Power Wins IndyCar Championship
{fshare id=5474}
FONTANA, Calif. — Will Power finally overcame his IndyCar championship demons.
The 33-year-old driver of Toowoomba, Australia, had finished second in the point standings three times in the past four years but delivered a special moment Saturday night in the MAVTV 500 at Auto Club Speedway.
Power finished ninth in the season-ending race as Team Penske teammate Helio Castroneves settled for 14th place after being penalized for crossing a line coming to pit road on his final stop.
The white line in the corners is to keep drivers from straying into the path of others still on the track. Castroneves was on pit road in Turn 3 but drifted up in Turn 4 before turning down toward pit road.
“I was crying over the line,” Power said. “I can’t believe I’m the champion. That’s 15 years of hard work.”
Team Penske won its first IndyCar title since 2006 and its 13th overall in the sport.
Tony Kanaan won the race, his first for Ganassi Racing since replacing Dario Franchitti, the driver
who twice denied Power the championship. Kanaan became the 11th different driver to win this season, matching the record set twice in CART. It also gave Chip Ganassi’s team three wins in the season’s final four races.
Kanaan even confirmed that his wife, Lauren, is pregnant. She is due in January.
After qualifying poorly, starting 21st among 22 cars, Power and strategist Tim Cindric decided to go conservative with the race approach. Power made no move to advance his position in the early laps, and he was briefly last in the field.
Slowly and surely, he started his march, picking off a car here, another there. After the second pit stop at Lap 70, he was 10th and starting to see the level he needed.
Meanwhile, Simon Pagenaud effectively lost his chance to steal the title from Team Penske early on. The most points the Schmidt Peterson Hamilton Motorsports driver could attain was 648 and that’s if he scored maximum race-day points. That meant Power only needed to finish in the top 19.
Pagenaud didn’t help his chances by falling a lap off the pace with an early pit stop under green on Lap 22, and he nearly crashed leaving the pits as he did in Wednesday’s test.
Pagenaud, who fell all the way to fifth in the standings with a 20th-place finish, was trying to win his first IndyCar Series championship. He won an American Le Mans Series sports car title in 2010 and continued to show why he’s the top member of IndyCar’s free agent class.
Pagenaud said he’d decide where he’ll race next season in the next couple of weeks, although it’s expected he’ll join Andretti Autosport.
“I don’t have an answer for you guys tonight,” Pagenaud said. “After I crashed on Wednesday night, we rebuilt the car. Everybody checked everything, but it never fit just as good. What it is, I have no idea.”
The race went on without Pagenaud’s teammate, rookie Mikhail Aleshin, who was hospitalized at Loma Linda University Medical Center with an assortment of injuries suffered in Friday night’s crash during the final practice.
Aleshin was in stable condition Saturday evening with a broken clavicle, fractured ribs, a concussion and a chest injury that was vague in its description. IndyCar did confirm, however, that Aleshin had a procedure on his chest.
Aleshin, a 27-year-old Moscow native, is expected to remain hospitalized for the next five to seven days. His car was withdrawn from the race.
