Hinchcliffe ends drought with Long Beach win

James Hinchcliffe ended a two-year win drought with victory in a rollercoaster Verizon IndyCar Series race at Long Beach.

The Canadian's Schmidt Peterson Motorsport Honda was a frontrunner all afternoon, and made the first of his big moves when he stayed out one lap longer than then-race leader Ryan Hunter-Reay before making his final visit to the pits. That allowed him to leapfrog his Andretti rival once he rejoined after his stop, and put him in the catbird seat for the final phase of the race.

Hunter-Reay was no longer in the equation in the final laps – more on that in a moment – and Hinchcliffe instead found himself needing to fend off St. Petersburg winner Sebastien Bourdais on a restart with three laps to go.

But he didn't have to work that hard to do so. Hinchcliffe shot away from the Frenchman at the final green, and greeted the checker with a 1.4s advantage in his pocket.

"This racetrack has been so good to me over the years, and it's always one I wanted to be on top of," he said. "To finally get [the win] here is awesome."

Bourdais, who'd fought back after being forced to stop for a new wing after just two laps, conceded that he didn't have a response to Hinchcliffe at the end, but was justifiably pleased with another good result for the Coyne team.

"We played to our strengths," he said. "I've always been pretty comfortable saving fuel, and it just came to us. [At the final restart] I was just trying to hang on to second place; I didn't really have the balance at the end to chase [Hinchcliffe] so I tried to hold on to second.

And third went to Josef Newgarden, who earned his first podium since moving to Penske from Ed Carpenter Racing.

"It's exciting," he said. "It's nice to get the first podium for The Captain out of the way. We made good stops and had the car to challenge for the win if everything worked out perfectly, but the stops didn't quite shake out."

Two main factors conspired to shape the outcome; the first being an absolutely horrendous day for reliability in the Andretti Autosport camp. All four cars were eliminated by various mechanical failures, and two – those of Hunter-Reay and Alexander Rossi – could justifiably have considered themselves contenders for the win.

Hunter-Reay was running in second place just five laps short of the finish when his car suddenly shut itself off.

"I have no idea [what happened]," he said. "It was going to be a good fight at the end, and then ... that happened. It's so frustrating. It was something electrical. I tried cycling the car a few times and it wouldn't fire and then after we flipped a few switches it fired back up again."

Similarly, Rossi had been among the top five all afternoon until he suffered a suspected engine failure on lap 68.

Marco Andretti was less of a threat to the front, but his early exit on lap 13 inadvertently set into motion the other big moment of the race. At that point, Scott Dixon was leading, but when Andretti jinked off the track and into the run-off at Turn 6, the Ganassi team – possibly anticipating a yellow - pulled him into the pits and switched from a two-stop to a three-stop strategy.

But the yellow never came, and a frustrated Dixon was on the back foot for the rest of the race. He eventually finished fourth, acutely aware of what might have been.

"[Two-stopping] was always the plan; not sure what changed up there," he said. "We gave the race away at that point. The car was super-fast and we'd trimmed the car to stay up front, so it got tricky later in the race when we were in traffic. Hard to swallow, that one. We were leading, pulling away, saving fuel ... it was going to be an easy two-stop strategy for us, and we ended up fourth."

Simon Pagenaud recovered from starting last and then suffering a cut tire in the opening laps to claw his way back to a satisfied fifth ahead of Coyne rookie Ed Jones. Carlos Munoz and Spencer Pigot were next across the line, followed by Helio Castroneves, who started from pole and immediately dived into an afternoon of weirdness. The Brazilian was swamped at the start, and was picking his way back up through the field when he was issued a drive-through penalty for speeding in pitlane.

He served that – and in doing so, committed another pitlane speed violation. As punishment for that one, he was sent to the rear of the field for the second restart.

Graham Rahal rebounded from a late stop for a cut tire to complete the top 10, although his cause was helped by JR Hildebrand and Mikhael Aleshin colliding on the final lap. It was Aleshin's second incident for the day, following on from an earlier bump with Tony Kanaan that forced the Ganassi car into the pits with a punctured left-rear. That one was reviewed and cleared by race control, although his clash with Hildebrand resulted in his being demoted from 11th to 12th.

Much earlier, a prolonged challenge by Will Power on Charlie Kimball had ended with contact that put Kimball out of the race on the spot, and left Power a lap down.