Indy Pro Series Season Enters Final Stanza
Written by Allan Brewer · July 31, 2007
Alex Lloyd remains on top, but the field has been gathering momentum since end of June
Sam Schmidt Motorsports’ Alex Lloyd rode a wave of victories in the opening races of the 2007 season to a huge lead in the championship points standings toward the Firestone Firehawk Cup, but as the calendar pages flip to August his competition is heating up for a press to unseat him from the top spot in the standings.
Granted, with 111 points cushion between himself and his closest competitor (Hideki Mutoh of Panther Racing) Lloyd is unlikely to swoon sufficiently that he’ll lose the championship–especially as only fifty-three points maximum can be taken from any event weekend (including pole) with only four races remaining.
However, if bad luck (as he’s seen at Nashville and at Mid-Ohio) continues to haunt the SSM garages it’s not inconceivable that the two-race lead Alex sports now could shrink to something entirely less comfortable.
Looking ahead to the remaining races (Kentucky, Sonoma twice, and Chicagoland) it would seem the field’s best chance of overhauling the white number seven’s lead in the points chase would be a combination of mechanical and ontrack mishap that catches the leader out over some combination of those events.
A crash here, a broken suspension piece there, and suddenly a couple of back-of-the-pack finishes could upset the applecart for the Englishman.
The standard reply in racing is “You make your own luck” implying that fast qualifying puts you up front where it’s relatively safe and out of the melee that sometimes erupts in the middle to later echelons of the twenty to twenty-five car fields the Pro Series has seen this year.
In other words, Lloyd and the Schmidt team can do themselves great favor by continuing to qualify well as they have; and remaining wary of passing through the backmarkers on the way to the podium.
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Great article. I’m just getting into watching races and there is so much to learn about the sport.
This was a great race and Alex Lloyd deserves the top spots.