Juan Pablo Montoya was slowest of the Team Penske drivers in qualifying (that’s a relative term), but was top of the Captain’s crew on race day as the 39-year-old captured his first road/street course win since his comeback last season, after a tight duel with teammate and polesitter Will Power.

Power, who had dominated the Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg, suffered a poor final pit stop when it appeared his rear jack wasn’t released, and he emerged 3.2 seconds behind the No. 2 car. The reigning champion whittled that gap down to nothing in the closing stint, but on lap 100 of the 110 laps, he brushed his front-wing endplate on Montoya’s left-rear at Turn 10, sending parts flying away.

After adapting to his car’s altered handling around the 1.8-mile course, Power again closed in on Montoya, but a bad break in backmarkers with five laps to go put JPM too far out of reach, and the 1999 CART Indy car champion crossed the line one second ahead of the 2014 champ.

“It was a good day. I was pretty good on black tires,” said Montoya who clocked his 13th win and his first non-oval win since mid-1999! “I think that was the key. The tires were not falling off and right there at the end I was just running slow to look after them. When I needed to push, I could push. Everybody with Verizon and Team Penske did an amazing job, Chevy as well. This aero kit is amazing to drive.”

On Power’s late pass attempt for the lead, the Colombian said: “I saw him make the move, but he was way too far and I wasn’t going to give him the position. If he was beside me, I would have said, ‘OK, go ahead.’ When I got to the turn-in point, he wasn’t even close. It is a shame we touched, but it’s all good, it’s racing.”

Explained Power: “He was very strong on the front straight and my exits weren’t very good [off the final turn]. So Turn 10 was really my only chance.  I thought maybe I would catch him off guard there.  You don’t expect someone to pass there, so, yeah, I gave it a shot. It was tight there, no doubt. I was surprised at how aggressively he turned, but he wanted to win the race and so did I.”

Tony Kanaan, drove a superb race to take third ahead of the other two Penske drivers, Helio Castroneves and Simon Pagenaud. Kanaan matched the fastest laps turned by Power at the end to keep the No. 10 Ganassi car out of reach of Castroneves, who had to recover from a calamitous restart where he went from third to sixth in just two corners.

Said Kanaan: “Chip told me to bring the NTT Data car back in one piece, he didn’t want to see a scratch apart from the marbles.  We tried to stay out of trouble. The Penske guys were definitely tough today. On that last stint there, we had to save a little bit more fuel, but we’ll take third.”

Pagenaud’s fifth place was largely the result of being so far from the pit exit compared with his teammates, and then clouting the back of Charlie Kimball’s Ganassi entry.

In a race where, as the cynics predicted, there were countless yellow-flag periods to clear debris from splintered aero kit pieces, Sebastien Bourdais chose caution over valor on one of the restarts, where he lost five places in one lap, but this was the wise decision of a veteran who had the pace to make it back up. The KVSH Racing driver finished sixth, four seconds behind former sports car teammate, Pagenaud.

“Initially, it felt like we had something special going,” said Bourdais. “I got TK and the car had good pace. Then I made a couple of mistakes and a restart didn’t go my way. After that Sato hit us and we lost three positions. It was one of those races where you controlled the damage, but you don’t feel you have achieved what you were capable of.

“The pace was good when we got clear air, but it definitely is hard to follow other cars and get a run on them.”  

Ryan Hunter-Reay was first of the Hondas home in seventh, after a torrid race in which the Andretti Autosport driver ran wide at Turn 1 on the opening lap, and then seemed to always be in the firing line whenever there were wingplates and debris flying through the air. His race was one of perseverance by a champion.

But it was the team that took eighth and 13th that should have earned Honda a podium on a weekend where HPD’s cars looked a tenth or two from Pratt & Miller’s, and more than that from the Penske-Chevys. Both Takuma Sato and Jack Hawksworth needed their nosewings replacing, necessitating long stops, and Hawksworth’s alternate strategy was only going to work if there were yellows in the final stint. Amazingly – given the race’s form up to then – there weren’t and he was forced to pit 15 laps from home.

In his first race for CFH Racing, Luca Filippi held off Andretti Autosport’s Marco Andretti to claim ninth. The other son of an Indy car champ, Graham Rahal, looked mighty fast but served a drive-through penalty for thumping the limping Kimball into a spin.

Filippi’s CFH teammate, Josef Newgarden, took 12th after an adventure-filled day. The Tennessee native said: “I think we had a car that was able to challenge for a top five finish, but we were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Right when Charlie [Kimball] got spun out in Turn 10 it was a bottleneck and I got into the back of [Sebastien] Bourdais and damaged the front wing. It sort of hurt us; we struggled to fight with everyone after that. We lost a lot of pace, then did what we could to finish as strong as possible.”

If Power thought he had problems with the rear end at pit stop time, he should have seen Chip Ganassi Racing’s three-time champion Scott Dixon. The Kiwi had a rear-jack failure, necessitating a lengthy stops involving manual jacks, and also had a long stop to clear debris from the car.

Simona De Silvestro’s IndyCar return did not go well, as she shoved James Jakes into the tire wall at the hairpin on lap 47, and then had to drive two laps with a disintegrating front wing as the yellows came out. She was also hit by teammate Carlos Munoz who lost his front-wing endplate as a result.

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