Newgarden controls proceedings at Elkhart Lake for third win

IndyCar

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Reigning IndyCar champion Josef Newgarden scored his third victory of 2018 despite race-long pressure from Ryan Hunter-Reay at the Road America circuit in Elkhart Lake.

Having beaten Penske team mate Will Power to pole position by five-hundredths of a second, Newgarden held his advantage at the start as an electrical problem ended Power’s race before it began.

Hunter-Reay took up the chase of Newgarden and bore down heavily on his rival at the beginning of each stint. But as the lead pair made all three of their pit stops on the same lap, Hunter-Reay was never able to realistically challenge his rival.

Having failed to make the cut for the Fast Six in qualifying, Scott Dixon used his trademark fuel-sipping know-how to arrive in third place. He went a lap further than his rivals in the first stint – an impressive feat around Road America’s long, 6.4-kilometre lap. That done he short-fuelled at his second stop to jump ahead of the battling Alexander Rossi, Takuma Sato and Robert Wickens.

Rossi twice faced investigated from the stewards for his elbows-out defensive moves against Wickens and Sato, but the Andretti driver was cleared both times. But he was doomed to lose a potential fourth-place finish when a suspension problem forced him into the pits.

Sato therefore took fourth ahead of Wickens and Graham Rahal. Simon Pagenaud climbed to seventh from a lowly 14th on the grid, despite losing time when he was held up in the pits. He had to pass Spencer Pigot twice, finally demoting the Carpenter driver for good with a forceful move at Canada corner. Pigot came in eighth ahead of Ed Jones and James Hinchcliffe.

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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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7 comments on “Newgarden controls proceedings at Elkhart Lake for third win”

  1. This race=yawn

  2. spec racing is so unsatisfying because the cars are all the same.

    1. spec racing is so satisfying because the cars are all the same.

    2. “spec racing is so unsatisfying because the cars are all the same”
      and the winner isn’t a foregone conclusion:)

    3. To half quote Bob Duval: “There is nothing spec about a spec car”…

  3. Kenny Schachat
    26th June 2018, 2:28

    One that struck me watching this race is that the track is wide enough to allow overtaking! What a relief. IMO, the street circuits are far too narrow and a heart crushing number or crashes and safety cars is the result.

  4. Spec racing , as some call it, means that the skill of the driver really matters .
    If you want to watch world-class drivers battle each other with the driver who handles the track the best usually winning the race then watch INDYCAR .
    If you want to see which multi-national company is willing to spend the most and thus buy a race win then watch F1.
    I watch both but, for different reasons . I am fascinated by the sophistication of the F1 cars but, have MUCH more respect for the INDYCAR teams and its drivers .
    Note that in INDYCAR the drivers have input as to the race outcome and the INDYCAR drivers are as a group honorable sportsmen . That for the most part simply cannot be said about F1 drivers .
    Usually when they win it is because they were driving the best car and in F1 there is little sportsmanship and less honor . Sad but, true . Further by ” best car ” I mean not the one that is most intelligently set -up for the specific track it is on but, rather which has the latest /most expensive technology and which has as a support team the most number of people to monitor and work on the car .
    The engineering and $ that go into F1 cars ,however, are both impressive and if that interest you -watch F1 .
    So…if you want to witness what 10 to 15 million can buy in an open-wheeled one- seater : watch F1.
    If you want to see what a driver and crew with heart can do an a race track : watch INDYCAR .

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