The first oval race of the season didn’t bring to the reigning IndyCar champion the
positive result he had been hoping for.
After a top ten finish in the first St. Petersburg round in spite of receiving a penalty for his incident with Colton Herta, Will Power had qualified in P8. His Sunday had started in a positive way, as he was able to improve his starting position and fight with Romain Grosjean.
However, Power’s No. 12 began to suffer from excessive oversteer, causing him to lose eight spots as he completely lost all pace.
Some of them were recovered with a good pit strategy during the caution issued after Takuma Sato’s crash as the Japanese driver was trying to pass the Australian, but the situation worsened.
In fact, the Team Penske driver ended up outside of the top 20, and was lapped by his teammate and race leader Josef Newgarden on Lap 90. In the final stages of the race, Power also suffered from a pit stop issue, with a tyre not well secured had him bobble off in diagonal, and was thus penalised with a drive through penalty for the mishap.
In the end, the former Texas race winner managed to move up in P16, scoring 14 points which leaves him in tenth place in the drivers’ standings.
Power believes that his Chevrolet-powered car had the potential to achieve a better result. Despite the fact he had been unable to maximise the result his car could offer in that race, the Team Penske driver is not disappointed with his race, as in his opinion external factors, such as the pit stop issue, had a strong hand in preventing him to improve his final position.
“Yeah, I think we probably could have got a top 10 out of our Verizon 5G Chevy. We didn’t do that in part because of the drive through penalty for a mistake in the pits.
“It wasn’t as bad as I thought. I expected it to be way worse than 16th. Yeah. Good regroup. Go on to Long Beach y’all,” he concluded, already thinking about Long Beach next weekend.
