Late crash makes Power’s road to victory lane smoother

Will Power won the Verizon IndyCar Series race at Texas Motor Speedway under the caution flag Friday night after Takuma Sato and Scott Dixon crashed while racing for second.

Sato, the Indianapolis 500 winner, triggered the accident with six laps to go when he ran into the infield grass and spun into Dixon taking them both out.

“Oh, my God, what a race,” Power said on the radio after taking the checkered and yellow flags after a wild 248 laps around the 1.5-mile Fort Worth oval.

Tony Kanaan finished second after falling laps from his involvement in an earlier accident. Simon Pagenaud, one of Power’s teammates, was third.

The race was red-flagged nearly 31 minutes to clean up the earlier incident that involved nine cars.

James Hinchcliffe got loose after making contact with Kanaan, who appeared to move up the track into him. That put Hinchcliffe in the middle of three-wide and he made contact with his with Schmidt Peterson Motorsports teammate Mikhail Aleshin.

IndyCar penalized Kanaan for avoidable contact.

The next race for the series is June 25 at Road America in Elkhart Lake, where Power is the defending winner.

NASCAR Xfinity Series: Ryan Blaney was splashed with beer, accepted some handshakes and even gave a fist bump in a raucous victory lane celebration in Long Pond, Pa.

But with his car number nowhere on the leader board, the blossoming NASCAR Cup driver had to lift an ear on his headset to learn his result.

“How’d I do? It was fun. I tried not to mess up too bad,” Blaney said to his Fox TV crew.

Looking for a new spin on the standard telecast, Fox used eight active NASCAR Cup drivers to provide insight — from the studio to the booth to the pits — during Saturday’s Xfinity Series race at Pocono Raceway.

They didn’t have to worry about learning any new names at the finish: Cup regular Brad Keselowski held off the field of mostly developmental drivers to win the Xfinity race.

Formula One: Lewis Hamilton won the pole position at the Canadian Grand Prix for the third year in a row in Montreal.