Schmidt Peterson Motorsports, along with drivers James Hinchcliffe and Mikhail Aleshin, returned to the track this weekend in Newton, IA for the fourth oval event on the 2017 Verizon IndyCar Series calendar.

The Iowa Corn 300’s two-day event provided two practice sessions and a qualifying round on Friday. Both SPM crews proved quick off the trucks with top-10 lap times in the practice sessions overall. Once the time to qualify arrived, Aleshin and the No. 7 Schmidt Peterson Motorsports Honda qualified in sixth place with teammate Hinchcliffe putting down a two-lap average speed in the No. 5 Arrow Electronics Schmidt Peterson Motorsports Honda for a ninth-place starting position.

The 300-lap race saw a clean start amongst the 21 competitors and marked James’ 100th Verizon IndyCar Series start. The two Schmidt Peterson Motorsports teammates soon settled in to their top-seven positions with Aleshin breaking into the top three. After battling a looser setup, on one bigger moment, the Russian was unable to hold on the No. 7 which broke loose and made contact with the Turn 2 wall ending his day.

Hinchcliffe’s day showed a bit better than recent events and saw the 30-year-old fighting for a top-five finish with plenty of his own close calls while battling it out. The Canadian brought his Honda home in a solid 10th place.

“It was a bit of a long day for us, to be honest,” Hinchcliffe admitted. “We had a really quick car in certain points of the day, but really struggled with the car going loose in traffic. There was a bunch of times where we had really good runs on cars, and as I tried to pull up behind them, we just totally lost the back of the car. We were really fighting that all night long… it was a bit of a battle out there for sure. We probably had a fifth-place car, but unfortunately we couldn’t pull that off today. It was nice to get a finish after some of the luck we’ve had the last few rounds. We head to a street circuit which is what we’ve been strong at so far this year, so hopefully we can have a good result in the Arrow car in Toronto."

The Indianapolis team have a quick turnaround at home converting the cars from oval to street course setup and will head to Canada this Wednesday for the Honda Indy Toronto. With the sole Canadian driver in the series, next weekend’s event will see plenty of support for the Mayor of Hinchtown for the July 16 race.