Saturday’s Grand Prix of Indianapolis will forever be remembered as the first IndyCar race on the (mostly) infield road course at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Thankfully, what we saw the IndyCar field battle on for 82 laps on a gorgeous spring day in the American heartland bore little resemblance to the boring track that’s hosted Formula One, sports cars, MotoGP and Indy Lights over the years.
During the offseason, after IndyCar announced this race, they spent millions of dollars improving the track, listening to everything – or, at least, a lot of things – the drivers said following a test on the circuit’s old configuration. The result? One of the fastest road courses that the series will race at, with great passing zones, a couple of monster straights (one being the front straight of the oval, which the cars drive in the opposite direction for the road course) and plenty of wonderful viewing locations for the fans.
Pleasingly, there were many fans, packing the infield sections of the road course, and some of the more optimal grandstand viewing areas around the oval. I must admit that the race was better received than I thought it would be, thanks to the solid work IMS did in turning a tedious racetrack into a very exciting track – an incredible transformation.
The crowds should return next year, because the on-track product was dramatic, right from the get-go, when the standing start turned the front straight into something resembling the set of a Hollywood disaster movie. Pole-sitter Sebastian Saavedra went nowhere off the start, and though the majority of the field managed to get around and through, Carlos Munoz and Russian Mikhail Aleshin weren’t so lucky, their races over in spectacular fashion before they’d managed to get halfway down Indianapolis’ front straight.
When the race restarted, Hunter-Reay, who had gone into the lead in the seconds before the start line accident, was passed by impressive rookie Jack Hawksworth, and for a while it was a cakewalk, the Bryan Herta Autosport driver amassing a great lead, looking dominant at time.
Ultimately, poor pit strategy, a slightly slow last stop late and a missed radio call for him to pit was Hawksworth’s undoing. With such a deep field, it doesn’t take much to let a race win slip through a driver’s fingers. It was a shame, for Hawksworth’s #98 was clearly the fastest car out there.
One man’s misfortune is another man’s luck, and eventually it was Frenchman Simon Pagenaud who benefitted from Hawksworth’s missteps, eventually driving to victory lane for a historic win, but only after getting past American Ryan Hunter-Reay (who was saving fuel in an effort to finish) and Spain’s Oriol Servia (who wasn’t, instead gambling on a yellow, and ultimately requiring a late-race splash of fuel) to take the lead.
The problem lay in how Pagenaud was running his fuel strategy: it was very similar to Servia, but, he managed to last a little longer, surely crossing the yard of bricks at Indy’s start-finish line on fumes, with Helio Castroneves hot on his tail. The popular Brazilian, who celebrated his birthday on Saturday, had stopped for fuel some laps before, had new tires, and was eating into Pagenaud’s lead, narrowing the gap from 7 seconds to less than 3 in only a handful of laps.
Another few laps and the man we love to call Spider Man might’ve celebrated a win by scaling the front-straight fence. Alas, it was not meant to be. Helio, a three-time Indianapolis 500 champion, finished third, unable to get around a fading Hunter-Reay (on a similar fuel strategy to the winner) late, which helped Pagenaud’s chances of crossing first.
Pagenaud joins a rare club of drivers who have won inaugural events at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway: Ray Harroun (first Indianapolis 500 in 1911), Michael Schumacher (first Formula One Grand Prix winner in 2000), Valentino Rossi (first MotoGP winner in 2008) and the duo of Sebastien Bourdais and Alex Popow, who won the inaugural Brickyard GP for Grand-Am Rolex Series sports cars in 2012.
Bourdais finished fourth on Saturday for KV Racing Technology. Australia’s Ryan Briscoe finished in sixth spot (his best run of the year), one spot behind his Ganassi team-mate Charlie Kimball. Both were elevated in the running order by a group of cars needing fuel late.
Unusually, the Target-sponsored Ganassi entries of cars of Tony Kanaan and New Zealander Scott Dixon weren’t finished in tenth and fifteenth respectively. It wasn’t a good day for the Ganassi’s flagship squad. Indeed, Dixon’s most notable moment came during a duel with Power, and an ill-advised move that sent him spinning into the gravel traps.
Early pacesetter Hawksworth managed seventh, one ahead of Power, who had an uncharacteristically quiet race, aside from his run-in with Dixon. The third of the Penske trio, Juan Pablo Montoya, came home a lap down in sixteenth. It’s taken the ex-Formula One and NASCAR driver some time to get up to speed with modern-day IndyCar racing.
Alarmingly, Canadian James Hinchcliffe pulled off the track in the closing stages of the race, and was last seen on a stretcher being taken to the infield care centre. It was later made known that Hinchcliffe had been hit in the head by a piece of flying debris. He was diagnosed with a concussion, and will be re-evaluated in coming days before he is given permission to drive.
Despite the popular Hinchcliffe’s injury, and the opening crash, the inaugural Grand Prix of Indianapolis should be called a success. A pretty good crowd of more than twenty-one thousand fans filed through the gates, and surely would have gone home happy. Already, IndyCar officials have announced that the race will return in 2015. This year’s event is a good building block.
Opening practice for the 98th Indianapolis 500 begins tomorrow.
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