Would You Have Believed Me A Month Ago If I’d Told You By The Time We Left Barber…

…that Dario Franchitti would have led zero laps and failed to start inside the top 10?

…that James Hinchcliffe would be the top Andretti Autosport driver in the points (fourth)?

…that Tony Kanaan, who placed fifth in the 2011 championship, would be dead last in the standings?

…that in 12 total on-track sessions, E.J. Viso would have zero incidents of note with walls or other cars?

…that the oval-friendly Sarah Fisher Hartman Racing team would, with two days of testing and a rookie driver, finish a fighting 11th on a street course in its first race and hover mid-pack on a road course in the second?

…that despite putting many of the bigger teams to shame, SFHR’s white No. 67 car would run as the only car in the field begging for sponsorship logos to fill its empty canvas?

…that single-car team Schmidt Hamilton Racing and driver Simon Pagenaud would not only sit fifth in points, but also serve as the No. 2 Honda entry on the depth chart?

…that Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing, after securing Honda engines and a ridiculous amount of talent to run Takuma Sato, would see its driver headed to Long Beach wedged between the Lotus-powered cars of Simona de Silvestro and Katherine Legge in the championship?

…that the return of Justin Wilson and Bill Pappas to Dale Coyne Racing would go almost entirely unnoticed?

…that the initial acceleration provided by the Lotus engine has drivers using the other two engines a bit envious?

…that Panther Racing was becoming a legitimate contender for top 10s on road and street courses?

…that despite all of the efforts to increase awareness and interest, the first two broadcasts would have a ratings decrease?

…that Helio Castroneves would earn more points in the first two rounds of the 2012 season than he did through the first five races of 2011?

8 Is The Magic Number

One of my favorite rap groups, De La Soul, had it wrong. Three, as they their song on “3 Feet High And Rising” explained, isn’t the only magic number. Well, at least not at Barber.

What’s the likelihood of the three most feared drivers in open-wheel improving eight spots apiece in the same race? Will Power started ninth and finished first, Sebastien Bourdais started 17th and finished ninth and Dario Franchitti started 18th and finished 10th last weekend…

And 13 Is Now A Luck Number

Oriol Servia's presence and influence at Lotus DRR has reinvigorated the team. (Photo: Marshall Pruett)

Oriol Servia, whose Lotus DRR team credits him for uplifting and energizing their program, made even more progress than Power, Bourdais and Franchitti. The wee Spaniard motored from 26th to 13th after being the first to make a green flag pit stop, coming back from being lapped before the halfway point, picking up spots as others employed a more traditional fuel strategy and later dicing with Franchitti for position. Without the trio ahead of him garnering most of the attention, Servia’s drive would have been the highlight of the race.

The Right Man Won

With no disrespect to pole-sitter Helio Castroneves or the other seven drivers that qualified ahead of Power, there was a sense that the right man had won the race in Alabama. Power had the fastest car, was the most intense yet controlled from start to finish and his Team Penske crew played the race strategy game to perfection.

On a day where everyone seemed to have at least one seriously slow pit stop because of a rear wheel change issue, Power’s pit crew also performed flawlessly.

The field should be closer when the series returns to Barber in 2013, making a charge like Power’s harder to execute, but his ninth-to-first performance should serve as the blueprint on how to overcome a poor qualifying position at the winding road course.

Every driver expects to win, but I can’t believe that Power sat on the fifth row of the grid thinking “Yep, I’ve got this one in the bag,” which makes the result even more astounding.

(I took umbrage with Penske Racing President Tim Cindric’s post-qualifying statements that he felt Power “deserved the pole” after having his fastest lap—which would have moved him into the Firestone Fast 6—negated due to it being set on the lap Ryan Hunter-Reay’s spin and subsequent stall brought out the caution. Power could have been sent out early to post and “banker” lap to rest on, but the team held him, as many did, until late in the session. The reasoning is sound; teams want to limit the laps and heat cycles on their Firestone Reds, but Castroneves deserved the pole because he went out and earned it. You might not like the rule that took away Power’s time, but playing the waiting game comes with risks, which the RHR situation confirmed. Something tells me more teams will make a point of putting a lap in the bank early on at Long Beach next week…)

Blaze Of Glory

Sebastien Bourdais, whose engineers did a brilliant job of choosing a setup that was easy on both types of Firestones, attributed much of his “how the hell did you do that?” result to tire management.

“It’s not that I couldn’t go faster; I didn’t want to kill the tires,” he explained. “Anyone who didn’t anticipate that paid the price. On each stint, you wanted to have the fastest average, not the fastest lap.”

Which leads us to…

Marco Andretti drove like someone told him he had 90 laps left in his IndyCar career, and from there, he was determined to go out in a blaze of glory. Andretti tested and re-tested the strength of Dallara’s front wing assembly and the rear wheel guards on at least two cars, and that’s not a criticism.

One wing-to-rear-wheel-guard hit with E.J. Viso broke the right upper element on Andretti’s car, which limited his late-race charge, but there’s no denying his performance was one of the highlights of the race. Granted, he willingly burned the tires off his car to do so, but it added a stirring element to the event.

In the past, meaning from the start of his IndyCar career through the end of 2011, Andretti has struggled to maintain that edge from race to race. He’d be wise to go a bit easier on his tires, but that kind of intensity and electricity—just the stuff his father and grandfather were known for—would be a welcome addition to his toolbox.

Marco made sure you knew he was in the race, and let’s hope he keeps it up.

The Red Light Of Doom

For a variety of reason, most notably the more frequent need to stop for fresh tires, Barber didn’t end up as a fuel conservation race. That played into the hands of the teams that are still searching for answers on how to get every drop from their 18.5-gallon fuel cells, and no one was caught off guard like many were when their tanks ran dry in the final laps of the St. Pete race.

As one team principal told me, one of the issues at St. Pete was relying on the low-fuel warning light to prompt the need to refuel. With the previous Dallara chassis, teams knew that when the fuel light came on, their driver had enough go-juice to make it back to the pits. The sensor, placed in the fuel cell’s collector box, would trigger an alert when an absence of fuel was noted, and with teams having a proper understanding of just how much fuel was left in the collector at that exact moment, there were no concerns about running dry before hitting pit lane.

With the new fuel cells, which are smaller and constructed in a slightly different manner, the exact volume of the collector box is indeed different—less than last year—making the reliance on the fuel light a crapshoot.

Many teams figured it out the hard way after St. Pete: what they thought was a “pit now” light was actually an “our race is about to end” alert.