Hornish gets first win of season; Patrick third

A late crash tighted the field and made for a close finish.

FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) — Sam Hornish Jr. finally got his first victory of the season and feisty Danica Patrick came out on top in her “Rumble at the Speedway” with a career-best finish.

Despite being the closest finish in the IndyCar Series this season, Hornish had a dominating victory at Texas Saturday night — leading 159 of 228 laps and having a nearly 7 1⁄2-second lead before his final pit stop and then again before a late multicar crash.

“We had a great car. It did everything we wanted it to do. It was phenomenal,” Hornish said. “If feels good. I said all season, we were right there, right on the edge. Tonight the car was so good, we just needed things not to go against us.”

The only thing that slowed Hornish’s No. 6 Team Penske car down on way to his series-best 19th career victory were the necessary pit stops and the late crash. That wreck tightened the field and forced him to hold off a late charge by Tony Kanaan and Patrick.

Hornish was one of only three drivers with top-10 finishes in the first six races, but led only five laps before getting to the 1 1⁄2-mile high-banked Texas track. He is the first three-time winner at Texas Motor Speedway, but hadn’t won at the track since 2002.

Career-best finish

For Patrick, her career-best finish came after all the hype this week surrounding her postrace confrontation on pit row with Dan Wheldon a week ago.

“Maybe we should make you mad more often,” joked Kanaan, her Andretti Green teammate.

“There’s a story, and all of a sudden I have a season-best. It was really just a matter of time I think. We’ve had fast cars,” Patrick said. “It’s a shame Tony and I didn’t have more time to get Sam.”

Hornish won with an average speed of 177.314 mph and by a margin of only .0786 seconds — the 11th straight Texas race finished under the green flag that was decided by less than a half-second.

Sarah Fisher’s car was running slow on the bottom of the track to avoid the car of A.J. Foyt IV, whose right rear tire had popped off and was bouncing on the track. Ed Carpenter, Foyt’s teammate with Vision Racing, moved up and made contact with Scott Dixon.

In the chain reaction that followed, Wheldon — the Target Chip Ganassi teammate of Dixon who had running at the front all night — and Helio Castroneves of Team Penske were knocked out of the race.

Hornish maintained the lead on the restart — and there was mostly a 1-2-3 line to the finish with Kanaan unable to get enough of a push to get past the leader.