'I think we probably had Helio's pace' - Hildebrand

J.R. Hildebrand matched his career best IndyCar finish with his runner-up result in the Iowa Corn 300, and satisfying though that was, it left him wondering about what might have been. While crediting his Ed Carpenter Racing team with a great strategy call, Hildebrand said that the way things played out left him unable to challenge winner Helio Castroneves at the end.

"I think we probably had Helio's pace," Hildebrand mused. "I got jammed up in traffic, which is when he got by. For a period of time there, even with a lapped car between us, we were basically holding station.

"I think if I could have kept him behind me for longer and I'd have been in front and we were just kind of battling it out, he would have had a heck of a time getting by me as I was in more clean air. But that's just kind of how it goes."

Hildebrand reckoned that the hot weather contributed to the degree of challenge in passing, and was sure ECR's decision to switch to fresh tires earlier for the final stint was the right one.

"I think just because of the heat, to have a car that was good enough by enough that once you got later in a stint that you could get by guys, it was just really tough," he said. "We thought that we were better than the majority of the cars in front of us running fourth or fifth or something and elected to pit early, get on fresh tires, rip off a bunch of laps and try to kind of cycle out with better track position and see how that worked out for us.

"You know, it was a great call by the guys in the pits. I think they could kind of see how the race was unfolding. There weren't a lot of yellows. That would have cost us a lot if a yellow had come out after we had pitted, but it was definitely the right call to try to challenge for the win – and was able to hold off everybody but one.

"What was screwing me up with the traffic was that I was catching up to a lot of guys that were really unpredictable in terms of where they were putting their cars. In [Turns] 3 and 4 in particular, both lanes were still kind of there, and so you'd be catching up to guys and they're running in the high lane, so you're thinking, 'OK, I'm going to run low so I can get up close and have clean air going through the corner and work my way around him or whatever,' and then you'd catch up to him, and that lap they'll run the bottom, and it was just kind of...I guess that for me, when it's not for position it's really frustrating to deal with, because that's not stuff that I do to leaders if I'm getting caught in a race..."

He allowed, though, that the the layout of the 7/8th mile Iowa Speedway oval made such situations more likely than Phoenix, particularly in the unusally hot conditions of today's race.

"I think it's more difficult to know where the guy in front of you is going to run here," Hildebrand said. "I guess at Phoenix you know more ahead of time that you're going to have to set a guy up a bunch of laps in advance and make that happen, whereas around here it's a little bit more of a guessing game of like, where do I put my car so that I can keep the momentum going relative to the cars in front of me?

"Towards the end of the race there was no low line through 1 and 2, and there wasn't much of a high line through 3 and 4. Those lines were significantly slower than the alternatives. So that made it more of a one-lane track once the tires started to go off, and that was making it difficult, for sure. I think if it hadn't been quite as hot, you wouldn't have had quite the degradation, and you could have been a little bit more open to the line."

Hildebrand's impressive run followed on from Josef Newgarden's dominant win for ECR at Iowa last year. He reckoned the team's chemistry has had a lot to do with being able to maintain that momentum.

"I think at every event that we go to, your events are made and lost just in what you do over the course of practice sessions at the event," he said. "Rolling out of the truck on the right track helps a lot. But being in form to win races comes from making the right decisions during the weekend, because an event weekend like this, the conditions are totally different than when we tested here a couple weeks ago. So you have to be able to react in the right way to see success in situations like this.

"Between Ed and I, we're always looking for the same thing and I think generally pretty strongly opinionated about what exactly it is that we're looking for. So that has allowed us, when we come to these places, we do roll off the truck well, because we've got good historical track record, and we know that the setups are kind of in the general operating window of something that can be really fast. And then as we go through the weekend, as we go through practice sessions, we get that even more kind of refined.

"I think it just comes from the mindset within the team and the ability of the engineers to translate what we're looking for and asking for correctly or whatever, most effectively for what we're trying to get out of the cars. Fortunately for us, more often than not, it seems like we've been looking for the right things, because when we come to these places year after year, we're pretty competitive. We've got a little bit of work to do to make that the case across the board over the duration of the season, but certainly at events like this, we feel like we're coming in on an even playing field."