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This weekend, Team Penske had the Power – Will Power, that is.

Power led over two-thirds of the race from the first starting spot as Penske claimed its first victory in the Camping World Grand Prix at the Glen after winning every pole six years running.

Teammate Ryan Briscoe made it a Penske 1-2 after passing Chip Ganassi Racing rival Dario Franchitti in the later laps of the race. Raphael Matos and Mario Moraes rounded out the top five.

Dan Wheldon rebounded from an early-race incident in the track’s boot to finish sixth. Alex Lloyd punted Wheldon’s Panther Racing Dallara-Honda and Wheldon stalled, The Holmatro Safety Team got him refired before he lost a lap, however, and he utilized an alternate pit strategy to help get him up front.

Scott Dixon and Helio Castroneves were also among those to use different pit strategies, although not by choice; Dixon got into the back of his Team Penske rival early on in the race, forcing both to pit for repairs. Neither lost a lap, however, and were able to stay out after the Wheldon caution. They finished eighth and ninth, respectively.

E.J. Viso and Alex Tagliani also had encountered early-race issues that put them towards the front in the middle of the race. Viso came home 11th, and Tagliani 17th.

Tony Kanaan, on the other hand, had his problem on the penultimate lap, running out of fuel during a solid top-10 run. The necessity of the splash and go dropped him all the way back to 21st.

Kanaan’s finish was emblematic of a difficult day for most of the members of Andretti Autosport. Coming off the announcement that he would be running the rest of the season for the team, Ryan Hunter-Reay led the team with a seventh place finish, but other than that, there wasn’t much to celebrate about in the AA garage.

Marco Andretti’s streak of three consecutive top five finishes at the Glen was broken with a 13th place run, Adam Carroll’s first race of any kind in over a year yielded a 16th place result, and Danica Patrick continued to struggle on the road courses with a 20th place showing.

As for last year’s race winners, Justin Wilson snuck into the top 10 for Dreyer & Reinbold Racing. Meanwhile, it was a difficult day for Dale Coyne Racing, which saw Milka Duno finish 23rd and off the lead lap. Lloyd, meanwhile, was the first driver to retire, shortly after the Wheldon incident.

Power now maintains a lead of 32 points over Franchitti in the series point standings as the series heads to Toronto. His lead in the road course standings is now a whopping 70 over Ryan Hunter-Reay – theoretically, Power could take the next two events off and still win that title.

Tony Kanaan ended a 34-race winless drought and Michael Andretti won his second race of the season after a winless 2009 as the IZOD IndyCar Series finished its first oval segment of the 2010 season with today’s Iowa Corn Indy 250.

It was the 15th career open-wheel win for Kanaan, his first since Richmond in 2008, and the first time that the Brazilian did not suffer a race-ending accident in an Iowa event. He led 62 laps, holding the point for the first time since Chicago last year.

It also marked the second race win at Iowa for Andretti Autosport, and their first since the inaugural event in 2007 with Dario Franchitti. However, neither Franchitti nor the other Andretti cars had quite the same amount of success as Kanaan; Franchitti’s transmission gave out late in the race, dropping him to 18th, while the other three Andretti cars of Ryan Hunter-Reay (8th), Danica Patrick (10th), and Marco Andretti (15th) fell off the lead lap.

Helio Castroneves held the lead with as few as a dozen laps to go, but Kanaan positioned himself perfectly for the victory, conserving 11 of his 24 allotted overtake assists for the final 11 laps. Castroneves had nine assists remaining, but they were not enough; with each assist lasting about halfway around the 7/8 mile track, Kanaan could run with extra horsepower for about the entire final segment of the race.

Castroneves had encountered issues with Kanaan earlier in the race, coming very close to his countryman on pit road early in the race. Castroneves was stuck between Kanaan and Scott Dixon racing out of the pits, overcorrected to avoid Kanaan’s left rear and careened into Dixon, giving both cars a little air. Kanaan also had a pit incident with Hunter-Reay as the American pulled into his pit.

E.J. Viso finished third, salvaging one solid finish for KV Racing Technology. Mario Moraes became a victim of Justin Wilson’s turn three spin at the beginning of the event, eliminating one of the three KV cars before anybody could even get into a rhythm. Takuma Sato, in the lead Lotus-sponsored KV car, had a fantastic run going before trailing Alex Lloyd too closely into the turns on lap 177, losing the air off his car, and sliding up into the wall.

