Alex Palou, fourth in Wisconsin on Will Power’s big day

Australian Will Power won this Sunday in Wisconsin to win another IndyCar race two years later.

The test was completely dominated by the Penske team with American Josef Newgarden and New Zealander Scott McLaughlin completing the podium and leaving Alex Palou (Chip Ganassi) in fourth place.

It was a triumph of his strategy to achieve his second victory at this Wisconsin circuit and the fortieth of his entire career. For Penske, they put three cars on the podium, something they haven’t achieved since the Sonoma GP in 2017.

“I have a very fast car but I have to thank the guys, it was a great strategy. It was very special, it was very difficult in the preseason, it was very stressful last season. “I am very happy, and it is well deserved by the entire team,” Power said as he got out of the car.

It wasn’t the best race for Alex Palou and he showed it at the end: “We lacked a little more speed to catch the first three.. “It was a bit disappointing to ride alone for most of the race,” commented the Spanish driver.

Power takes a giant step on the leaderboard and fully enters the fight for the championship with the two ‘Chip Ganassi’s of Scott Dixon and Alex Palou after their victory in Wisconsin.

The start of the race is consistent with what was experienced in the previous classification, when the rain caused several incidents on the track. There was no water at the start but it only took one corner to see the first three on the grid sliding their cars around the track.

Lundqvist, Herta and Armstrong lost their pole positions and the race changed forever. In that chaos, the most shocking image was the camera on the McLaren of the Mexican ‘Pato’ O’Ward, who lost visibility and managed to avoid the danger on the grass.

Three yellow flags were shown in the first eight laps and McLaughlin took the lead., but in the first eight very close by only four seconds, the eighth position belongs to Palou. The Spanish driver took the lead on lap 18 after several drivers went through the pits.

The Penskes of McLaughlin and Newgarden dominated and occupied the first two positions midway through the race, with the five-hundred-mile winner setting fast laps and putting his teammate in trouble.

Already in lane 32, Palou took the lead again, delaying his visit to the mechanics as long as possible. to ride very fast and try to gain a tenth of a second that would put him in a good position for the final attack, but he came out behind the Penskes.

Penske dominance

Newgarden, despite several scares while driving on green and risking losing control of his car, was able to lead the race less than twenty laps before the checkered flag. Because of this, he forgot about the fatal accident he had on Saturday when he crashed into the wall.

Will Power knows how to coexist in this context and maintain a chance of victory until the end, occupying the third position for most of the laps. And Colton Herta joined the party, knowing how to recover after the first misfortune and reach the last ten laps leading Wisconsin to earn a place in the top ten.

The passages in the pits of Newgarden and McLaughlin were a spectacle trying the ‘overcuts’, and with Power in the fight, a good day for Team Penske was over. The Australian only needed to remain error-free to win a race again after two years without doing so.

‘Pato’ O’Ward’s Arrow McLaren finished in eighth position, three places back from the start of the race, but he regretted being involved in an accident again: “I just wish it was a clean and incident-free start. I’m just trying to survive each beginning and end in the middle.”