From 3rd place, title within reach
The winds might be swirling around Helio Castroneves, but the IndyCar driver is keeping a steady hand on the wheel.
With one race left in the 17-event IndyCar Series season, Sunday’s Grand Prix of Sonoma, the 42-year-old Brazilian sits third in the standings, 22 points adrift of Team Penske teammate Josef Newgarden of Tennessee and 19 behind Australian Scott Dixon of Chip Ganassi Racing. Castroneves can almost taste his first series win in 17 years.
“Sure, I’m confident of my chances,” he said in a recent interview. “I have to be. Or else I wouldn’t be here. I trust myself; I trust my team. I’ve just got to keep going.”
No one could blame Castroneves for being a bit distracted recently. He spent much of the last week worried about his home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. — which initially was projected to be in the path of Hurricane Irma.
He also has spent months dealing with the rumors that this is his final year racing IndyCars for Team Penske and that he could be piloting a sports car for the Roger Penske organization next year. Castroneves refuses, at least outwardly, to be put off by such talk.
“I’m looking to get this championship,” he said, “and I’m not looking beyond that. … If you start thinking about the future, that’s where it starts being a distraction.”
Castroneves likes to talk about being focused on the task at hand, which, coming into this season, was getting a victory of any kind — he hadn’t won since the second round of the Detroit Grand Prix in June 2014. He came tantalizingly close with his third runner-up finish at the Indy 500 in May, before breaking the drought by winning the Iowa Corn 300 in early July.
“Finally everything came together,” he said then. “I remember this feeling (of winning) from before . ... That’s a feeling that nobody can take away from you. And that’s what motivates me to come back and do what I just did.”
Now his focus is on winning the series championship.
“We’ve just got to keep bringing what we’ve been doing the whole season,” he said. “We’re not here at this position by luck. We’re here because we perform.”
Castroneves’ performances this season have been fairly consistent, with 15 top-10 finishes in 16 starts. That one non-top-10 — a 20th-place finish at Forth Worth, Texas, in early June — dropped him to fourth in the standings after he had taken the series lead in Indianapolis.
Castroneves, the driver they call “Spider-Man” for his predilection for scaling the grandstand-lining debris fences after every victory, has climbed back into contention. And he’ll be racing on a track where he has had some success: one win (2008) and two runner-up finishes (’07, ’11) in 12 races at Sonoma Raceway. He’s hoping the vibe at Sonoma will give him the series title after four times finishing runner-up (in ’02, ’08, ’13 and ’14).
“We definitely have a good chance heading into Sonoma and I feel really good about our setup there,” he said after finishing fourth at Watkins Glen in New York on Sunday. “We’ll be ready to go for it and finish strong.”