Iowa also featured support races that went all the way down the Road to Indy ladder. In Firestone Indy Lights, former Andretti driver Sebastien Saavedra held off his replacement, Martin Plowman, for the victory. Conor Daly led all 100 laps of the Star Mazda race for his fourth consecutive victory in that series, and Sage Karam (also driving for Andretti) won his third US Formula 2000 event of the season.

First of all, a huge thank you to George Phillips over at Oil Pressure for the shout-out in his preview of this weekend’s race. George’s blog is one of the best and most insightful IndyCar blogs out there, and one of my personal favorites. Check out “Are Engine Failures Always a Bad Thing?” for an example of the high quality posts on the site.

Getting to the event at hand this weekend, however, the Iowa Corn Indy 250 will mark the fourth IZOD IndyCar Series event at the 7/8 mile Iowa Speedway. Chip Ganassi Racing’s No. 10 Dallara-Honda has won the past two events, with Dan Wheldon taking the checkers in 2008 and Dario Franchitti last year. Points leader Franchitti, who also won the event in 2007, can use the weekend to open up a gap in points over second-place Will Power, whose only Iowa experience yielded a ninth-place finish. Meanwhile, teammate Scott Dixon has a solid average finish of 6.3 at the track with two top five finishes.

But Iowa has the potential to produce a surprise winner, even if it hasn’t happened yet in the race’s three-year history. In two races at the track, Hideki Mutoh has finishes of second and third place, respectively. His prowess at the track could lead to a bump for his Newman/Haas Racing team, as they are mired at 18th in points. But a strong finish for Mutoh, combined with some bad luck for his immediate leaders in points, could mathematically elevate him to as high as 12th.

While Ganassi usually takes the checkers, Andretti Autosport also knows its way around Iowa. Andretti cars finished 1-2 in 2007, had three drivers in the top six in 2008, and a best finish of third last year with Mutoh. Tony Kanaan led 48 laps last year before a crash took him out of the event, and Marco Andretti has challenged for the win at Iowa multiple times in the past. An Andretti car could feasibly end Ganassi’s streak of wins at the track come Sunday.

It will also be interesting to see how a handful of drivers will approach the Iowa event this weekend. What will Ryan Hunter-Reay and Graham Rahal do with their one-week reprieves to get back in the series? Hunter-Reay has sponsorship from the American ethanol industry once again, a partnership that paid dividends in the past, and Rahal will replace the injured Mike Conway at Dreyer & Reinbold Racing. Both drivers will want solid finishes to secure rides as early as possible for Watkins Glen.

How will Simona de Silvestro handle her first race after the Texas wreck? This has nothing to do with the fact that de Silvestro was cleared to drive just a couple of days after the incident. A bad crash like that can alter a driver’s psyche, and make them less willing to engage in daring maneuvers on the track. If de Silvestro begins to fear another fiery wreck – as most of us would – she might be slow on this, one of the trickier tracks in the IZOD IndyCar Series. It will be interesting to see how she runs this weekend.

Finally, will there be a breakout rookie at Iowa? Mutoh sure was in 2008, finishing second, but more often than not, rookies populate the bottom of the results. Iowa’s unconventional length and layout prove tricky for the series’ less experienced drivers and veterans alike, but the added caveat of Iowa being the only short track on the schedule could cause plenty of headaches for inexperienced drivers who haven’t handled the Dallaras on smaller tracks. Expect about half of this year’s rookie class to tear up some equipment.

Let me preface this piece by asserting a few facts: I am 19 years old. I go to one of the top communication schools in the United States with the end goal of becoming a professional motorsports journalist. My location may be somewhat far away from the IndyCar hub of Indianapolis, but I follow the sport religiously and have for years, and I feel like I’m pretty knowledgeable, both about the sport and my craft.

Of course, all the schooling in the world can’t prepare you for situations in which things start to go wrong.

On Tuesday, I posted an opinion piece entitled “The Plight of the American Open-Wheel Racer,” which was intended to be about Ryan Hunter-Reay’s inability to secure a full-time IZOD IndyCar Series ride despite having done all the right things. In that column, I mentioned the possibility of him taking over the No. 24 car for Dreyer & Reinbold Racing, as lead driver Mike Conway is injured.

