IndyCar: Despite being annihilated, Team Penske secure rare top result

By Asher Fair | Jun 25, 2019

FORT WORTH, TEXAS - JUNE 07: Will Power of Australia, driver of the #12 Verizon Team Penske Chevrolet (Photo by Brian Lawdermilk/Getty Images) /

While Team Penske were singlehandedly annihilated by Alexander Rossi at Road America, their result was one of their best results in the last two IndyCar seasons.

Team Penske have been responsible for earning Chevrolet each and every one of their last 22 victories going back to the end of the 2016 IndyCar season.

Among these 22 victories, which they have earned over the course of the last 45 races, are six victories that they earned in the 17-race 2018 season, the first season of the new universal aero kit (UAK18) era, and five victories that they have earned through the first 10 races of the 17-race 2019 season.

So the fact that a 28.4391-second defeat to a Honda driver at a track where they had earned two of the last three victories was actually by far and away one of their best results of the last two years may seem ludicrous to even suggest.

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But it isn’t.

Despite this annihilation that Team Penske endured at the hands of Andretti Autosport’s Alexander Rossi in the REV Group Grand Prix at Road America, the team still ended up with arguably one of their best two results over the last two seasons.

You wouldn’t have known it simply by looking at the shell-shocked faces of Team Penske teammates Josef Newgarden, the leader of the championship standings, and Will Power after this embarrassing beatdown, but that is exactly what happened.

Last season, Honda won 11 races while Chevrolet, specifically Team Penske, won the other six. But the Honda teams and drivers were even more dominant than this statistic illustrates.

In only two of Team Penske’s six victories last season did more than one Chevrolet driver finish in the top five, and in only three of them did more than one Chevrolet driver finish in the top six.

In only one race did two Chevrolet drivers finish in the top three, and while Power won this race, the 102nd running of the Indianapolis 500 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, it was Ed Carpenter Racing’s Ed Carpenter, not one of Power’s teammates, who also finished in the top three for Chevrolet with his second place finish.

The start of this season looked similar in terms of the battle between Honda and Chevrolet. In only three of the season’s first nine races did more than one Chevrolet driver manage to finish in the top five, yet Chevrolet drivers won more than half of these nine races with five victories.

But the REV Group Grand Prix at Road America resulted in something extremely rare for Team Penske.

They had two of their drivers finish on the podium.

Power finished in second place while Newgarden finished in third, a result that the team had not recorded with any of their drivers since the race at Road America back in the 2017 season when Newgarden finished in second ahead of Helio Castroneves in third.

Team Penske did enter this race with the double podium finish that they earned in the 2019 season opener on the streets of St. Petersburg, Florida, as Newgarden won this race while Power finished in third place, and a 1-3 finish is undoubtedly better than a 2-3 finish.

But even with their 11 victories since the UAK18 era began at the start of last season, they had only managed to pull off any kind of double podium finish once during this span. It took a 28.4391-second beatdown by Newgarden’s chief championship rival for them to double that total over the last two seasons and for them to record their first result of this kind without actually winning a race in two full years.

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As ironic as it sounds, one of the best results recorded over the last two seasons by IndyCar‘s top team came in a race that featured a Honda driver and championship contender recording what is by far the largest margin of victory in an IndyCar race since 2009. Add this to the already lengthy list of reasons why IndyCar is the best and most competitive racing series in the world.