the Texas event, winning with more authority on an oval than he’s ever done before. Power led 180 of 248 laps on Saturday night as the field crashed and crashed and crashed some more behind him.
It was a masterful drive, keeping the #12 Team Penske Chevrolet out of the craziness in the best possible way: by scarcely relinquishing the lead. He was fast, clean and made zero mistakes, something that can’t be said for a lot of his fellow competitors.
The emotion written all over Power’s face and saturating his voice in his Victory Lane interview proved how big of a win it was for him. “We’re coming,” Power said in respect of the IndyCar Series championship. And he really is, vaulting to fifth in the championship hunt.
Pack racing returns
If you’re an IndyCar fan, the prospect of pack racing is both wonderful and scary at the same time. We all thought we’d seen the last of the often insane racing where guys are wheel-to-wheel for long stretches of the race, and especially after many drivers – most notably James Hinchcliffe and Tony Kanaan – predicted that there wouldn’t be a second groove to speak of, but Saturday night was a return to the IndyCar races of old at Texas.
It was hold-onto-your-butts stuff from green to checkers under a full moon in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and I didn’t know whether to label the more audacious moves put on by the field of 22 as crazy brave or just plain crazy.
If nothing else, the race seemed to have an impact on its audience, with plenty of social media buzz, including from a few prominent NASCAR types, which will surely help the profile of the series.
Whether we see drastic changes to the aero package is something to be determined later, but as much as fans enjoy the wheel-to-wheel action, the drivers hate it. Their point that someone could be seriously hurt – or worse – is well-taken, and we’ve seen enough IndyCar fatalities recently.
My guess is there’ll be subtle changes so that we witness a race in 2018 that’s somewhere between the white-knuckle ride of 2017 and the boring 2016 events. Series officials will need to make sure they don’t mess with the package too much.
An early pit lane incident
James Hinchcliffe gunned his Honda too much leaving pit road early in the race, ploughing into Helio Castroneves, who then pinched down on Takuma Sato for an embarrassing three-way tangle at the end of pit road. It was a sign of crazy things to come. Remember the full moon I mentioned over the speedway? We certainly saw it’s full effects during the race.
The big one
It was a NASCAR-style crash on Lap 152, caused by Tony Kanaan driving up the track going into turn three, pushing James Hinchcliffe into teammate Mikhail Aleshin. It was chaos from there, Texas Motor Speedway looking more like Talladega or Daytona after a particularly bad wreck, the resulting chain reaction claiming eight cars, six of which were done for the night.
The incident was uncharacteristic of Kanaan, a guy who is the first to come to mind when you think of clean drivers, and the Brazilian took responsibility for the incident in a post-race interview and served a stop-and-hold by way of penalty.
The last crash
It was Takuma Sato, challenging for the lead, who ended the race. The Indianapolis 500 winner dropped a wheel into the grass on the front straight, cannoned up into Scott Dixon, and sent both cars hard into the outside wall. Out came the caution, and Power went on to take the chequered flag under yellow.
Tyre wear
Without much testing data on a Texas Motor Speedway surface, which had been altered since the last IndyCar race, Firestone did their best guess job in bringing a tyre to the track, but there were issues with the rubber blistering, forcing the series to institute competition cautions for mandatory tyre changes every thirty laps late in the going. It wasn’t ideal for a smooth and clean race, but it was a necessary step to ensure the safety of all the competitors.
Tristan Vautier
Two years out of an IndyCar didn’t slow the Frenchman down in the Dale Coyne Racing Honda that’s been an absolute rocket ship for Sebastien Bourdais and James Davison this year. Vautier impressed in the first half of the race, pulling off insane passes en route to proving that Dale Coyne made a good choice of driver for this weekend.
He was nothing if not spectacular, but he ended up in the wall late in the race – yet one more torn-up DCR race car in a season that’s been chock-full of them.
Attrition
Just nine of the 22 cars who took the green flag were on the track to take the chequers behind Will Power. Only six of those were on the lead lap. There’ve been clumsy races in recent memory – Scott Sharp won a crash-filled race in Japan almost by default in 2003 – but I honestly can’t remember an IndyCar race with as much carnage as we saw on Saturday night.
Gabby Chaves
Two weeks after impressing at the Indianapolis 500 for rookie team Harding Racing, Chaves gave Harding a brilliant and clean run to fifth at Texas. He, Power and Graham Rahal were about the only guys out there who were problem and controversy-free all night.
A big crowd
Texas Motor Speedway officials confirmed that the crowd for Saturday night’s frantic contest was the biggest since the 2012 race. The sort of race that they witnessed will surely entice those fans back next year and hopefully convince a few more to attend.
Points race
Despite a late-race crash, Scott Dixon maintains the IndyCar Series championship points lead 13 points ahead of Team Penske’s Simon Pagenaud. Takuma Sato is one point further back, and Australia’s Will Power is in fifth, 40 markers back, but definitely within striking distance.
The next event
The IndyCar Series heads to the best natural terrain road course in North America, Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin’s Road America, in two weeks time. If there’s one road course all drivers want to conquer, it’s the 4.048-mile blast through the Wisconsin forests.
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