Those of you who read the original piece can probably figure out the mistake I made – I chalked up the wreck to “Conway being Conway.” What I had meant to say was that Mike Conway is one of the more aggressive drivers in the sport, and one of the most willing to make daring on-track maneuvers, something that most will probably concede. And although I did not phrase it in a convincing way, I enjoy aggressive drivers like Conway who make the races more entertaining. “So-and-so being so-and-so” is a remark familiar to most in my area, as Boston baseball fans had to put up with the antics of Manny Ramirez for almost a decade.

Unfortunately, I meant what I meant, and I said what I said, and they turned out to be two different things. In this situation, the remark was factually inaccurate – Hunter-Reay was running out of gas, and although Conway looked to be creating a new lane at the bottom of the track if one looks at the instant replay without the context, it was not in all actuality the case.

Now, this mistake might have gone unnoticed on my part if not for an interesting email that I received as I was walking out of my house on Wednesday. It appears that, for all of the times that I wonder whether or not anybody reads what I write at all, somebody did… and the reader just so happened to be Mike Conway’s manager, Mark Blundell.

1990s Formula 1 and CART fans alike probably remember Blundell as a talented driver in both disciplines. He scored three podium finishes and 32 points in his brief F1 career, scoring a point in every season in which he competed. In a five-year CART career, he won three races, all in 1997, and won Autosport Magazine’s British Driver of the Year award that year. More recently, he has been involved in driver management, with Conway and Formula 1 test driver/DTM racer Gary Paffett his top two clients.

On a more personal note, Blundell was almost always my driver of choice in CART Fury, Midway’s attempt to combine the excitement of CART racing and the physical impossibility of the NFL Blitz videogames into one. I would compare receiving his email to first meeting somebody you looked up to as a child by spilling a boiling pot of spaghetti sauce onto their new white suit. In other words, it’s not quite the best way to introduce yourself.

Clearly I didn’t pick the right time to bring up Conway’s aggressive driving tendencies anyway, in effect kicking a man while he’s down. Believe me, I do feel bad. It clearly was not the time to form an opinion, much less voice it, and unlike big names like Robin Miller, who get to interact with the big names on a weekly basis, I’m a kid who’s just trying to get his foot in the door without pissing too many people off.

This time, things didn’t exactly go to plan. You live and you learn.

But the most embarrassing part about this whole mess for me is that I clearly have no idea how many people read what I have to say, or who my readers are. My IndyCar stuff primarily comes from OpenWheelAmerica.com, but I also post my writing to BleacherReport.com, OnPitRow.com, PitRoadScene.com, and my own personal blog. It gets hard to keep track of where everything is going, who hears things where, and so on.

So from here, I regroup – I make my apologies, I lick my wounds, I move on. We all make mistakes. And in the end, things could have been a whole lot worse all the way around. Next time, I’ll try to say what I mean.

Saturday night’s Firestone 550k was one of the best races for Andretti Autosport in recent memory. Andretti cars finished 2nd, 3rd, 6th, and 7th, one of their best performances as a team since the 1-2-3-4 sweep at St. Petersburg in 2005. Even better for Andretti, Danica Patrick, the all-world marketing superstar who has been struggling for much of the year, was the lead driver in that pack, and even briefly made the racing difficult for eventual winner Ryan Briscoe.

But Texas may prove to be bittersweet for Andretti, as it may be the final race for fourth driver Ryan Hunter-Reay. For the second consecutive year, Hunter-Reay’s status as “the IZOD driver” will only take him about a third of the way through the IZOD IndyCar Series season, before he has to find another ride on his own. Andretti’s already got another driver, Adam Carroll, lined up to drive for them in a few events.

Hunter-Reay has two weeks before the next race at Iowa to figure things out. He could get lucky and, for the second year in a row, become a replacement for a driver injured in the Indianapolis 500. Last year, he replaced Vitor Meira in A.J. Foyt’s famed No. 14 car; this year, he could take over for Mike Conway at Dreyer & Reinbold Racing, depending on whether or not the team feels strongly about retaining the services of Tomas Scheckter… or if DRR officials feel like he was at fault for the Conway wreck, in which his car was used as the launching pad for the No. 24’s trip into the wall.

Regardless, Hunter-Reay’s continued plight – even with the commercial weight of the series’ title sponsor behind him – says a lot about the state of American drivers in open wheel racing. Here’s a driver who just won the biggest street race in the country, the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach. He was thisclose to winning the inauagural Sao Paulo Indy 300. Until being involved in the Conway incident, he had a solid Indy run going. He currently sits sixth in points and, with 11 races to make up 45 points, can make a solid run at this year’s championship.

