Penske drivers admit they couldn’t race Rahal in shootout

Simultaneous engine failures for James Hinchcliffe’s Schmidt Peterson Motorsports-Honda and Spencer Pigot’s Ed Carpenter Racing-Chevrolet with four laps to go prompted Race Control to red flag the second of the Detroit races, rather than finish the race under a full-course caution.

With the lapped car of Ryan Hunter-Reay shuffled to the back, theoretically this gave second and third place runners, Penske-Chevrolet drivers Newgarden and Power, a chance to fight for the win having run six and 13 seconds behind the Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing-Honda respectively, until the stoppage period. Newgarden had fresher tires than Rahal, having committed to a three-stop strategy, and Power had twice as much push-to-pass boost available as the leader, and three times as much as Newgarden.

However, when the field was restarted with two laps to go, Newgarden appeared to be struggling to get his tires up to temperature as Rahal pulled away, while Power was in no mood to try a risky move on a teammate.

Said Newgarden: “We had marbles all over the tires, and in that type of situation, there’s not much you can do, unfortunately. You’d love to say, ‘Oh I’m gonna go race this guy and try and beat him,’ and I would have done that if he had messed up. If he had made a mistake I’d have tried to capitalize.

“But if everyone stays steady, I’m just trying to hold onto the racecar. When it’s your weekend, it’s your weekend and Rahal did a great job, him and his whole team, so congrats to those guys, and a good bounce-back by our team.”

Asked if he was concerned about Power behind him, Newgarden replied: “All of us were trying to make it to the end there, and you had so much pick-up and marbles on the tires, you’re just sliding all over the place. You can’t really do much with anybody. Will couldn’t do much with me, I couldn’t do much with Rahal.”

Power added: “There was better grip than I thought. Normally you’re sliding all over the place [in those circumstances].

“But I wasn’t close enough out of Turn 2, and it was my teammate ahead so I definitely wasn’t going to take a big risk on the last two laps.

“So I’m really happy, got to thank Chevy for giving us such a good package to run up the front.”

Comparing Saturday’s misfortune that saw him limping slowly along trying to save fuel and finishing 18^th, with Sunday’s third-place finish, Power commented: “Yesterday it was just unlucky when the yellow came. We kinda went halfway between a two-stop and a three-stop, and went longer than the three-stop guys but I was saving so much fuel [to make the two-stop strategy work] so I was just too slow.

“But [today], that was all we could get out of our strategy, the guys did a great job, and so I’m very happy with third.”