Will Power Team Penske Extremely Powerful in Weekend Sweep of Sonoma and Bristol

After winning the Peak Performance Pole Award for the quickest qualifier yesterday, Will Power dominated today's Indy Grand Prix of Sonoma in capturing his 14th career Izod IndyCar Series win and his season leading fifth win of the season.

Power led 71 of the 75 laps today and closed the gap between him and points leader Dario Franchitti to 26 points.

This weekend in Sonoma showed that Penske team still has championship caliber teams.  Ryan Briscoe and Helio Castroneves have been a major disappointment this season in that neither have been to victory lane.  This weekend showed the Penske team was in a class all by themselves.

They claimed the top three starting positions in qualifying yesterday for today's race and finished in the exact same way.  Power as noted above started from the pole and won, but Helio Castroneves started and finished second, and Ryan Briscoe started and finished third.

This is the first time since 1994 that Team Penske swept positions 1-3.  In that year in Nazareth Paul Tracy won while Al Unser Jr. finished second and Emerson Fittipaldi finished third.  The last time a team finished 1-2-3 was in 2005 at St. Pete when Andretti-Green pulled that feat.

The win today also sealed a weekend sweep for Penske in both major forms of auto racing.  Brad Keselowski won the night race last night in Bristol to go along with Power's win today.

With Power now in the championship hunt again and Keselowski hot in the NASCAR Sprint Cup scene with four top three finishes in a row including two wins, both drivers are now the favorites to win the championship in their respective series'.

Outside of Penske's dominance this weekend, the Ganassi teams ran dominate as well.  Points leader Dario Franchitti finished fourth while his teammate Scott Dixon rounded out the top five.  Fellow Ganassi teammate Graham Rahal capped a great run and finished ninth today as well. Rookie Charlie Kimball, the other member of Chip Ganassi Racing, was the lone disappointment for the team in finishing 26th.  He never really had much compared to his teammates.

Today's action was pretty uneventful at Sonoma in that there was only one full course caution and that came with 10 laps to go when rookie Ho-Pin Tun crashed hard in the tire barrier.  It was pretty much follow the leader in the top five.

The only other action came on the last lap when rookie Sebastian Saveedra and Mike Conway made contact that sent Saveedra airborne up on the dirt hill.  Both drivers were able to retain power and finish the race.

The Izod IndyCar Series returns to action next Sunday in the inagural Baltimore Grand Prix.  This will be the first time that the series will race in Baltimore.  The 75 lap race will take place on September 4th at 2:00 P.M. on Versus.

FINISHING ORDER:

1. 12 Will Power

2. 3 Helio Castroneves

3. 6 Ryan Briscoe

4. 10 Dario Franchiti

5. 9 Scott Dixon

6. 22 Giorgio Pantano (R)

7. 19 Sebastien Bourdais

8. 06 James Hinchcliffe (R)

9. 38 Graham Rahal

10. 59 E.J. Viso

11. 28 Ryan Hunter-Reay

12. 2 Oriol Servia

13. 17 Martin Plowman (R)

14. 24 Ana Beatriz

15. 34 Sebastian Saveedra

16. 78 Simon Pagenaud (R)

17. 27 Mike Conway

18. 5 Takuma Sato

19. 18 James Jakes (R)

20. 77 Alex Tagliani

21. 7 Danica Patrick

22. 14 Vitor Meira

23. 4 J.R. Hildebrand (R)

24. 26 Marco Andretti

25. 67 Ed Carpenter

26. 83 Charlie Kimball (R)

27. 88 Ho-Pin Tung (R)

28. 82 Tony Kanaan