Sonoma Raceway lands IndyCar season finale for 2015

The 2015 IndyCar Series season championship could land right in the hands of a road-course ringer in Wine Country.

The American open-wheel series will host its season finale Aug. 30 at Sonoma Raceway next year, becoming the first major auto racing series to finish its season at the Northern California 12-turn road course. The series has held its finale at the Auto Club Speedway in Fontana in recent years.

Sonoma Raceway president and general manager Steve Page said the talks came together in recent weeks when IndyCar realized that ending the season on Labor Day weekend wasn’t going to work.

“We’ve been talking to them for some time, and they’ve been wrestling with some changes with the schedule,” he said.

Ultimately, the track and series worked together, and Sonoma became a good option to end the season on the weekend before Labor Day, the same weekend the road course has always held an IndyCar event.

Page said the market is a major favorite of the series’ sponsors and “the idea of building that whole season-ending celebration in Sonoma was very appealing.”

The IndyCar title has come down to the final race of the season every year since 2006, but all those finales were hosted at ovals. Will Power, the 2014 IndyCar champion, leads all active drivers with three Grand Prix of Sonoma wins and four pole awards. Scott Dixon won this year’s race.

“Sonoma will be an outstanding place to end the Verizon IndyCar Series season,” Power said in a press release. “It’s an awesome venue with fans who really love our sport. Sonoma is one of my absolute favorite tracks and I’m really excited for the season to end there. I think it will be a good change of pace from the previous years.”

Sonoma is known as a road course where it’s hard to pass and even tougher to race, where track position and nifty driving reign over aerodynamics and horsepower. Whoever starts on the pole usually wins, unless they suffer a mechanical failure or slip-up on track.

Power knows all about that, as a mid-race spin in this year’s race sent him to the rear of the field before he finished in 10th place.

Dixon, a three-time series champion, isn’t complaining about the change, either.

“Sonoma has always been a great circuit for the Verizon IndyCar Series schedule, and I’m happy to hear we’re continuing that relationship,” Dixon said. “People always ask what my favorite track is, and I often say ‘the last one I won at,’ so it’s perfect for me. It’s a very technical and challenging track.”

The IndyCar season consists of 17 events across six ovals, six road courses and four street courses. The season’s first race will held on a road course in Brazil. The first race on American soil will be held on a St. Petersburg, Fla., street course, and the first race on an oval will be the Indianapolis 500 on Memorial Day weekend.