IndyCar: Top 5 strangest races since 2010

#5 – 2010 Honda Indy Edmonton (continued)

This race is even stranger for Team Penske fans, at least the ramifications of it. There are two stances that they can take.

The first stance is that IndyCar robbed Castroneves of a victory. That is a simple enough stance to take, and it is the more common stance of these two stances among not only Team Penske fans but all IndyCar fans. The second stance, however, is a lot more complicated.

Will Power ended up losing the championship by five points to Dario Franchitti. Team Penske fans can argue that had Helio Castroneves not “blocked” Power, at least by IndyCar’s standards in this particular instance, Power would have won the race with Castroneves in second place, Dixon in third and Franchitti in fourth. Power would have outscored Franchitti by 18 points using this scenario.

Instead, Power finished in second place behind Dixon and Franchitti finished in third, so Power gained only five points on Franchitti, 13 points fewer than he would have gained without Castroneves’s “block” and five points fewer than the point total that would have made him the 2010 IndyCar champion.

That said, once Power crashed out of the season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway as the points leader, Franchitti did somewhat ease up en route to an eighth place finish to secure himself the 2010 championship, which was the third championship of his IndyCar career.

But even had Franchitti not eased up in this race, he was not guaranteed to win the championship. Had the first scenario described above taken place in the 2010 Honda Indy Edmonton, he still would have had to finish in the top three as opposed to the top 10 in the season finale to win the championship.