Simon Pagenaud took his second consecutive victory in IndyCar’s iRacing Challenge after two of his Penske team mates were involved in a late-race collision with a backmarker.
Will Power, who finished all of the previous IndyCar iRacing Challenge races in the top four, looked on course to finally score his first victory on the Motegi oval.He was holding the lead with 10 laps to go under fierce pressure from a third Penske driver, Scott McLaughlin. But the pair were hit by lapped McLaren SP racer Oliver Askew, triggering a spectacular crash for McLaughlin, while Power soldiered on with a damaged front wing.
He was unable to resist Pagenaud moving by for the lead, despite squeezing his team mate into the wall as he came by. Scott Dixon, who had led before dropping back due to a slow pit stop, also got by the wounded Penske. He chased Pagenaud down and made a bid for victory on the final lap, the pair touching in turn one, but had to settle for second place behind the driver who won on Michigan a week ago.
Power took the chequered flag in third place ahead of Marcus Ericsson and pole sitter Robert Wickens. Jack Harvey, who moved ahead of Wickens and Power to lead early on, came in sixth while Sage Karam climbed through the field to seventh place. Zach Veach, Santino Ferrucci and Graham Rahal completed the top 10.
Josef Newgarden made a strategic gamble to postpone his final pit stop, but was forced to sacrifice the lead and dropped to 15th at the flag behind 11th-placed Conor Daly, Takuma Sato, Kyle Busch and Felix Rosenqvist.
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@HoHum (@hohum)
18th April 2020, 22:15
Well if we are going to take this seriously and report it like a real race actually happened we might as well take it to it’s logical conclusion and let computers (using AI ) do the driving.
kpcart
18th April 2020, 22:23
@hohum, whatcon earth are you talking about?
@HoHum (@hohum)
19th April 2020, 0:34
@kpcart, Hmm, not sure whether “whatcon” is a tech pun or just a typo, I will explain ; we apparently are having races in cyberspace that purport to be real cars on a real track being piloted from afar by really real drivers, but as the whole thing is computer generated why not the drivers as well ?
kpcart
19th April 2020, 2:10
Because that won’t be entertaining. It is real racers driving in a virtual series, which means real driving skill is involved. Also you CAN watch computer generated drivers race on these Sims, but no one is interested in that, and no one will bother telecasting it. Please watch and you will find it enjoyable instead of hohumming everything.
graham228221 (@graham228221)
19th April 2020, 12:21
Well, if we are seriously not interested in something then perhaps we could go do something else with our lives instead of spending time writing snarky comments about it on the internet
Bobby (@f1bobby)
20th April 2020, 19:02
Agree with OP. I can’t fathom the appeal of watching a “virtual” race what-so-ever. It’s debasing for a website of this calibre to report on these races as if they actually matter, or mean anything at all in the world we actually live in.
Mark Thomson (@melthom)
18th April 2020, 22:47
Little boys game
bigwilk (@bigwilk)
19th April 2020, 0:23
I’m enjoying the Indycar series (and I don’t normally watch, just happen to be a McLaughlin fan).
What I’ve noticed so far is that whilst the risks of running close to another car are amplified by the latency involved in remote racing. In today’s big moment you can see from the footage that McLaughlin’s car snaps sideways without visible contact, but on the other side of the Pacific his game must’ve seen the cars colliding.
I’ve experienced this when I’ve played online myself: you can be following a car closely and they’ll suddenly spin as if you hit them (which obviously is also what happened from their point of view).
Summary: it’s cool and the simulation is very realistic until the cars get close and then it’s a bit messy.
DavidH
19th April 2020, 7:28
Any chances of not openly spoiling these results on the main page titles like this? Especially since most of these races are being put up on YouTube, it promotes an on demand rather than live viewing. I was gonna catch up with this later.
pastaman (@)
19th April 2020, 14:52
Don’t hold your breath, I’ve been asking for a couple years to hide non-F1 race result spoilers.
Sean Johnson (@belucid)
20th April 2020, 4:30
This! It really makes me stop reading Racefans.net (not their intention I’m sure) because I’m so certain there’s going to be spoiler headlines that ruin my catching up on other series’ races.
Don
19th April 2020, 14:46
Another very good virtual IndyCar race. Quite a good finish, and the fact that it has all of the drivers running rather than some kid down the block makes it really interesting. Nice job.