Wheldon wins IRL-record sixth race of season

[admin]

Dan Wheldon set an IndyCar record Sunday with his sixth victory this season and all but clinched his first IRL championship, beating Helio Castroneves and Sam Hornish Jr. in a tight finish to win the Peak Antifreeze Indy 300 at Chicagoland Speedway.

Wheldon beat Castroneves by about 3 feet, with Hornish taking third place.

Wheldon will win the points title simply by taking to the track at Watkins Glen in two weeks. With Sunday's victory, he broke a tie with Hornish for wins in a season.

Wheldon survived a pit speed violation midway through the race, regained the lead on the 179th lap, held off a pack in the final stages, and finished in 1 hour, 47 minutes, 49.6126 seconds - 0.0133 seconds ahead of Castroneves.

Hornish, a two-time winner at Chicagoland, was followed by Tomas Scheckter and Tony Kanaan.

Danica Patrick, starting from the pole, was sixth - the seventh top-10 finish of her rookie season. The Roscoe, Ill., native lost the lead to Scheckter on the second lap and never got it back despite a push late in the race. She jump started coming out of a pit after the 188th lap and got knocked down two spots to fourth.

Wheldon averaged 169.160 mph and led 88 laps. He now has a 102-point lead in the point standings over defending series champion Kanaan.

After a fiery 20th-lap collision involving three cars, Ryan Briscoe was taken by helicopter to a Chicago-area hospital with head and neck pain.

Briscoe's car flipped over Alex Barron's and slammed into the safety barrier after the two clipped tires on the fourth turn of the 1.5-mile oval. The rear end of Briscoe's car broke away, and debris tore a hole in a fence along the barrier.

Barron and Kosuke Matsuura, who also was involved, walked away unscathed. Briscoe was alert as he was taken to the hospital.

The crash resulted in a 17-minute red flag - the first for a medical emergency in an Indy Racing League race since October 2003.

"I felt a bump from the left rear of my car," Barron said. "Ryan was up over me. He was upside down and there was a lot of fire. It was just a quick thud." Briscoe initially won the pole in Saturday's qualifying but dropped to the 23rd position after his car failed an inspection, giving Patrick her third pole. She finished ninth with the top spot at Kansas Speedway in July and was 16th at Kentucky Speedway last month.