And then there were… five, theoretically. Yup the guys who finished first, second and third in Sonoma are respectively fifth, fourth and third in the 2014 Verizon IndyCar Series points table, heading to this Saturday night’s MAVTV 500 at Auto Club Speedway, Fontana.

In reality though, reigning champion Scott Dixon is toast, as he’d need championship leader Will Power to eat a bad clam on Saturday afternoon and not make the start of the race. Even then, Dixie would need to overcome a 52-point deficit to Helio Castroneves, lead the most laps and take pole position. Frankly, he’d stand a better chance of teaching the finer points of race strategy to Bullseye, the Target dog.

Ryan Hunter-Reay’s hopes of recapturing a title he won in 2012 would also require divine intervention (although, maybe the earthquake at Sonoma last Saturday night that threw Penske people out of their hotel beds was The Man Upstairs’ warm-up act). The most number of points the Andretti Autosport driver can end the season with is 638. Power’s total will be 642 points even if he posts the first DNF.

Simon Pagenaud has a genuine shot, but it’s ridiculously long. There are 104 points available this weekend – 100 for the win, 1 for pole, 1 for leading a lap, an additional 2 for leading most laps – and Simon is 81 points behind Power currently. If the Schmidt Peterson driver fails to score any of the bonus points, he needs to win…and pray that Penske No. 12 is the first or second retirement. Or, put another way, finishing second in Fontana without bonus points wouldn’t even get him to the points total that Power holds now.

So the 2014 IndyCar title seems 99.5 percent certain to be heading to a Team Penske driver. How double points for the 500-mile races has influenced this championship was discussed here in detail last week by Robin Miller. But in simple terms, think of the Power vs. Castroneves battle this way: Helio is 51 points adrift of Will, or 25 points under the normal scoring system. That’s precisely the same deficit he carried to Fontana last year in his title battle with Dixon. And we remember how that turned out.

SIMON PAGENAUD

A win in Fontana: nothing else will do, and that has got to be a bittersweet feeling for the Schmidt Peterson Motorsports ace who has spent this season cementing his reputation as an ace. Two wins (Grand Prix of Indianapolis and the second Houston race) equals his tally from 2013, and he currently lies third in the points standings, where he finished last year. He shouldn’t think of 2014 as a year of treading water, however, but a year when he has again beaten the majority of drivers from the Big Three teams. Currently he heads the four-strong Ganassi Gang, the four-ship Andretti Armada and one of The Captain’s Crew in the points standings.

That word “currently” is important, however. While he must consider Power all but out of reach, Pagenaud is only 30 points away from Castroneves and so he could feasibly move up the rankings. Were he to win at Fontana and Helio to finish third, the Brazilian would need a couple of bonus points to prevent Pagenaud from overtaking him for runner-up spot in the title race. A second place for the SPM driver would still require Castroneves to finish top seven.

Things could swing the opposite way for Pagenaud, too, though. Hunter-Reay is just 11 points behind, Dixon 22 and Montoya 26, and all three have a better oval track record than Simon who’s yet to conquer on a left-turn-only track. But that’s just a trick of the stat books. He’s in only his fourth full season at this level, and the first of these (Champ Car in 2007) contained no ovals. Fontana will be his 17th oval race, and he did a fine job there last year, making up a lap after an early setback dropped him out of the serious running.

Simon, more than most of his rivals, gets a deep enjoyment from studying the engineering data, learning how and where to improve, and then making that happen. More importantly, he’s professed his love of ovals and what demands it puts on his driving. If he’s not an even better driver at Auto Club Speedway compared with last year, it would be a huge surprise – far more surprising than to see him in Victory Lane on Saturday night.

So, while Pagenaud has barely a hope of winning the Verizon IndyCar Series title, he’s still got a lot to fight for, both in attack and defense.

HELIO CASTRONEVES

Castroneves drove a textbook race in Fontana last year in trying to overhaul Dixon. He led 27 laps because he was aggressive in his passing, uninhibited in his chosen lines at any time of the night, willingly going low, middle or high in a three-abreast situation, and in pit stops he was on his marks. In other words, he never let the tension of the situation get to him. I said at the time that his performance reminded me of his “what the hell” approach to Chicago in 2008, his previous down-to-the-wire title fight, when he had to come from the back of the grid following a qualifying blunder and he won the race, regardless of the fact that Dixon (yeah, him again!) only needed to keep him vaguely in sight in order to clinch the crown.

That’s the kind of driving Helio needs to reproduce this weekend – not worrying where his title rival is, nor the mathematics of the moment, but just doing his utmost to maximize his chances by continually going for the front. He can control no more than that.

What Castroneves has on his side is temperament going into an event. Anyone who’s followed the cheery three-time Indy 500 winner’s fortunes over the course of his 17-year top-rank career is aware there’s no one better at putting recent disappointments behind him. Helio treats each race as a do-over – knock him down in one, and he’ll pick himself up, dust himself off and come back just as hard next time. Yes, if there’s a problem in a race, then he can get thrown out of his comfort zone and his troubles start to increase, but it’s hard to think of any front-runner on the current grid who can face mid-race adversity with complete composure so it would be unfair to criticize Castroneves in this regard. (Dario Franchitti was the last IndyCar driver who could prevent in-race troubles from escalating, and one assumes this was thanks to his early mentor Jackie Stewart’s mind management lessons.)

