Simon Pagenaud beats Will Power at Mid-Ohio IndyCar race

With four races to go in the season, Pagenaud holds a 58 point lead on Power in the points standings.

Dixon returned after 45 laps to get the necessary mileage so he can change engines, but has now gone into the garage. “I feel bad for my guys because I think we had a good auto”.

Power said he was cognizant that he was going against a teammate.

“I remember two or three races back talking to Will about the points, and I told him, ‘Dude, it’s gonna flip soon here”.

“Everyone knows this, but I love Ohio”.

“Helio was coming out of the pits on the pit exchange and we were trying to go off (fuel) sequence”, Dixon said. The American opened up an eight-second lead over Pagenaud before pitting, emerging down in eighth after a slow fuel-only stop from his crew.

Bobby Rahal won two IndyCar races at Mid-Ohio and Graham finally joined him in the winner’s circle a year ago, his third victory in the series. Indy 500 pole sitter James Hinchcliffe finished right behind Rahal in fifth place at 110.6 miles per hour. “We didn’t catch either of the lucky yellows, we had to earn it”.

If there were any questions that Simon Pagenaud was feeling the pressure of the Verizon IndyCar Series title battle, the Team Penske driver answered them emphatically with an aggressive victory at today’s Honda Indy 200 at Mid-Ohio. We didn’t need to do too much on the auto, more on me this weekend. “It was my time”.

Power, who is 47 points behind Pagenaud, said the weather, indeed, made things interesting.

Power said he “slept” on the restart, giving Pagenaud the opportunity. I was quite slow. “I never lost faith and when it was time to push it was easy to put down some fast laps”. “When you have a shot, of course, you’re going to go for it”.

Erik Jones retook the lead from Ty Dillon with 16 laps to go and won the NASCAR Xfinity race Saturday night at Iowa Speedway for his third victory of the season.

All is well that ends well, but in between there was a lot of action as race favorite Scott Dixon suffered an early mishap with Helio Castroneves to effectively end his weekend.

However, Dixon indicated that Castroneves may have cut him off. There were a whopping nine cautions – that kind of number not even usually found in the Sprint Cup race at Pocono – that allowed Christopher Bell to finish 10th, though he was five laps down at one point.

The No. 22 Team Penske driver battled a pre-existing back injury and his teammate Will Power to claw out the win at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course on Sunday.

Power, who collected his fifth straight top-two finish of the season, was mad at himself for not getting a good jump on the critical restart. He surpassed Kurt Busch, the 2004 Sprint Cup champion, who had four wins as a rookie in 2000.

“It was really exciting, actually”, Newgarden said. That’s a good spot for us. Byron led a race-high 44 laps and added one more win in the No. 9 Toyota for Kyle Busch Motorsports.

Josef Newgarden qualified third in the #21 Fuzzy’s Ultra Premium/ECR Chevrolet, while Ryan Hunter-Reay was the lead Honda, qualifying fourth in the # 28 DHL entry for Andretti Autosport.