Did You Notice? … Team Penske currently leads the points in every series it races in?
OK, I know it’s early in the season, regardless of what series it is. It’s only March, and auto racing is the one of the few sports, if not the only sport, that largely starts and ends its season within a single year instead of spanning the end of one year and the beginning of the next.
But for one single team to be atop the point standings in every single discipline of motorsport that it competes in is impressive. Because it establishes that, at least in some capacity, Team Penske is an early favorite for a championship, if not several.
Following the NASCAR Cup Series race at Phoenix Raceway on Sunday (March 10), Ryan Blaney has taken the points lead. Despite a 30th-place finish in the Daytona 500, Blaney mitigated the standings damage from that race by scoring stage points and a playoff point after winning stage two. He has since followed that up with three straight top fives, enough to claim the lead. He currently holds a 10-point cushion over Kyle Larson.
While the defending Cup champion is off to a hot start, the same cannot be said for his teammates. Austin Cindric currently sits 15th in the standings, and with the exception of a fourth-place finish at Atlanta Motor Speedway (in which he also notched the stage two win), he has not finished higher than 22nd in the other three races.
Meanwhile, their other teammate Joey Logano has had, um … well, let’s just say he has had a season from hell four races in. Logano has crashed in three of the four races so far, only boasting a ninth-place finish at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. The two-time Cup champion is an appalling 30th in the point standings, arguably one of his worst starts to a season since joining forces with Penske in 2013.
The NTT IndyCar Series also made its season debut on Sunday at the Grand Prix of St. Petersburg, and it was a dominating performance from start to finish by Josef Newgarden, who also started on pole for good measure. With team owner Roger Penske under fire for his administration’s management (or lack thereof) of IndyCar since buying it and Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 2019, Newgarden provided a nice distraction for him by being the class of the field throughout the day.
Teammates Scott McLaughlin and Will Power finished third and fourth, respectively — only Arrow McLaren’s Pato O’Ward finishing runner-up stood in the way of a complete sweep of…
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