IRL Sonoma 2014 - Recap

Sonoma, Aug 24th. With only the double appointment at Fontana left in the calendar, the rush to the championship gets fiery.
Will Power, starting from the pole, has a real opportunity to weaken Castrovenes (who starts in P6) dreams of glory.
However, the windy road course of Sonoma is famous for the ability to shuffle driver's ambitions and results.

The green lights are on and it takes only a bunch of seconds to witness the first episode of the race. At the top of the hill there's a pile up and Castroneves, at that point in the middle of the pack, gets involved and needs to pit right away.
Power leads now with even more advantage on the Brazilian. Everything goes smooth for about 30 laps, where Power keeps the lead after the first round of pit stop, but then Huertas goes wide and a caution is called.
Lap 36, we get to the green and after only half of a lap there's another contact between Saavedra and Bourdais and another yellow comes out. This time Power stops and when he gets back he's in the middle of the group, the green is deployed and, at the same hairpin that caused the previous yellow, he spins.
Conway is in the lead now, followed by Kanaan. Power is second last while Castroneves is 18th.

After lap 60 the last session of pit stops is already on the go and Rahal gets in first position. Conway, Kanaan and Dixon follow.
Kanaan stops for the last time, while Dixon is getting very close to the back of Conway.
Three laps to go and Rahal can't stretch the fuel anymore. It's time for a very painful pit stop that means giving up the leadership.
Dixon sees the leader entering the pit lane and takes the chance, all he needs is to get a good exit from the last hairpin before the finish line and to push to pass Conway right in from of him right now. Everything goes as planned for Scott that closes the second turn of the track in first position.
Conway is probably being told to cruise to the end and he finds himself in third position, not able to reply to Hunter-Reay's attack.
The last lap sees the duo Dixon Hunter-Reay confortably getting to the finish line. The same can't be said for Conway that runs out of fuel at the very end of the lap, giving away the third place to Pagenaud and closing his race at walking speed in 14th position.

For the Championship, Power closes in P10 and Castroneves in P18. Nothing has been decided yet, given the double points yet to be assigned in Fontana, but something tells me that Castroneves would happily trade his position at -51 pts for the Power's one.
Stay tuned!