A Drenched Scorecard and a Sunny Preview

Hey there Internet! It's Guido here with another Scoring Indy update. This week, we look back at a rainy weekend in Louisiana, and we look forward to another race weekend coming up with the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach. Let's get to it!


Indy Grand Prix of Louisiana Scorecard

Here are the scores from NOLA:

Finish	Driver	Grid	Led	Completed	A.R.P.	Race Score
1	Hinchcliffe	16	15	47	8.83	87.26
2	Castroneves	4	1	47	6.57	61.02
3	Jakes	22	0	47	12.98	73.64
4	de Silvestro	18	0	47	11.43	67.46
5	Montoya	1	31	47	2.60	75.33
6	Kanaan	3	0	47	11.74	40.63
7	Power	2	0	47	3.70	47.64
8	Rahal	11	0	47	7.72	51.77
9	Newgarden	12	0	47	9.91	47.34
10	Filippi	9	0	47	9.66	40.75
11	Dixon	15	0	47	15.26	38.53
12	Munoz	14	0	47	12.17	38.65
13	Andretti	10	0	47	14.94	26.48
14	Kimball	21	0	47	17.00	36.11
15	Chaves	17	0	46	18.00	26.12
16	Huertas	24	0	46	17.70	33.30
17	Coletti	20	0	44	16.05	26.65
18	Karam	19	0	44	19.61	18.03
19	Hunter-Reay	7	0	43	7.65	15.13
20	Pagenaud	5	0	43	4.91	13.42
21	Bordais	6	0	43	6.65	9.81
22	Sato	13	0	39	17.92	1.95
23	Dracone	23	0	23	22.39	4.55
24	Hawksworth	8	0	19	12.95	-0.83

Observations

Here are the quick hits from last weekend:

- Rain racing is weird. Let's just get that out of the way up front. First of all, you get lots of yellows. (In the case of last week's race, you get LOTS of yellows...) Second, you often get timed racing. This results in weird numbers of laps, like the 47 completed by the leaders at NOLA. This can give us slightly odd numbers in our Race Scores, but they still serve the purpose of comparing drivers, so that's what we'll do:

-  The first driver that I want to talk about this week is James Hinchcliffe. Hinch managed to get off the schnide at NOLA, stopping earlier than the race leaders, and riding out the string of cautions to victory. This is completely in character from Hinchcliffe, who tends to be a boom or bust sort of driver. I find him to be engaging and charismatic. He's the sort of driver that's good for the sport, and I'm glad to see him pull this one off.

- Now let's talk about some drivers who didn't have such great days. I want to preface this by saying that I want to like AJ Foyt Racing. I live in Wisconsin, home of the primary sponsor of both cars: ABC Supply. Also, can we talk about how amazing it is that a company sponsors two full-season entries? Hats off to ABC. Anyway, I just can't help but be wary of this year's lineup of Jack Hawksworth & Takuma Sato. Just look at their performances in Louisiana. Race scores of 1.95 and -0.83 hardly impress. And, while Hawksworth was ok in St. Petersburg, Sato ran well initially, but got shuffled back in the field. Long Beach is where Sato picked up his lone Verizon IndyCar Series win, but he was taken out last year by contact early on. But, we're not quite to previewing yet...

- Finally, we come to this week's edition of Rahal Watch. Graham managed to keep himself interesting again, running well, with an Average Running Position of 7.72. He finished better than he qualified, and he had one of the eight best Race Scores, which managed to score him points in the Race Score World Championship, so let's get to it!

RSWC Update

Here is the updated table from my little pet project, the RSWC:

Driver	STP	NOLA	Total
Montoya	8	8	18
Power	10	2	12
Hinchcliffe		10	10
Castroneves	4	4	8
Kanaan	6		6
Jakes		6	6
de Silvestro		5	5
Hawksworth	5		5
Rahal		3	3
Filippi	3		3
Pagenaud	2		2
Bourdais	1		1
Newgarden		1	1

- I'll keep tracking performance race-by-race here. That way, we'll be able to evaluate performance across the wide variety of tracks that the IndyCar crew visit this year. This will allow us to see if last week's rain-racing jamboree at NOLA is an outlier, or if the likes of "Buckshot" Jakes and James Hinchcliffe keep scoring points.

- It's worth noting that even with the ran, each Penske to finish a race over these two events, has scored points in that event.

Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach Preview

Her's what happened in 2014 at "America's Monaco" 

Finish	Driver	Grid	Led	Completed	A.R.P.	Race Score
1	Conway	17	3	80	9.64	78.59
2	Power	14	0	80	7.38	73.37
3	Munoz	11	0	80	8.30	64.78
4	Montoya	16	0	80	10.71	65.63
5	Pagenaud	6	0	80	9.75	49.64
6	Aleshin	20	0	80	14.86	59.62
7	Servia	12	0	80	11.35	50.22
8	Andretti	8	0	80	9.78	43.80
9	Saavedra	22	3	80	15.44	54.24
10	Huertas	21	0	80	12.93	52.28
11	Castroneves	9	0	80	10.49	35.53
12	Dixon	7	22	80	8.53	41.74
13	Rahal	23	0	79	15.00	43.13
14	Bourdais	3	0	77	13.22	14.18
15	Hawksworth	5	0	77	9.87	18.80
16	Wison	10	0	64	11.34	19.31
17	Briscoe	18	0	60	20.35	15.20
18	Kanaan	13	0	55	14.38	13.30
19	Newgarden	4	1	55	4.49	12.03
20	Hunter-Reay	1	51	55	1.20	24.19
21	Hinchcliffe	2	0	55	3.15	6.20
22	Sato	15	0	55	17.04	2.86
23	Kimball	19	0	41	12.88	6.74

We're starting to run out of time for this week, so here's last year's race in short:

- Hunter-Reay crashed.

- Newgardern got a good run wiped out.

- Graham Rahal continued to just show me enough to keep my interest.

- And, Mike Conway, Destroyer of Worlds, got the W.

So, for this year:

- Look for Montoya to show up big at the track where he first got on track in '14.

- Look for at least a couple contenders to get taken out by contact.

- Look for me to continue to find a way to talk about Graham Rahal.

- And, look for at least one unexpected face on the podium.

Stay Tuned

I have been known to share the occasional opinion on Twitter. Here's one from last week:

As a reminder, at Long Beach '14 Saavedra started P22 kept it clean and finished P9. Then sat on the pole at the Indy GP. #JustSaying
— Dom Guido (@ScoringIndy) April 14, 2015

I'm not saying that's an endorsement, I'm just saying I did say something about an unexpected face...

See you next Friday!!

-- Guido