Helio Wins: Championship Fight Draws Even Closer
By Andrew Cutler
September 19 2010
Two weeks ago Helio Castroneves won at Kentucky because an early race mistake forced him onto a different pit sequence than the rest of the field: On Sunday afternoon (Japan time) the Brazilian claimed his third victory of 2010 because his car was the class of the field - period.
Helio lead over 3/4 of the 200 laps, and his only real challenger was his teammate, Ryan Briscoe. After performing his customary post-victory 'Spiderman' antics (climbing the catch-fench & doing a number of fist-pumps), an exausted but exuberant Castroneves thanked Team Penske for a superbly dialed-in car: "It's always a tough race here," he continued. "I trusted my car and trusted my team, which did a great job in the pits. Team Penske is about execution and they gave me a fantastic car. Every time I wanted to go for it, the car was responding."
As for his other teammate, championship points leader Will Power dropped back from his starting position (third) early on, and lost a few more spots when he 'anticipated' a yellow flag (due to Alex Llloyd's car suddenly losing power) that didn't get thrown for another couple of laps. He spent the rest of the race trying to catch up to his title rival, Dario Franchitti. Power would finish third, which is his best-ever oval result, but Franchitti would place in second, which narrowed the Aussie's points lead to twelve as the series heads to the season finale in two weeks at Homestead-Miami.
His second place result at Motegi was enough to secure Dario the inaugural AJ Foyt trophy as the season's best oval track racer: Power had claimed the Mario Andretti throphy for his road/street prowess earlier in the year.
Here are the complete race results:http://www.indycar.com:8080/var/assets/IndyJapan300boxscore.pdf
As mentioned above, the 2010 IndyCar Series season will draw to a close in two weeks, on Saturday, October 2nd at 7pm ET/midnight Sunday GMT at Homstead-Miami Speedway.