Dan Wheldon was caught up in a lap 41 incident to finish 17th in round 12 of the IRL IndyCar Series at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course. The race began under wet conditions and finished just under the two hour time limit for the event.
The turning point of the race for Wheldon came on lap 41 when contact between Justin Wilson and Mario Dominguez started a pileup that left Wheldon stopped and stalled in the grass. Wheldon’s team would make a total of six stops on the day, keeping him in the championship hunt by making up four positions (21st to 17th) after the incident.
"A tough day for the Target team today." Wheldon said. "We were obviously on another strategy and we were doing alright and minding our own business. On the restart, Wilson and Dominguez got together and I got hit from behind. There was really nowhere to go so it’s unfortunate. We came into the pits a few more times to top off and make sure we could run the remaining laps and get the most points available to us."
Scott Dixon maintained his IndyCar Series championship lead with a 58 point advantage (455 to 397) over Helio Castroneves, with Wheldon now a single marker back of Tony Kanaan in fourth with 364 points. Up next for the Target team is the Rexall Edmonton Indy at Edmonton City Centre Airport on Saturday, July 26th (5:00 p.m. EDT, ESPN).
2007 Mid-Ohio race winner and recent Indianapolis 500 champion Scott Dixon sits atop the Series' driver point standings, 63 points ahead of Team Penske's Helio Castroneves. Dixon, last year's IndyCar Series Championship runner-up, has secured four race wins and five poles and will look to increase his lead not only over Castroneves, but also Target Chip Ganassi teammate Dan Wheldon who sits in third, and Andretti Green Racing's foursome of Tony Kanaan, Danica Patrick, Hideki Mutoh and Marco Andretti.
"As always I look forward to going to road courses during the season and more so when it is a race that we won last year," said Scott Dixon. "Mid-Ohio is a very challenging track and requires a lot of emphasis on qualifying well. I hope to improve on our qualifying from last year. We tested for a few hours just recently and I believe we found a few things. So all in all I can't wait to get back this weekend and try to defend our title."
Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course may be the great equalizer in the field of 27, as all of the drivers who moved to the IndyCar Series in 2008 have a strong road racing background. Both Enrique Bernoldi and Justin Wilson have experience competing in Formula One while Mario Dominguez, Bruno Junqueira, Oriol Servia, Will Power and Graham Rahal all participated in Champ Car. E.J. Viso competed in GP2 and Mario Moraes in the British Formula 3 championship. Look for the top five to be challenged up front by these experienced road racers during the 85-lap race.
The Honda Indy 200 at Mid-Ohio presented by Westfield Insurance is scheduled for 1:30 p.m. ET on Sunday, July 20. ABC HD will televise the race live beginning at 1:30 p.m. ET on Sunday, July 20, while XM Satellite Radio will air the race at 1:30 p.m. ET on XM Satellite Channel 145.
Justin Wilson was speaking in relaxed tones about the twists and turns his career has taken as an auto racing driver. He talked about his unsatisfying season in Formula One in 2003, and about the literal twisting and turning he does to get into his vehicle, thanks to his 6-foot-3 frame. His tone changed when the subject of Sunday's non-finish in Champ Car's season opener at the Vegas Grand Prix was broached. Wilson, of Sheffield, England, completed only 20 laps because of transmission problems. He was not the only talented driver not to get through the 68 laps as three-time defending series champion Sebastien Bourdais and touted rookies Graham Rahal and Simon Pagenaud also did not finish.
But it may have bothered Wilson a little more than the others. Three-time series champion Bourdais has made his money, and Rahal and Pagenaud are the new kids on the block. Wilson finished 11th overall in 2004 in his first season in Champ Car. He was third in 2005 and second to Bourdais last year. There is a burning desire to take the whole ball of wax this year, so Sunday's result was not cool.
"It's very difficult," said Wilson, who will race this weekend in the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach. "It actually haunts you. I woke up at 5 this morning (Monday), was writing notes on what I think we need to do better. It gets under your skin and that's part of the driver making sure you don't fail again. "Failing is quite a big part of this and you don't want to feel that too often. Once it comes down to race day, you gotta put that out of your mind and think you have just as good a chance as anyone else of being right up there at the front."
In the back of the pack is where Wilson found himself most of the time during his one season of Formula One while racing for Team Minardi. Wilson said that in F1, perhaps more than any other series, it's the teams with the bigger budgets that are always going to do better. Since Minardi did not have a big budget, its cars simply were not as fast as those whose teams did.
"Formula One is very different to most auto racing," said Wilson, 28. "All the cars are built by the teams themselves, so there is a big differences in the speed of the car. You're basically racing your teammate because he's the only one who's got the same equipment you have. "We were the back team, so we were qualifying 19th or 20th. If you qualified 19th it was a good day. If you qualified 20th, it was a bad day."
Wilson moved to Team Jaguar, which was a middle-of- the-pack team, for the last five races of the season. But he was then replaced because Jaguar was looking for a paying driver, rather than one it had to pay. So Wilson happily moved on to Champ Car in 2004. For one thing, its prestige aside, F1 simply was not the grand endeavor Wilson had envisioned.
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