A gamble on strategy rewarded James Hinchcliffe with victory for Schmidt Peterson in a damp, incident-filled incident-filled IndyCar race at NOLA on Sunday.

The Canadian had started back in 16th, and took advantage of an early caution to go off-sequence.

A near-constant succession of yellows later in the race allowed him to stretch his fuel and tyres to the point where he ran a 34-lap final stint.

As the cautions kept coming, Hinchcliffe’s main fear became the prospect of having to fend off Helio Castroneves on a late restart, but that problem was eliminated when Simon Pagenaud, Ryan Hunter-Reay and Sebastien Bourdais tried to go three-wide just after what would be the final green flag.

It didn’t work. Pagenaud, on the outside, quickly ran out of room and veered onto the muddy verge, which snapped his Penske Dallara-Chevrolet into a spin back across the track.

He collected both Hunter-Reay and Bourdais on his way to the wall, putting all three out.

With less than 10 minutes of the race remaining the result was all but sealed, and Hinchcliffe was able to reward Schmidt’s faith with a win in just his second race for the team.

“When we first decided to stay out, I thought, wouldn’t it be funny if we could make this a one-stopper,” he said.

“I just never thought it [would happen]. On one hand, I feel bad that we didn’t have more green-flag laps for the fans and everybody here at NOLA, but on the other hand, those guys called [the strategy] awesome.

“The car was unbelievable on the reds [soft tyres]. We pulled away from a couple of Penskes on those restarts.

“If we had gone green, I think we could’ve held them off at the end as long as we had the fuel. I’m just so happy.”

Off-sequence opportunists were the big winners of the day. Castroneves had switched strategies after making an unscheduled stop to replace a broken front wing, and James Jakes and Simona de Silvestro took an aggressive approach to compensate for poor grid positions. They finished up as the top four.

Polesitter Juan Pablo Montoya held command of the cars who had stuck to conventional strategies.

He rejoined from his final stop in fifth, but the lack of green flag time during the final quarter of the race denied him the opportunity to hunt down the cars that had popped up ahead of him.

“We did everything right,” he said. “We executed. We pushed when we needed to push. We did everything we needed to do. We took good points. We’ll probably still lead in the championship, so it’s good.”

RESULTS – 47 LAPS:

CHAMPIONSHIP STANDINGS:

‘Hinchtown’ triumphant in messy NOLA Indycar race