For the second year in a row, the same driver won the St. Petersburg Indy Car Grand Prix.  The race started on Friday, March 11th, with a practice run.  That a day also happened to be almost exactly one year since driver Juan Pablo Montoya won the 2015 Grand Prix.

Saturday, drivers practiced again before qualifying to see where they would start in the race. Will Power, #12, won the pole position in qualifications, the number one spot.

But just hours before the race Sunday, team Penske announced that Power was not able to drive due to being diagnosed with a mild concussion. “That really sucks for Will Power, but if you have a concussion, the doctors will not let you race,” said Grand Prix fan Tyler Porter.

Because of his concussion, team Penske had to find a new driver the #12 Verizon car, but the issue with doing this was that the car had to be sent to the back line starting last. So because of this change, all of the drivers were moved up a spot, putting one of Power’s teammates, Simon Pagenaud, on the pole. When the drivers took the green flag, not much happened at the beginning, because Simon led the first 48 laps of race out of 110. After half the race was over, there was finally the first lead change, Conor Daly was the one to take over the lead, but not for long as Montoya caught up to him and took the lead for the majority of the second half of the race leading 44 laps.

By the time there were 15 laps left in the race, Montoya had pretty much pulled away from everyone else as Simon was in 2nd either 2 or 4 seconds behind. So there was really no doubt that he was going to win the race. “I would say he was a heavy favorite to win the race especially because the fastest driver could not race,” said Tyler.

This is Montoya’s second time winning this race and he has won it back to back years, only very few drivers have done this before in history, “I think it takes some major skill and a fast car for Montoya to win it back to back years,” said Tyler. Now one big question that people are wondering about a lot is that if Montoya will be able to pull it off again next year and win the race 3 years in a row.