Sam Hornish Jr raced into the IRL IndyCar Series points lead with his second win in eight days after a dominating performance in the Kansas Lottery Indy 300.
Much like he did last Saturday night at Richmond Hornish Jr paced the majority of the 200-laps that made up the eighth round of the 2006 season in his #6 Marlboro Team Penske Dallara-Honda for his third win of the season.
Target Chip Ganassi Racing may have had the edge over Hornish's Penske crew in the pits but on the track the current Indy 500 champion was in a class of his own with any lead held by another driver proving to be short lived.
It took Hornish seven laps to get by polesitter Dan Wheldon at the beginning of the 200-lap blast around the wide open 1.5-mile Kansas Speedway and while both Wheldon and his teammate Scott Dixon would edge ahead of the double series champion during pitstops Hornish was always able to get back ahead.
Once again the race was run with relatively few caution periods with the first yellow pegging back a rampant Hornish, who had eased out a several second lead inside 30 laps. From that point onwards Hornish's lead would rarely top more than two seconds with Wheldon and Dixon both taking turns to try and wrest the spot away.
Although Dixon's quick pitstop enabled the New Zealander to exit the pits ahead of Hornish during the opening round of stops it took Hornish less than a lap to get the lead back.
The next time Hornish would be usurped was during a round of green flag pitstops with roughly 50 laps remaining when Wheldon's team was able to service their man quicker than anyone else and send the Englishman back on track with a reasonably healthy lead.
In clean air and with more than a second in hand over Hornish, Wheldon was actually able to maintain an advantage over the Marlboro backed machine until a pair of late cautions for separate single car incidents involving Scott Sharp and Buddy Rice pegged the Ganassi man back.
