By Andrew Cutler
June 6 2010

In his previous three starts at Texas Motor Speedway, Ryan Briscoe has finished in the exact same position as he started each race. As pole-sitter for last night's event, he had to consider this to be a good omen: After a disapointing month of May at Indy, the Aussie was in need of a confidence boost.

After leading the early laps, Briscoe surrendered the point to others, most notably Dario Franchitti and Alex Tagliani during the 'middle' half of the race, but stayed within striking distance all the while. Regaining the lead with about fifty laps to go, he would only be seriously challenged from that point on by Danica Patrick, who put in her best performance since winning at Motegi back in 2008.

“This is a huge win. Not only for winning, but to get this championship rolling for the No. 6 car (Briscoe moved from 7th to 5th in the points)", Ryan said afterwards. "It’s been a really difficult start to the season for this team. It’s so competitive this year. It’s not easy to run consistently in the top 3 or 5.” 

Still in somewhat of a 'charm offensive' to dispell any lingering fan displeasure over her unfortunate choice of words in her post-qualy interview at Indy, Patrick made a point of keeping a cheerful tone and praising her crew. “Sometimes the little victories that I have throughout the season are not necessarily obvious on the track.  Maybe they’re in other aspects of what I’m doing, winning little victories here and there to get everything in line to perform from top to bottom on race day. I’ve been working hard all season. It’s just really nice to have a result to show how hard I’ve been working and how hard the team has been working as well.”

Her Andretti Autosport teammate Marco Andretti finished in third.

There were two scarry incidents during the race. In the first, the car of rookie Simona de Silvestro caught fire after hitting the Turn Two wall: Simona would suffer burns to her right hand as she struggled to get out. In the second, Mario Moraes would pinch Helio Castroneves into the wall comming out of Turn Four: this would send both cars pinwheeling down the front stretch, collecting rookie Bertrand Baguette in the process.

Here are the complete race results: http://www.indycar.com/var/assets/Firestone550KBoxScore.pdf

Next up for the IndyCar Series is the Iowa Corn Indy 250 on the 7/8 mile Iowa Speedway, on June 20th at 1:30pm ET/6;30 pm GMT.