MOTORSPORT: The hour of Power cometh

He might have that same feeling again, only worse, if he doesn’t become the IndyCar champion this weekend at the Fontana Speedway, also in California.

Power, 33, from Toowoomba, leads the series by 51 points, but the 500-mile (800km) Fontana race carries double points – 100, plus up to four bonus points.

Brazilian Helio Castroneves, who like Power drives for Team Penske, is the Aussie’s main rival for the title, but even if he wins the race he will need Power to finish seventh or worse.

Frenchman Simon Pagenaud, driving for the small Schmidt Peterson Motorsports, is a third contender, but at 81 points behind Power he needs to win and have lots of other things to go his way to steal the crown.

American Ryan Hunter-Reay, of Andretti Autosports and the 2012 champion, will be out of the title race once the event goes green to start the race, while New Zealand’s defending champion Scott Dixon, of Chip Ganassi Racing, will be out of the title running as soon as Power begins practice.

Power, who has raced in American open-wheelers for a decade and full-time in the IndyCar championship since 2008, and Castroneves, who has been in the US several years longer, have both come close to being the champion three times but missed out.

Castroneves, 39, at least has three victories in the Indianapolis 500 – by far the biggest race in the series - to console him. Power has won 24 times in the series, but only three times on ovals – although he feels he has conquered them now, especially after winning at the 2-mile (3.2km) Fontana at the end of last season and the Milwaukee Mile this year.

Roger “The Captain” Penske is an icon of American motorsport, having been the victorious team owner in a record 15 Indianapolis 500s and won a dozen American open-wheeler series titles (in USAC, CART and IndyCar – although none since 2006 as the Ganassi and Andretti teams have shared them.

Penske’s also now two months beyond the deadline he’d flagged to decide on whether to enter Australia’s V8 Supercars series next year, although he’s a strong chance to land a second NASCAR stock car title in three years.

Apart from Milwaukee, Power has been on the podium six other times season, including for victories on street courses at St Petersburg in Florida and Belle Isle in Detroit, Penske’s business base.

Castroneves has been inconsistent of late, finishing outside the top 10 in the past four races and dropping 79 points to Power.

Knowing that sixth place will secure the title for him at Fontana, Power said: “I don’t have to do anything exceptional.

“It’s going to come down to having a good, solid race. But we all know that anything can happen.

“It’s never over until it’s over. There are a lot of points on the table.”

Power claims that the success he’s finally had at the black art of American oval racing has given him enormous confidence.

“I had always been competitive on oval tracks and I enjoyed the racing, but to crack that win [at Fontana last October] was a confidence thing,” he said.

“Now I know I can do it and I feel as though it has become one of my strengths.

“Before it was hit and miss. Now I know I have a chance to win on every track on the schedule, and that’s what you have to have to win an IndyCar championship.”

Tim Cindric, Penske’s racing lieutenant who is Power’s race strategist [and also has done the bulk of the investigation into entering V8 Supercars], said that Fontana victory 10 months ago was “a turning point” for Power – “not just statistically but mentally”.

Power added: “It just clicked. It just got to the point where I realised, ‘Man, I could do this [win on ovals] every weekend.”

So now Power finds himself with his fourth and best chance to become IndyCar champion.

Penske’s three open-wheeler cars (the third is driven by Colombian Juan Pablo Montoya) have led 938 of 2145 laps this season – that’s 43.7 per cent – compared with the 440 of rival Ganassi’s four cars (including that of another Australian, Ryan Briscoe).

Power has led 615 laps – 255 per cent of Castroneves’ 241, while Montoya’s tally is 82.

It would be gutting for Power to miss out on the title again. More likely, surely, is that this time he will clinch it and earn elevated status within The Captain’s stable of great drivers that has included “Rocket Man” Rick Mears, the wonderful Brazilian Emerson Fittipaldi and the Unsers – Al Junior, his father, and uncle Bobby.

It also would give him the distinction of being Australia’s only IndyCar champion.

This weekend’s race is at the high-banked 1.5-mile (2.4km) Atlanta Motor Speedway in Georgia, with the following round at Richmond International Raceway in Virginia.

“Winning is all that matters to get into The Chase for us,” said Ford driver Ambrose, who is 18th in the standings – 8 points behind 16th-placed Jamie McMurray.

“We aren’t going to leave anything on the table. Our fate is in our hands and we know the challenge.

“It’s just time to go out and execute.”

Triple Cup champion Tony Stewart will return to racing at Alanta, three weeks after the sprintcar tragedy in which he struck and killed 20-year-old Kevin Ward at a dirt-track in New York State.

