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Ryan’s redemption: Briscoe scores first IndyCar win at Milwaukee Mile

After tumultuous early races, has the Aussie driver quieted his critics?

He stepped in to replace Sam Hornish, Jr., one of the greatest in IRL history — only to crash out of the first two races of his Team Penske career. Then he became Public Enemy No. 1 for fans of IndyCar’s top star Danica Patrick when the two collided on pit road at last week’s Indianapolis 500.

After all of his trials and tribulations so far this year, more than a few were wondering if Ryan Briscoe was just destined to be a mediocre talent since he entered the league in 2005 — and become one of Roger Penske’s rare misses on judging driver talent.

That talk has been silenced. For now, anyway.

Briscoe managed to pass Scott Dixon for the lead with 49 laps to go and then managed to keep him in his rear view mirror in the closing laps until a multi-car crash with three circuits remaining brought out the yellow to end the race.

With that, the Australian driver became the 15th different driver to win for Penske today in the ABC Supply/AJ Foyt 225 at the Milwaukee Mile. On top of that, he gave his boss his 300th career victory in auto racing.

Dixon had dominated for much of the day in his first race following his Indy 500 victory, but Briscoe managed to cut a two-second deficit in ten laps before getting by Dixon. He was forced to give up the lead when he pitted with 31 laps to go, but retook it with 18 to go when the cycle of stops ended.

Briscoe was unable to get away from Dixon due to lapped traffic and when the multi-car crash ensued ahead of him with three laps left, it certainly didn’t help matters.

Marco Andretti and Ed Carpenter were battling for position between Turns 1 and 2, when Andretti washed up into Carpenter and sent both of them spinning into the wall. A second or two later, the lapped car of Vitor Meira was sent flying as he ran over Andretti’s No. 26 machine. Hideki Mutoh also was involved in the incident; all came out of it in one piece.

Briscoe narrowly dodged Meira to escape the crash, while the Brazilian stayed right-side up throughout the short flight and landed hard in front of Andretti on the backstretch. Later on, Briscoe surmised that he had missed Meira by “about a foot,” and said that the crash was much more harrowing than trying to hold back the Indy champion Dixon:

“I knew how to keep Dixon behind me, and I was like, you know, let’s just bring this home. And then all of a sudden, I’m seeing smoke in front of me and I’m seeing cars flying. I’m like, ‘This is not what I need.’

“I’m just [hitting] the brakes, locked up, trying to avoid this thinking, ‘This is not good,’ and then ‘Wheewww,’ and huge relief and that was it. It was close, though. I think I would have been in tears if I would have been hit.”

Instead, celebration ensued and Penske was vindicated for a late-race call that made a big difference. He decided to give his driver some fresh tires instead of ordering just fuel-only when Briscoe’s No. 6 Team Penske Dallara made its final stop of the day.

Problems with the left-rear wheel forced the stop to be longer than expected, but the new Firestone Firehawks enabled Briscoe to cycle through the pit stops and come out back as the leader. Said Penske:

“I said, ‘Let’s roll the dice, come in now, get fresh tires on.’ So we had five or six or maybe eight laps on fresh tires, as you could see, so that gave us the chance to get ahead of those guys when they came in and pitted.”

Dixon attempted to cut into Briscoe’s lead by using the low line to counter his Aussie rival’s high groove in the turns, but afterwards, he admitted that it may have been lapped traffic that could have stopped Briscoe instead of him catching and passing him:

“You know, the cars were both quick. I think it was going to…come down to how you call the traffic and check what the traffic was going to do.

“Yeah, if we were in front of him at that point, you know, I think we could have maybe won the race, but three laps more, who knows what would have happened with the traffic?”

Two-time Milwaukee winner Tony Kanaan came into today’s race trying to make a three-peat at the Mile. Instead, he had to settle for third place.

But considering his troubles last weekend at the Indy 500, the 2004 IndyCar champion was pleased with the result, especially in the big picture of the title hunt:

“When you don’t have a car to win, you have to understand what you have in your hands, and that’s what we had today. It’s good momentum for Team 7-Eleven and for the championship. To think championship, you have to finish in the top three. The way these guys are going, it’s how it has to be.”

Dan Wheldon also put a horrid Indy behind him to come home fourth in the No. 10 Target car. Helio Castroneves notched another top-five finish with a fifth. But perhaps the biggest story of the afternoon wound up with sixth-place runner Oriol Servia and his No. 5 KV Racing Technology team.

Servia’s front wing was damaged when he made contact with another car in Turn 3. He was forced to enter the pits, where his team put on a new wing but was unable to do it without losing a lap.

The incident brought out the yellow, but shortly after the field went back to green, Servia managed to pass leader Marco Andretti and stay in front of him until the next yellow came out at Lap 63 for debris. From there, he cut through the field in every phase: at race speed, in the pits, and on restarts.

Understandably, Servia was dog tired after his run today:

“It was really tough, but the whole race was just — keep fighting, keep fighting and every pit stop, we gain spots…I was quite happy and also quite [tired].

“Usually, I don’t get tired on the ovals, but because of the type of the racing I had to do every lap and because when we changed the wing, for some reason we lost water; I didn’t have the water. I was really struggling there at the end.”

Behind Servia, IndyCar Series rookies Justin Wilson and E.J. Viso ran solid during the day and came home seventh and eighth respectively. Danica Patrick rebounded nicely with a ninth place run and Buddy Rice finished tenth to round out the top 10.

Dixon now holds a 28-point lead in the championship over Castroneves as the IndyCar Series heads for the Bombardier Learjet 550K next Saturday night at Texas Motor Speedway. The green flag is expected to drop shortly after 10 p.m. ET.

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All quotes used in this article were taken from today’s post-race press conference transcript and trackside report.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 1st, 2008 at 10:14 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.