The first round of the major overseas “formula” championship was held March 29 on the track of St. Petersburg. The Australian driver Will Power scored victory in this race, while the Russian pilot Mikhail Aleshin became the best rookie. IndyCar presenter on the Russian Viasat Sport channel and one of Dragtimes.ru journalists Sergey Bednaruk tells about the season-opening IndyCar race.
This IndyCar season features quite a lot of pilots claiming for the title. However, before the beginning of the championship the majority of experts agreed that the main season’s front-runner is the Australian driver Will Power. 33-year old pilot from the famous Penske team is the three-time vice champion of the IndyCar Series. In 2013 he messed up the first half of the season but was just unstoppable in its end clinching victories in the last two races. Power proved he is in form during the collective pre-season tests held at Barber by topping the time sheets.
However, Power qualified fourth for the first race of the 2014 season held in the streets of St. Petersburg, named after the Russian city resting on the banks of Neva-river. Then again the qualifying was held in unfavourable weather conditions — due to heavy showers and storm alert the start of qualifying session was postponed for several hours, finally setting off into the drying track. Apart from that, yellow and red flags interfered with the race many times turning it into a lottery.
The winning ticket in the qualifying session went to the ex-Formula 1 pilot Takuma Sato, who scored one IndyCar victory at the city track of Long Beach last year, giving him the fourth pole of his career. But this time again, like in all three previous cases, he was not able to turn his first starting position into victory.
Sato, driving for the team of the legendary A.J. Foyt, won the start and was steadily heading the peloton for the first few laps. Behind him were the 2012 champion Ryan Hunter-Reay from the team of another formerly famous driver Michael Andretti and the Brazilian veteran Tony Kanaan, who lost one position to the American driver right from the start. Quite soon the winner of the last year’s Indy 500 race who has joined Ganassi, one of the strongest teams of the series, lost third position as well — in the first corner Kanaan, nicknamed the “big nose”, was overtaken by Power.
Soon Power was the first among leaders to make a pit stop which actually sealed the fate of the race. The Australian driver switched soft tyres to hard ones and after the stop he had a lot of open space in front of him. After the first pit stops performed by other leaders, the pilot from Penske team was already taking the second position behind Sato who was still leading at that time.
But while the Japanese driver was warming up the cold tyres, Power took advantage of the situation and overtook Takuma without any difficulties. After that the Australian could find no equals — he was extremely good in the car wearing hard tyres. Even his teammate Hélio Castroneves, also competing for Penske, could not remove Will from this position though he managed to break through to second place from the ninth starting position due to the right choice of strategy.
The only nailbiter for the Power’s fans was the restart after the first series of yellow flags (surprisingly, the safety car appeared on the city track for the first time only after 78 laps of the race with no incidents before that!). When entering the main straight line, the Australian pilot started slowing down the rest of the peloton (it’s a famous technique in American races used to overtake the competitors with the help of sprint reaction time which helps to stay in the lead) which caused chaos in the middle of the peloton and a crash between Jack Hawksworth, who was having an excellent debut race, and Marco Andretti. Power’s actions were studied by the judges but they did not find anything illegal in them so the pilot escaped any punishment.
As a result, Power drove steadily to the victory celebrating his third win in a row — curiously enough, he became the second pilot in the centenary history of the leading American “formula” championship who managed to add the victory scored in the beginning of the new season to two victories achieved in the last two races of the previous season. The Australian, who had his 19th career win, was accompanied by Ryan Hunter-Reay and Hélio Castroneves on the podium. The Brazilian driver missed an attack performed by the American during the second restart and was third to cross the finish line.
The Penske team has chosen an excellent strategy for its pilots and began this new IndyCar season with double podium. Meanwhile, its major rivals from the Ganassi team were not able to provide any serious competition to the drivers from Roger Penske’s team in St. Petersburg. The defending champion Scott Dixon has never been in the lead in the course of the race and finished fourth, while his teammate Tony Kanaan, who had been in the first row of the starting lineup, was sixth passing pole-sitter Takuma Sato, who took the seventh place. Simon Pagenaud, who was third in the overall standings last year, cut in between two red race cars of Chip Ganassi — he was able to fight his way to top five from the 14th starting position.
Aleshin had a moment of hesitation on the start (no wonder as it was the first rolling start for the driver from Moscow) falling back to the 20th position. But after that he had a steady and faultless debut race and was able to get to the 12th position taking advantage of hitches and failures of his competitors and outperforming other rookies of the 2014 IndyCar season. That was a decent debut!
By the way, Aleshin was able to leave behind such titled pilots as four-time Champ Car winner Sébastien Bourdais and Juan Pablo Montoya with Champ Car, Indy 500, Formula 1 and NASCAR victories on his account. The return of the Columbian pilot to the “formula” races after a pause was not successful but the famous racing driver might still show his worth in the course of the season.
17 more races are still to come for the IndyCar pilots. The next round will be held this Sunday, April 13 on the city course of Long Beach which used to host Formula 1 Grand Prix. It will be broadcast on the Viasat Sport channel — live stream from California will start at 00:30 a.m. Moscow time.