While it’s important for Helio to remain undistracted by points hypotheses, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t contemplate them. If Castroneves wins the race, he still needs Power to finish eighth or lower. If Helio can only get as high as second, then he’ll need to have scored all four bonus points (remember, that’s pole, leading a lap and leading the most laps) to beat Will, even if the Aussie finishes as low as 14th…and that’s assuming Will scores no bonuses himself. Most dauntingly of all for Helio is that even if Power posts the first retirement of the night, that No. 3 AAA-sponsored car will still need to finish third (or fourth but with maximum bonus points) in order for Helio to grab his first IndyCar title.

And that’s why Castroneves can’t be thinking about all these permutations. Instead, he and engineer Jonathan Diuguid must examine the data and figure out why the No. 3’s pace has been up and down on ovals in the past 12 months. Brave and bold though Helio was at Fontana last season, he didn’t have the same pace on worn tires as his victorious teammate. At Indy this year (LEFT), of course, Castroneves was brilliant and only narrowly missed out on joining the four-time winners club, yet two weeks later, Power lapped him at Texas Motor Speedway. Then at Pocono in July, Helio was a fraction off his teammates in terms of outright pace, although he did salvage second. At Iowa (BELOW), he turned the tables, and he was the Penske driver with the slight speed advantage. But at Milwaukee earlier this month, he was again lapped by the Verizon No. 12 car.

It would be wrong to take this as a form guide. An oval like Iowa, for example, is comparable to Fontana only in terms of bumps (and lack of right turns). What should concern all in the No. 3 camp is the fact that Power is just one of the 21 opponents who could throw out road blocks in Helio’s march to the front. Remember how Tony Kanaan dominated in Iowa this year. Or how strong Hunter-Reay, Sebastien Bourdais, Ed Carpenter (and again, TK) were at Fontana last year. We’re used to seeing Dixon, Marco Andretti and Montoya running at the front on any oval, to say nothing of Josef Newgarden, James Hinchcliffe, Carlos Munoz and title contender Pagenaud…

They, rather than Power, may be Castroneves’ biggest problem. Some of these drivers will be looking for their first win of the year, some will be looking to just close out the season on a high, and none of them will care too much about the championship outcome.

WILL POWER

A Castroneves supporter might reasonably argue that those aforementioned drivers could also conveniently finish behind Helio and ahead of Will Power, which is why the championship leader cannot just settle back when the green flag drops. Should Power float backward into the mêlée, surrounded by those with imperfect cars on a treacherous track, he’ll run the risk of getting put into positions he doesn’t want, maybe losing a wing endplate or, even worse, getting nudged up into the gray and therefore the wall.

Anyway, it’s unwise for a driver to “take it easy” on an oval for a long period, because when it comes time to speed up, how does he know where the limit is? How much is too much regarding entry speed? How many lanes are available? How high can he run the car into a corner so he doesn’t have to pinch the nose down too far and risk losing the tail? How high can he let it run on exit so he can wind off the steering lock as soon as possible and thus save the front tires? None of those fine lines are clear to a driver who spends a stint coming nowhere near the limit of his car.

And then there’s the psychology of the game, too. It’s easy for a driver to settle into a slower rhythm only if everyone else is doing the same. A driver who sees a pack of his rivals disappearing because they’re running at 100 percent and he’s trying to get by on 98 percent can be easily panicked. It’s important to keep up with the herd. Pocono was different because all the drivers were trying to get fuel mileage and cruising at 208mph in 214mph cars – less than riveting for the spectator and, with no driver edging near his car’s limit, there were few mistakes. Fontana won’t be like that; it’s likely to be a “tire track” although to what extent won’t become clearer until the Wednesday evening test.

If it seems we’ve drifted from the subject of Will Power on Saturday night, we haven’t. These are all things that he has learned, sometimes the hard way, over the past five seasons. What no one is foolish enough to cling to is the belief that Will “isn’t an oval driver.” It was always a dumb generalization, because as long ago as 2010, you could point to two, possibly three oval wins he lost through no fault of his own, but he agrees he’s become far better in understanding what he wants and needs from an oval setup, both in qualifying and race. His engineer Dave Faustino also admits to a learning curve roughly the same gradient as his driver’s. (Power even confessed on RACER.com that this dedication to improving on ovals has come at a cost to their street course performances.)

Whatever, Power’s new maxim of just trying to do his best at every track in every circumstance will never serve him better than this Saturday night. If the car’s fast, why waste it? As Will proved at both Milwaukee in his battle with TK and on the last corner of the last lap at Sonoma between Justin Wilson and Bourdais, he’ll hold his own and get aggressive even with the title at stake. If his teammate was within 10 points, he might be a little more circumspect but a lead of 51 points allows him some latitude.

Of course, Power needs to remember what’s at stake, as well as the size of his championship lead, so there’s no need to go barreling into the pits and risk cracking the speed limiter, for instance. And being extra careful in hitting his marks in the pit stops would be smart, too, although among the frontrunners this year, he’s been one of the best at keeping it precise in the pitbox.

In short, there are plenty of driver/car combos that could make life tough for Power at Fontana, and I’ve got a feeling this race could belong to Kanaan and Ganassi. But there’s no reason to expect any Penske driver to be at a major disadvantage to either of his teammates. Barring mechanical disaster (Fontana is tough on engines) and avoiding complacency (which Will always does), Power should finish close enough to Castroneves to bag the 2014 Verizon IndyCar Series championship.