JOLIET, Ill. — Sunday’s rain at Chicagoland Speedway forced NASCAR to postpone the opening race of the Chase for the Sprint Cup championship.
NASCAR rescheduled the race for today at 10 a.m., Mountain time.
“I think it will change the first 40 or 50 laps until the track gets rubbered up again. Then I think it will be similar to what it has been all weekend,” said Matt Kenseth, who will start from the pole position.
Dixon wins Japan 300
MOTEGI, Japan — The IndyCar championship race is going down to the wire — again. Scott Dixon won the Indy Japan 300 from the pole, and Will Power finished second to take the points lead from Dario Franchitti, whose uncharacteristic slip-up helped set up a reprisal of last year’s tight title race going into the final two events.
Team Penske’s Power moved into first place in the standings with 542 points, 11 ahead of Franchitti, who finished eighth after being penalized for hitting Ryan Briscoe‘s car on the 26th lap.
“It was a stupid move on my part,” said Franchitti, who started ninth. “I did a lot of hard work to get from ninth to fifth, and I’d been saving fuel the whole first stint. I thought there was a gap and Ryan was going wide on the entry and that was that.”
Marco Andretti finished third, Alex Tagliani was fourth and Oriol Servia took fifth.
• Matt Hagan backed up his record-setting run by beating points leader Mike Neff in the funny car finals for his first victory of the season at the NHRA Nationals in Concord, N.C. Antron Brown (top fuel), Kurt Johnson (pro stock) and Eddie Krawiec (pro stock motorcycle) won in their respective categories in the first event of NHRA’s six-race playoff.
Djokovic bows out of Davis Cup.
Novak Djokovic‘s ailing back didn’t hold up, meaning Rafael Nadal won’t have to face his main rival in the Davis Cup final.
Djokovic tried to help Serbia stage a comeback in its semifinal against Argentina despite a lingering back problem, but he had to retire when trailing 7-6 (5), 3-0 against Juan Martin del Potro. That sent Argentina into the final against Spain, which advanced after Nadal routed Jo-Wilfried Tsonga 6-0, 6-2, 6-4 on clay in Cordoba.
Argentina ended up winning 3-2 after Serbia’s Janko Tipsarevic took the final meaningless match when Juan Monaco retired after losing the first set 6-2. Spain completed a 4-1 win after Fernando Verdasco beat Richard Gasquet in the final match.
Footnotes.
Former CSU star Becky Hammon scored 18 points to lead the host San Antonio Silver Stars over the Minnesota Lynx 84-75 to even the Western Conference WNBA semifinals series at 1-1. The deciding game will be Tuesday in Minneapolis.
• Angel McCoughtry scored all 12 of her points in the second half, and the host Atlanta Dream rallied for a 69-64 win over the Connecticut Sun to reach the Eastern Conference finals for the second consecutive season.
• American wrestler and NCAA champion Jordan Burroughs won his first world championship title in Istanbul, Turkey, defeating Sedagh Saaeed Goudarzi of Iran 3-2, 4-1 in the 74-kilogram freestyle category.