Investigations are continuing into that incident, in which Ward was on foot protesting at Stewart a lap after the NASCAR icon known as ‘Smoke’ had punted him out of the race, but there are no indications of criminal charges.

Stewart is winless and 26th in the Cups standings this year after missing the second half of last season with a broken leg from another sprintcar incident.

Then V8 Supercar chief Tony Cochrane claimed it was “a huge deal” and “one that all Australians should be proud of”. Cochrane claimed it had come on the back of North Americans having “embraced V8 Supercars through the SPEED [TV] network in a way that is beyond anything we could have imagined”.

“It’s an amazing feat for an Australian-born sport, or business, to have such popularity in the world’s largest motorsport market,” Cochrane said.

“Our entrance into the United States marks a new day for the series and we’re excited for Americans to experience what has made V8 Supercars so popular in many places around the world.”

Then Queensland premier Anna Bligh was on hand for the announcement in Austin, Texas, claiming it represented a new export industry for the state and would generate enormous economic and tourism benefits.

“V8 Supercars are a home-grown Queensland success story and are now set to shine in the US, the world’s number one car racing centre … it is a vote of confidence for other sports and Queensland businesses looking to expand in the US,” Bligh said.

Reports in News Corporation’s Australian newspapers proclaimed ‘V8s big as Texas’.

It was meant to be one of five or six rounds of the championship each season outside Australia and New Zealand.

One V8 Supercar meeting was run at the Circuit of the Americas, in the middle of last year.

Previewing it, a News Corp report headlined  ‘US to get its own Bathurst’ proclaimed: “The V8 Supercars could become Australia’s greatest sporting export with the ‘Bathurst of America’ set to be beamed into 80 million American homes.

In an unprecedented march on the US that could earn the V8 Supercars a grip in the world’s most lucrative sporting market, this week’s Austin 400 will reach a combined live audience of 100 million in North America.”

The American round dropped off the V8 Supercar Championship calendar this season, with the convenient excuse that the venue was required for X Games extreme sports festival instead.

It was clear – after the sums didn’t add up for either party to the contract – that a return to Austin was unlikely.

In the meantime, contrary to Anna Blight’s projected export industry, the V8 Supercar head office has since relocated from Queensland’s Gold Coast to Sydney.

American associates report that they never notice V8 Supercars on television there now.

And this week the man in Cochrane’s old seat, James Warburton, found himself having to announce the formality that the Texas contract had been terminated.

“We spent a lot of time chasing down ‘The American Dream’ … which is unfortunately a bit wasted,” Warburton told v8supercars.com.au.

“We would’ve got a twin [a second American event to share the transport costs] up … [but] agreed it was better just to terminate.”
Warburton claimed Formula One promoters in Asia had wanted the V8 Supercars as a support category as they are at Melbourne Australian Grand Prix, but that Formula One Management had stymied that.

He indicated V8 Supercars would have at least one international race on its 2016 calendar, and that it would “have to be in the right timezone for Australian [TV] viewers”.

“Now we go back into Asia and some other areas and develop the plan” Warburton said.

The farce that has been the attempt at international expansion of V8 Supercars was not of Warburton’s making.

But none of the deals for races in Shanghai, Bahrain, Abu Dhabi and now Texas have gone the distance.

As then Australian Associated Press correspondent Guy Hand wrote in mid-May 2013: “V8 Supercar international races have been like the infamous Lada Samara sold in Australia in the late 1980s. If you’re lucky, they start. They stall, they stop. Eventually, they disappear altogether.”

Tasmania’s V8 Supercar Championship round at Launceston’s Symmons Plains recently was locked in until 2019. The West Australian round at Perth’s Barbagallo Raceway probably will be renewed in the next few months.

There are the prospects of new circuits around the country – at Toowoomba in Queensland, Tailem Bend in South Australia, the Central Coast north of Sydney and Mildura. Perhaps others.

Might it not be best simply to concentrate on creating a bigger, better and broader Australian and New Zealand championship?

Applications were invited for the three RECs – handed back to V8 Supercars after last season by Lucas Dumbrell Motorsport, Tony D’Alberto Racing and Dean Fiore’s Triple F Racing – by August 1.

V8 Supercars chief executive James Warburton has told Auto Action magazine that there were bids for the RECs but that the matter had become “complicated”.

Auto Action reported that legal action by Lucas Dumbrell, who is still fielding one Holden Commodore in the series, had halted any action by the V8 Supercar board but that details of his complaint remained secret.

New Zealand’s Super Black Racing, which will field a – and probably the only – wildcard entry at this year’s Bathurst 1000 on October 12, a Ford Performance Racing-prepared Falcon, has been thought to be the most likely new full-time entrant in the sport.