Hunter-Reay continues Iowa success

With Sunday's podium finish in the Iowa Corn 300, Ryan Hunter-Reay happily broke a five-race streak of finishing 13th or worse. Iowa is always a welcome sight for the 2012 IndyCar champion – he's the only active driver to have won here more than once (2012, 2014 and 2015) and he has finished on the podium in five of the past six races here. Ever hard on himself, Hunter-Reay came away relieved with a good finish.

"I love this place and I know what I need from the car," Hunter-Reay said. "That's one thing. I'm very certain what I need from it. I can describe exactly to the engineers what we need, and I know where the target is, and that's where I need to be.

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"And then once we get into a racing situation, if I can have a car where I can put it in different lanes, this is one of my favorite racetracks. We just didn't have the speed today for the competition, straight-line speed. I had some great runs on even JR [Hildebrand] there the last few laps, and I just couldn't do anything with it. But I think third is a really good result today coming from 15th and knowing the weekend that we had last year."

Despite his recent history at Iowa, it was his last-place finish in 2016 due to mechanical issues that had Hunter-Reay worried, especially when the car started this weekend off with handling issues. But the No. 28 Andretti Autosport team went to work on adjustments that fixed the setup.

"[The car] felt like it just always wanted to turn around, get into the wall," he said. "Within an hour and a half of the practice time that we had, we made some good changes to it, especially in the warm-up. And we made the right changes going into the race. So credit to the engineering team of the 28 car. We definitely got a good setup on it.

"We spent the whole race catching up on front wing. Had too little front wing in it, which is kind of a byproduct of searching around for setups to land on. These cars are so sensitive here. You can dial the car out so easily. You can miss the setup by just a little bit and be way off the pace. I was very thankful, especially after last year where I was a fish out of water at a track that I absolutely love. This was nice to be back in the rhythm and going from 15th to third."

Hunter-Reay and Castroneves made their final pit stops under green with 47 laps remaining – seven laps after runner-up Hildebrand came in for his final stop. Asked if he thought coming in earlier would have made a difference, Hunter-Reay was convinced that "it was [Helio's] race weekend."

"I was flat out and he was driving away from me," Hunter-Reay said.

"The problem with stopping earlier is the degradation is so big, right; like JR stopped earlier and he was another three or four laps, I was going to be giving him a really hard time. That's the kind of gamble you play. You can come in and get the reward up front of going quick, but you're going to have to pay for it at the end of the stint, and that's what we were kind of contemplating.

"With the track temp as high as it is being a day race, once you get to about lap 30 or 35 on tires, it's like running on an ice skate rink with sneakers on. You want your own piece of real estate, and it's very – it becomes very difficult, especially at the end.

"You got halfway into a tire stint and even the fast cars couldn't go anywhere. Am I right? We saw Helio, Will ... stuck behind cars that were much slower. I'd love to come back here at night. I think I've said that about 35 times."