In other words, he’s done almost everything right on track this year. So why does team owner Michael Andretti say that multiple sponsorship deals fell through for the budding star, even immediately after the Long Beach victory? Why does the Sprint Prepaid Group, through its Boost and Virgin Mobile brands, decide to throw most of its weight behind the already well-sponsored Patrick and the newcomer Carroll, only kicking a little support at Indy to their best bet to actually win a race?

If I’m Hunter-Reay, I’m starting to feel a little like Rodney Dangerfield right about now. My first thought when I wake up in the morning has to be, “I don’t get no respect!”

Worse, he’s not the only one. So many quality American drivers currently sit on the sidelines as their foreign counterparts trash racecars, all because they don’t have the same kind of sponsorship. Ed Carpenter and Townsend Bell sit on the sidelines after strong Indy runs but mid-pack finishes. Buddy Rice – that’s 2004 Indianapolis 500 champion Buddy Rice to you – and last year’s Indy Lights champion, J.R. Hildebrand, have taken their talents to sports car racing. Meanwhile, four current IndyCar drivers have three or more DNFs in the seven races this season, and almost all of them are ride buyers of some sort. I won’t name names, but you can probably figure it out easily enough.

Let’s also call Paul Tracy an adopted American now that he lives in Vegas, and wonder aloud why the winningest active driver doesn’t get a shot in more races, while his KV Racing teammates get involved in incidents like it’s what they’re paid to do.

I won’t even bring up Graham Rahal with the list, though – he passed on the Boy Scouts ride with Dale Coyne Racing, and Alex Lloyd has been working wonders with it the past couple of races. Sure, Bill Pappas is no longer the engineer at DCR, which gave him some reservations about the quality of the cars, but surely Graham could have done just as much with that equipment as Lloyd. Newman/Haas Racing may have strung him along, but the rides were there, and he was a little too picky.

It’s hard to make this argument without tapping into good old-fashioned American jingoism, but wasn’t the Indy Racing League originally founded to give more American drivers a chance?

Hunter-Reay is a prime example of a driver that the old IRL would have served well, a Tony Stewart-type in that he has plenty of talent but no ride in which to show it off. Ever since losing the Ethanol sponsorship, his career has been unsteady, with plenty of uncertainty from week to week about where he’ll be racing, who he’ll be racing for, if he’ll be racing at all.

The old IRL would have protected a driver like that. Now, not even race wins, a challenge for the championship, or, worst of all, the backing of the series’ title sponsor can secure him a full-season contract. He’s got two weeks to figure out how to get behind the wheel of a race car at Iowa, and I don’t think anybody can come up with a reasonable explanation as to why.

I guess it all comes down to no respect.

Attention readers: The previous version of the column contained a poorly worded, easily misinterpreted remark about Mike Conway. That comment has since been removed, and I sincerely apologize to anybody who took it the wrong way. We all wish Mike Conway well, and look forward to him rejoining the series upon his recovery.

I don’t think that I’m the only person to be excited about the ICONIC committee’s decision to bring turbocharged 2.4 liter V6 engines to the IZOD IndyCar Series in 2012. The new engine will be a lot smaller and lighter than the current Honda powerplant, will maintain up to 700 horsepower, and will return turbos to major American open-wheel racing for the first time since Champ Car’s demise. It should also allow other engine manufacturers, potentially including one of the Volkswagen Group’s brands and a Lotus-Cosworth collaboration, to join the party. All of this is excellent news.

Now the ICONIC committee turns to chassis selection, where five industry leaders are currently fighting for the single contract to produce IndyCar chassis. Three of the companies – Dallara, Lola, and Swift – have built chassis before. BAT Engineering is comprised of three men who dominated the sport in the 1980s. Delta Wing is the pet project of some of the series’ biggest owners.

The problem here is that three or fourth worthy chassis designers are going to go home, while one secures a contract, keeping IndyCar in its spec-design age. But why?

When CART reached its latest peak in the mid-to-late 1990s, when entry lists were full, big names were all around, and the IRL hadn’t yet lured the top teams back to Indianapolis, there were three chassis manufacturers (and Roger Penske’s in-house design) battling for supremacy, as there were four engine manufacturers competing to build the best engines. The competition may have driven up costs a bit, but that’s what added to the prestige of the series – you had to beat everybody else on the track, not in the bidding.

