Team Penske’s Simon Pagenaud stormed to a maiden IndyCar championship with a fifth win of the season at Sonoma.
Pagenaud and team-mate Will Power were the only two mathematically in the title hunt heading into the double-points finale, but a gearbox issue for Power on lap 36 of 85 put him out of contention.
Pagenaud led team-mates Power, Helio Castroneves and Juan Pablo Montoya at the start, and enjoyed a 5.4-second lead after the first stops.
A yellow for the slow-moving Power prompted a second flurry of stops that left Pagenaud leading by 3.9s from Castroneves.
Castroneves had already switched to an alternative strategy a handful of laps earlier in a bid to claim a first win since Detroit in 2014, but wasn’t able to make the early pitstops work, leaving Pagenaud defending from Graham Rahal and Montoya.
Pagenaud had enough pace in hand to cross the line first by 3.5s for a fifth win of the season that confirmed his 2016 IndyCar title.
Rahal and Montoya did enough to secure the podium places, ahead of the strong Andretti pair of Ryan Hunter-Reay and Alexander Rossi in their Dallara-Hondas.
Josef Newgarden signed off his season with a sixth, holding off Castroneves in seventh.
The finale was a largely trouble-free race with only one yellow flag period for Power’s issues, although Mikhail Aleshin and Tony Kanaan came together at the Turn 7 hairpin on lap one. Both were able to continue and finished 11th and 13th respectively.
