Tony Kanaan led 183 laps of the 200 lap event at the Michigan International Speedway last weekend, and claimed to be stunned when Buddy Rice took the checkered flag winning the event. Kanaan, on the advice of his Andretti Green team, held off on a late race charge to take command of the event because his team was certain that Rice would run out of fuel with his #15 Rahal/Letterman Honda. That didn't happen, and when Kanaan saw that he was given bad advice, he tried to correct it, but was a mere 0.0796 seconds away from his fourth checkered flag of the 2004 season.
The gaffe on the Andretti Green team allowed Rice to put his fourth win of the season in the books, winning the fourth fastest timed race in IndyCar history with an average race speed of 182.123 miles per hour. Following Rice across the finish line in the top ten were Kanaan, Dan Wheldon, Sam Hornish Jr., Vitor Meira, Bryan Herta, Scott Dixon, Townsend Bell, Scott Sharp, and Helio Castroneves. The top ten starters and how they finished:
* = Rookie
- Tony Kanaan -- #11 Honda - finished 2nd
- Kosuke Matsuura* -- #55 Honda - finished 17th
- Scott Dixon -- #1 Toyota - finished 7th
- Sam Hornish Jr. -- #6 Toyota -- finished 4th
- Vitor Meira -- #17 Honda -- finished 5th
- Buddy Rice -- #15 Honda - finished 1st
- Townsend Bell -- #2 Chevy - finished 8th
- Dan Wheldon -- #26 Honda - finished 3rd
- Bryan Herta -- #7 Honda - finished 6th
- Adrian Fernandez -- #5 Honda - finished 12th
The next event for the IndyCar Series is the Belterra Casino Indy 300 at The Kentucky Speedway on Sunday, August 15th at 3:30 pm eastern. The event will be televised live by the ABC network.
Last season's winner of the Kentucky event was Sam Hornish Jr., followed by Scott Dixon, Bryan Herta, Al Unser Jr., Helio Castroneves, Tony Kanaan, Robbie Buhl, Dan Wheldon, Gil de Ferran, and Tomas Scheckter.
The big news in the IRL Series is addition of two road races on the 2005 schedule. The IRL Series has raced entirely on oval tracks since its beginning 1996. It was speculated that the IRL would join NASCAR's Busch Series in moving their Nazareth event to Watkins Glen, but the second road racing event was in question. As with the NASCAR Busch Series, it wouldn't be cost efficient for the teams to build road racing cars for just one event, so they have planned a second event on the Infineon Raceway at Sonoma, California.
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