Will Power stretched his fuel and held off a hard-charging Simon Pagenaud to win Sunday's Izod IndyCar Series Long Beach Grand Prix and give Team Penske it's third straight win to open the 2012 season.
It's also the second straight win for Power, who won two weeks ago at Barber Motorsports Park.
Power started 12th thanks to the 10 place grid penalties that were assessed to all of the Chevrolet teams before the start of the race weekend. During a test at Sonoma, Chevy found an issue and made a precautionary move to change all of its teams engines before Long Beach. Because of the new IndyCar Series engine rules regarding rule changes, that meant that each Chevy team was required to start 10 places behind where it qualified, leading to a jumbled up field with the front-row from Saturday's qualifying session starting in the sixth row.
The front row consisted of Dario Franchitti and Josef Newgarden, both in Hondas. Newgarden, a rookie driving for Sarah Fisher Hartman Racing, went for the lead on the outside of turn one on the opening lap, but made contact with Franchitti and slammed into the outside wall -- contact that ended his day.
The penalties led to a bunch of different strategies with seemingly every team on a different tire and fuel strategy. After pitting on the edge of his fuel window, Power passed Takuma Sato for the lead and built enough of an advantage to make it to the checkered flag as Pagenaud ran out of laps to catch and pass him. Despite the penalties, eight Chevrolets finished in the top 10.