Opening up chassis production to at least two manufacturers would increase competition, and hearken back to better days in the sport, before the nasty political split had scorched much of the open-wheel earth. The series could set a cost cap on chassis development and production in order to protect its owners from the potential of escalating costs, and perhaps adjust that cap on a yearly basis, as stick-and-ball sports do with player salary caps. If nothing else, multiple chassis would make the races far more visually interesting, in a way that multiple engine companies cannot.

Allowing multiple chassis contracts will also help bring the sport’s biggest and best track back to the prominence and prestige it once held. Indianapolis used to be a proving ground for new road technologies, and a breeding ground for open-wheel innovation. Think of some of the cars used in the past 40 years, and how much change has occurred, both in aerodynamics and underneath the engine cowling. The changes have been massive, and part of it came from the less restrictive rules at Indianapolis.

Remember that during the CART era of the 1980s and 90s, the Indianapolis 500 was a USAC-sanctioned race in which CART decided to award points to its teams. Because the race was not run under CART sanctioning, and thus under Indianapolis 500-specific rules, teams had the ability to experiment a little more freely with their cars. Some of the most dominating performances in all of motorsport have come due to this provision.

In 1994, Team Penske, with drivers Al Unser Jr., Paul Tracy, and Emerson Fittipaldi, had one of the most dominating combinations in open-wheel history: the Penske PC-23 chassis and Ilmor-Mercedes Indy V8 engine. This combination allowed Penske to rip off a seven-race winning streak at one points in the 16-race season, and allowed the team to take 12 victories overall. Everybody knew that coming into Indy that year, the team to beat was going to be Team Penske, especially coming off of their win the previous year with Fittipaldi.

But Penske outdid themselves at Indy, bringing along a secretly-built 209 cid pushrod Mercedes engine, the 500I. Penske utilized rules provisions that allowed pushrod engines like John Menard’s Buick V6 an extra 650 cubic centimeters and 4.9 psi of boost. For those of us who aren’t engineers, it meant that the engine could produce 1000 horsepower, significantly more than Penske’s competitors. The team went on to dominate the race.

Randy Bernard, CEO of IndyCar, has said that he wants to bring innovation back to the series. Bernard has also proven himself willing to make some huge decisions – awarding split oval and road course championships, attempting to implement bonuses next year of $10 million for series champions and $20 million for winning both Indy and NASCAR’s Coca-Cola 600 on the same day, and so on.

What about opening up the field at Indianapolis to innovation once again?

In its heyday long ago, the Indianapolis 500 was so highly regarded that it counted in Formula 1 world championship points. That won’t happen again, but the race can still go a long way towards attracting racing powerhouses from across the globe by opening up its engine formula and allowing multiple chassis manufacturers to build Indy racers.

In other words, by encouraging innovation and the competition of technologies, with the assumed goal of bringing what’s learned on the racetrack back to the streets, Indianapolis can recapture the prestige it used to have, years and years ago. Because let’s be honest: Indianapolis still matters, but it just isn’t the same.

The key difference in racing nowadays, compared to years ago, is that what’s running on the track nowadays has little or no correlation to the cars that we drive on the streets. Sure, IndyCar does a lot with ethanol, but how many of us currently have ethanol-based cars? And what does an eight-year-old Dallara chassis have to do with the aerodynamics of the vehicles that any of us drive?

The reason why sports car racing flourishes in its niche is because the developments made at Le Mans have street relevance. When Peugeot and Audi battle at Circuit de la Sarthe, they’re not just racing for glory. They’re in it because what they learn at the track will make their performance vehicles on the road that much better. The American Le Mans Series does a fantastic job, with its embrace of multiple fuels and the Michelin Green Challenge, which awards a championship to the most efficient team over the course of the year.

By loosening restrictions on competitors in the Indianapolis 500, the sport’s most prestigious race, IndyCar can push its own “green” initiative even further, by encouraging participants to develop the fastest and most efficient cars they possibly can. Only cars that meet certain standards for efficiency can attempt to qualify; as usual, the fastest 33 race. Exclusive supplier contracts be damned – let them apply to every other race of the season but Indy, because years of spec 500s is beginning to grow old.

If Chip Ganassi and Bobby Rahal want to bring the BMW motors they run in sports car racing to Indy, by all means let them. See if Duncan Dayton’s Highcroft Racing can run as well with Honda at Indianapolis as they do at Sebring and Laguna Seca. Manufacturers currently on the outside looking in would have a reason to care about Indy again, and so would fair-weather motorsports fans.

It’d be the biggest and best race in the world, if only we opened it up.