They will be the favorites to win this weekend as Team Penske has won eight of the 12 series races contested on the 14-turn, 2.439-mile IMS circuit. Newgarden’s Turn 4 incident cost him a chance to take the series points lead, but his teammates gained significant ground.
#FINISH LINE RACE GEAR DRIVERS#
Aside from O’Ward, the non-Penske drivers in the field combined to lead 25 laps last weekend. Over the past seven races at Iowa Speedway, Roger Penske’s cars have led 1,617 of the 1,950 laps (82.9 percent), with Newgarden leading 920 of them after adding 356 laps over the weekend. O’Ward led the final 66 laps of Sunday’s race to thwart some of Team Penske’s dominating statistics. Scott McLaughlin is seventh, 86 points out of the lead. Realistically, six drivers are solidly in the mix for the Astor Challenge Cup, with Marcus Ericsson leading Power by eight points, Newgarden and Scott Dixon by 34 points and reigning series champion Alex Palou by 44 points. He heads to this weekend’s Gallagher Grand Prix on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course just 36 points out of the series lead with five races remaining. The victory also brought O’Ward back into championship contention. O’Ward has won on a superspeedway (Texas Motor Speedway in 2021), a street circuit (The Raceway at Belle Isle Park in Detroit in 2021), a permanent road course (Barber Motorsports Park in 2022) and now a short oval. O’Ward went on to win the weekend’s 300-lap second race, beating Power to the finish line by 4.276 seconds for his fourth career series victory. Until Newgarden’s car spun into the Turn 4 wall on Lap 236 of 300, the Hy-Vee Salute to Farmers 300 presented by Google was racing toward another 1-2-3 finish led by Newgarden, Pato O’Ward and Will Power in that order. As rare as a doubleheader sweep would have been for Team Penske’s Josef Newgarden – there have only been two such feats in this sport since 1981 - the Hy-Vee INDYCAR Race Weekend at Iowa Speedway nearly had something that’s never happened in this sport: Duplicate podiums.
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