Schmidt Peterson Motorsports drivers James Hinchcliffe and Mikhail Aleshin both had an abrupt and violent end to what could have been a great day for the team at Texas Motor Speedway for the Rainguard Water Sealers 600. After running near the front, both cars were involved in a three-wide wreck that took out almost half the field.

Aleshin qualified a solid seventh whereas Hinchcliffe could only do 16th in a disappointing run for the Petro Canada Lubricants sponsored racer. Having turned the cars around overnight, both cars were running very strong in the 248-lap contest at the 1.5-mile oval.

Hinchcliffe had an early spin in pit lane relegating him to the back of the pack, but this was followed by an awe inspiring run up to the front of the pack. With both cars running near the top five, a three-wide moment heading into Turn 3 with Tony Kanaan resulted in heavy contact, taking both SPM cars out of the race on Lap 151.

"We had a run on TK [Tony Kanaan] and he had plenty of room on the left, but he just came to the right," noted a frustrated Hinchcliffe. "If you look at the replay, he comes all the way from the white line to the middle of the racetrack, just pinched me into Mikhail (Aleshin). Either his spotter didn’t tell him we were three wide or what, but I couldn’t go anywhere, I was sandwiched in the middle. I was not expecting him to do that; Tony has more experience in this kind of pack racing than anybody. I went wheel to wheel with him last year for the win and nine times out of 10 would do that all day long, but for whatever reason he wasn’t playing very nice today and wrecked a lot of good equipment. It turned into way more of a pack race than we’ve had here in a long time, which unfortunately, leads to situations like this. A lot of good cars taken out, but I’m glad everybody’s okay. We had such a good car. We had that penalty after I looped it in pit lane, but then we raced our way back to the lead lap; we were side-by-side with Will (Power) and we had the car in the top five. The Arrow Electronics car was just incredible and that last pit stop from the Schmidt Peterson Motorsports guys was just great, it’s just a super frustrating way to end a day that was going as well as that in this fashion. I just feel bad for the Arrow Electronics boys because we had two good cars that got taken out today."

The team now has a well-deserved weekend off before the Verizon IndyCar Series returns to Road America for the 10th race of the 2017 championship on June 25th.