Conway: I had to be calm and seize my moment - MotorSportsTalk

TORONTO – He only led seven laps – one less than he had combined this season – but Mike Conway nailed his timing Sunday en route to his win in the second race of the Honda Indy Toronto weekend for the Verizon IndyCar Series.

Conway started 11th in the No. 20 Fuzzy’s Vodka Chevrolet but made the call on Lap 43 to switch from wet weather tires onto slicks. That ultimately proved the winning call as the quiet but talented Englishman delivered his second win of the year for Ed Carpenter Racing.

“The conditions today were really tricky, with the rain and dry in places,” Conway said post-race. “I knew I just didn’t want to push too hard or risk anything at that point and I knew people were going to try to get by me, and I was going to fight as much as I could but not have the chance of going off.

“So I had to play it smart and make the moves when I could and you could see the cars going off and making mistakes, so easy to do here in a tenth of a second too late on the brakes, something can easily go wrong. So I had to be calm and seize my moment.”

Few drivers might have been better prepared for a single day doubleheader quite like Conway, who along with his open-wheel duties this year is Toyota Racing’s official reserve driver in the FIA World Endurance Championship. He hasn’t raced much this year due to his planned FIA WEC race program, an LMP2 effort with Millennium Racing, was halted preseason due to funding woes.

But Conway could have looked at Sunday’s pair of races in Toronto as separate stints in an endurance race, as he’s dovetailed sports car racing along with his road and street course starts in IndyCar since 2013. Essentially it was one full stint, a four-hour or so break, and then back in the car for race two.

“I suppose with having a seat in an endurance car, maybe it’s pretty helpful, the changing conditions, but IndyCar is the same thing. And these races are so tricky,” he said. “The first half of the race you’ve got to be smart really and it’s so true, you’ve got to not make any mistakes and let the race come to you a little bit, and it seems to happen that way.”

If ECR has been opportunistic, they certainly haven’t missed their chances to win. Combined, the team’s third win between Conway and Ed Carpenter equals them with Andretti Autosport for the second most number of wins this year. Only Team Penske, with four wins between its three drivers, has more this season in IndyCar.

“We had won before as a team, so I personally felt like we had better cars on road and street courses than what I was able to show,” Carpenter explained. “The cars were better than I was.

“We’re trying to grow this for the team and get results for our partners, and it’s been nice to be able to do that more consistently so far this year,” he added. “Mike’s one hell of a racer. It’s about him leading races. When you get him in position, when we do a good enough job or today him making the right call, when he gets in those positions he elevates his game and rises to the occasion.”

They did that to cap off the Toronto weekend.

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INDIANAPOLIS — The first Indy 500 victory for Josef Newgarden also was the richest in race history from a record 2023 purse of just more than $17 million.

The two-time NTT IndyCar Series champion, who continued his celebration Monday morning at Indianapolis Motor Speedway earned $3.666 million for winning the 107th running of the Greatest Spectacle in Racing.

The purse and winner’s share both are the largest in the history of the Indianapolis 500.

It’s the second consecutive year that the Indy 500 purse set a record after the 2022 Indy 500 became the first to crack the $16 million mark (nearly doubling the 2021 purse that offered a purse of $8,854,565 after a crowd limited to 135,000 because of the COVID-19 pandemic).

The average payout for IndyCar drivers was $500,600 (exceeding last year’s average of $485,000).

Indianapolis Motor Speedway owner Roger Penske, whose team also fields Newgarden’s No. 2 Dallara-Chevrolet, had made raising purses a priority since buying the track in 2020. But Penske but was unable to post big money purses until the race returned to full capacity grandstands last year.

The largest Indy 500 purse before this year was $14.4 million for the 2008 Indy 500 won by Scott Dixon (whose share was $2,988,065). Ericsson’s haul made him the second Indy 500 winner to top $3 million (2009 winner Helio Castroneves won $3,048,005.

Runner-up Marcus Ericsson won $1.043 million after falling short by 0.0974 seconds in the fourth-closest finish in Indy 500 history.

The 107th Indy 500 drew a crowd of at least 330,000 that was the largest since the sellout for the 100th running in 2016, and the second-largest in more than two decades, according to track officials.

“This is the greatest race in the world, and it was an especially monumental Month of May featuring packed grandstands and intense on-track action,” Penske Entertainment president and CEO Mark Miles said in a release. “Now, we have the best end card possible for the 107th Running of the Indianapolis 500: a record-breaking purse for the history books.”

Benjamin Pedersen was named the Indy 500 rookie of the year, earning a $50,000 bonus.

The race’s purse is determined through contingency and special awards from IMS and IndyCar. The awards were presented Monday night in the annual Indy 500 Victory Celebration at the JW Marriott in downtown Indianapolis.

The payouts for the 107th Indy 500:

1. Josef Newgarden, $3,666,000
2. Marcus Ericsson, $1,043,000
3. Santino Ferrucci, $481,800
4. Alex Palou, $801,500
5. Alexander Rossi, $574,000
6. Scott Dixon, $582,000
7. Takuma Sato, $217,300
8. Conor Daly, $512,000
9. Colton Herta, $506,500
10. Rinus VeeKay, $556,500
11. Ryan Hunter‐Reay, $145,500
12. Callum Ilott, $495,500
13. Devlin DeFrancesco, $482,000
14. Scott McLaughlin, $485,000
15. Helio Castroneves, $481,500
16. Tony Kanaan, $105,000
17. Marco Andretti, $102,000
18. Jack Harvey, $472,000
19. Christian Lundgaard, $467,500
20. Ed Carpenter, $102,000
21. Benjamin Pedersen (R), $215,300
22. Graham Rahal, $565,500*
23. Will Power, $488,000
24. Pato O’Ward, $516,500
25. Simon Pagenaud, $465,500
26. Agustín Canapino (R), $156,300
27. Felix Rosenqvist, $278,300
28. Kyle Kirkwood, $465,500
29. David Malukas, $462,000
30. Romain Grosjean, $462,000
31. Sting Ray Robb (R), $463,000
32. RC Enerson (R), $103,000
33. Katherine Legge, $102,000

*–Broken down between two teams, $460,000 Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing, $105,500 Dreyer & Reinbold Racing/Cusick Motorsports