It’s now a two-man race for the title for the IndyCar Series championship heading into Sunday’s Detroit Grand Prix on Belle Isle.
There’s Scott Dixon, the 2003 series title-holder and reigning Indianapolis 500 champion, and Helio Castroneves, the two-time 500-Mile Race winner who is seeking his first series crown.
Castroneves is coming off Sunday’s victory at the Peak Antifreeze & Motor Oil Indy Grand Prix of Sonoma County by more than five seconds over teammate Ryan Briscoe.
Castroneves is now 43 points behind Dixon with two races remaining.
“I think our approach is the same: We go for broke,” said Tim Cindric, president of Penske Performance Inc., who watched Castroneves lead a field-high 51 laps in Sonoma.
“That is the only thing that is going to get us where we need to be.”
The Belle Isle circuit has been fruitful for Castroneves before—winning for the first time in North America in 2000 and winning the pole last year.
Given the circumstances of the midweek fire on a stretch of Interstate 80 in Wyoming, which damaged the primary race cars of Castroneves and Briscoe, the victory was a reward for the crews as much as the driver.
“In my perspective, it’s a great and special week for us,” Castroneves said.
“It’s like all the hard work paid off. Unexpected hard work. Well, we proved it once when we had the (2006) flood in the shop. We proved it another time when we had the fire on the hauler. So just to prove that those guys, they keep these cars in fantastic shape, and for the drivers to not even notice. I didn’t notice, actually. For me, it was a great car.”
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