The two drivers with the best chance of winning the 2014 Verizon IndyCar Series championship know plenty about angst and longing. Team Penske’s Will Power took the series by storm in 2010, yet with three runner-up finishes over the past four seasons, the Aussie has spent far too many winters wondering what’s been missing from his arsenal.

While Power has become the most recent face of championship heartbreak, he’s a relative newcomer to the position. Within open-wheel racing, his Penske teammate Helio Castroneves has been the personification of runner-up disappointment for more than 15 years – a serial bridesmaid in Indy car competition.

His career has been defined by a constant ability to factor in championship showdowns without clearing the final hurdle. Since his Indy car debut in 1998, Helio’s amassed four second-place finishes, two third-places and five fourth-place championship performances.

He’s become the Buffalo Bills of IndyCar drivers – a perennial contender to reach the open-wheel Super Bowl – who lives to know the feeling of earning IndyCar’s equivalent of the Lombardi Trophy.

The lack of an Indy car championship is the one glaring item missing from a resume that includes three Indy 500 wins. There’s no questioning his greatness at Indianapolis; Castroneves has proven he’s more than capable of beating the Field of 33, but coming up short across the span of an entire season has also defined Helio’s career.

After finishing between second and fourth in the standings a staggering 11 times, Castroneves is faced with another runner-up scenario this weekend. At 39, he’s in the twilight of his career, starting on pole going into tonight’s 500-mile championship decider while Power is starting next to last, and is prepared for another showdown.

“I’m never giving up,” he told RACER. “Even if you have the smallest chance, you never give up. I’ve lost many championships by only a few points, and I know we can win this championship by only a few points. We only need one more point than Will, is the way I look at it. It’s special being on the same team with Will; I know he has the same car I have, and it’s a good thing for the team because probably it’s going to be one of us as the champion. This is going to be a healthy fight. Hopefully, if it’s meant to be, it will be. I’ll give 100 percent to do what I need to do, and we could also use some luck.”

As much as Helio’s record illustrates his lack of Indy car championships, it also reflects his status as one of the series’ most consistent performers.

“It’s something you always appreciate and it keeps me going,” he said. “That motivates me – winning a championship – and I want to win it as bad as anybody. If you count the times I’ve been in title contention, we still have to close the deal. I appreciate being close so many times, but I come back every year to get the job done and now I have another chance to do it.”

Castroneves is the consummate teammate – he drives for the glory of the team and sponsors assembled by Roger Penske. Racing against Power is a secondary concern, yet adds another element of intrigue – especially with Power’s struggles since last weekend at Sonoma.

Power’s mastery of the Milwaukee Mile, pole at Sonoma Raceway and dominant performance during the early stages of the race gave every indication he had moved past the comedy of errors that plagued so much of his career. The first half of Power’s 2014 must have felt like an ongoing drive-through penalty for speeding on pit lane became his go-to error, yet something seemed to change in recent weeks.

Steady finishes replaced Power’s erratic results and he appeared to be locked into Championship Mode after Milwaukee. As simple as his spin in Turn 7 at Sonoma might have been, it heralded the return of the giant question mark that has followed him since 2010. As far as the calm and cool Castroneves is concerned, that question mark is welcomed.

“That’s the unfortunate part for us at Sonoma,” he said. “If we didn’t have as bad of a race, we could have made a big improvement in the points, but when Will had his own problems…he’s had a chance to learn a lesson. He had a chance to take it easy and finish the race, but maybe that’s his pattern. He has some very good moments, and then he has some moments that are like, ‘What did you do?’ But he’s still in a very good position.”

Schmidt Peterson Motorsports’ Simon Pagenaud came into Fontana without carrying the same kind of baggage that burdens Castroneves and Power.

An IndyCar rookie as recently as 2012, Pagenaud spent one year in Champ Car in 2007 before turning his attention to sports cars, then returned to open-wheel competition in his late 20s and used all of his professional experience to bypass the usual learning curve. His blend of maturity and top-tier education while driving for Honda and Peugeot in high-tech prototypes has elevated the unheralded Schmidt Peterson Motorsports team to one of the major players in IndyCar during his brief tenure.

Pagenaud and his No. 77 Honda team turned a poor qualifying session at Sonoma into a podium finish, and without that comeback drive, the 30-year-old’s championship aspirations would have come to an end in the wine country. As Power and Castroneves worry about how the title will be settled, Pagenaud left Sonoma pleased with the fact he has one more chance to upset Penske’s plans for a championship celebration.

“Quite frankly, I’m not exactly sure how we got there,” Pagenaud said of his third-place run last Sunday. “My guys made excellent calls on strategy and this was a team result.”

The team aspect of how the 2014 championship has played out is also an interesting theme. Despite their massive advantage in funding and overall resources, Target Chip Ganassi Racing and Andretti Autosport are chasing SPM in the standings, which is a testament to how much the SPM team achieves on a fraction of the resources enjoyed by the Big 3. With SPM serving as a noteworthy wedge separating Ganassi and Andretti from Penske, you could say Schmidt and Peterson’s merry band of overachievers have already won, but Pagenaud isn’t interested in token titles.

“We go to every race knowing that if we do our best, we can win,” he added. “We don’t consider ourselves less than the big teams; we have the best engineers, the best mechanics, the best managers – you name it, and we have all of the tools. It feels good to win against the big names, but we don’t take satisfaction from doing things that maybe some people don’t expect us to do.”

Pagenaud has become a fixture in IndyCar’s championship mix and, unlike the Penske duo he’s chasing, he isn’t heading into tonight’s race questioning himself, with a monkey on his back, or personal demons to overcome.

Look for Simon to vie for championships throughout the rest of his career, and if it doesn’t happen in 2014, there’s little doubt he’ll have Penske, Ganassi and Andretti drivers in his crosshairs next year.

“What do I have to lose?” he said “I don’t have anything to lose, really. We go in with the approach to win, and if we win, we win. And if we don’t, we don’t. We need a little bit of luck, we need Will to have a bad race – I don’t wish that on him, but I’m just being honest.

“And we have a really strong car and we race well, so why not plan to be champions? One thing I know is that if you go in planning to be OK with second or third, that’s probably all you will achieve. We expect more from ourselves and so we won’t set our goal any lower. Like I said, what do we have to lose?”
​