Fernandez takes second win

"At that point I knew I we were not going to win the race," Fernandez said. "I knew I had a car that was able to win the race, but with that pit-stop, there was no way. At some stages of the race, I was just sitting back and trying to see how the race was going to develop. After that, it was just a matter of getting the lead."

Fernandez avoided the carnage all around him, eight cars crashed during the race including Indianapolis 500 winner Buddy Rice whose car flipped over after making contact with Darren Manning with 14 laps to go.

Since defecting from the Champ Car World Series to join the Indy Racing League in March, Fernandez has reached full speed in his first 13 races in new surroundings. He won at Kentucky Speedway, finished second the following week at Pikes Peak, ran seventh at Nazareth and followed that with this win.

"These last four races have been tremendous for the team," Fernandez said. "We've been working very hard. The opportunities that we're getting are tremendous, especially with adversity today."

He did it by outlasting Bryan Herta on a seven-lap shootout at the end of the 200 lap race. Herta, who finished third last year in a three-wide finish at Chicagoland, gained dramatically on Fernandez during the final lap. He tried the outside line in turns three and four, but couldn't pull alongside Fernandez, whose Fernandez Racing Honda-powered Panoz G Force beat Herta's Andretti Green Racing Honda/Dallara to the stripe by 0.0716s.

For Herta, the situation was similar to one Tony Kanaan faced in August at Michigan, when AGR officials told him to surrender the lead to Buddy Rice. This time, the same call was made to Herta, who said he let Fernandez go shortly after a restart on the 146th lap.

"The team asked me to let Adrian by and try to draft off of him," Herta said. "I did that - lifted a little bit and let him by - but I don't think he could have passed me otherwise. Then we had all of the yellows after that, and I could never get back around him."

Series leader Kanaan finished third, inching closer to the championship by finishing one position ahead of team-mate Dan Wheldon and watching Rice's car sail into the air on the 186th lap, dropping the Team Rahal driver to a 14th place finish. Heading into the second-to-last race of the season at California Speedway on October 3, Kanaan has a 75-point lead over Wheldon, while Rice barely hangs on to a mathematical shot of catching Kanaan, 95 points behind.

"I didn't have a car to win today," Kanaan said. "Thirteen top-fives in a row make you a champion one day. That's the mentality. You have to understand that if you have a fifth-place car, you finish fifth."

Rice's flip put an exclamation point on a rough race that included several incidents of hard contact, many of which didn't end in wrecks. Townsend Bell's car bounced off Scott Sharp's and into the wall on the 112th lap, the first of several crashes. Tomas Scheckter and Jacques Lazier hit the wall together on the 131st lap, and AJ Foyt IV and Mark Taylor crashed in turn four on the 156th lap.

When Rice's car touched wheels with Darren Manning's, it turned the Rahal Letterman Racing Honda/G Force sideways on the nose of Manning's car, then flipped it into the air. It landed on its roll hoop and skidded along the wall on the backstretch. After safety workers turned the car back onto its wheels, Rice emerged unscathed.

"I have no idea what happened, to be honest with you," Rice said. "It's what ends up happening when you have 20-lap shootouts at a place like this. Everyone is in tight quarters all the time. That's the way it goes."

With 57 laps left, Herta and Fernandez stayed on the track as the leaders pitted. It turned out to be the call of the day for both drivers; the stayed in the first two positions from that point on.

"When we saw that the leaders were going to pit, we knew it was time for us to do the reverse," Fernandez said. "Bryan Herta pitted four laps before us (previously), so we knew we had four laps on him. If we were going to have a problem (with fuel), then he was going to have a problem, too. Sometimes in these races, you have to take some chances and stay there."

Like Fernandez, Herta dropped to the back of the 22-car field early in the race when his car encountered a loose condition. "I was the last car at one point, and I was just hanging on," Herta said. "We kept making changes on the pit stops and kept getting it better and better. At that point we decided to try to get off sequence on our pit-stop strategy and try to get our track position back."

Following Fernandez, Herta and Kanaan to the line was Wheldon in another AGR car. Vitor Meira was fifth, the ninth time in 14 races this season in which he's finished seventh or better. At sixth, Sam Hornish Jr drove the highest-finishing Toyota. Scott Dixon was seventh, matching his best finish since April, while Felipe Giaffone recorded a season-best eighth-place finish.

Sharp and pole winner Helio Castroneves rounded out the top 10.

When the dust had settled, though, Fernandez was celebrating his second win in four weeks - and the decision he made in March. Despite missing the season opener, Fernandez is now sixth in the IRL standings, one point out of fifth and 14 points out of fourth.

"For us to finish fourth in the championship after what happened at the beginning of the year couldn't be any better," he said.