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Start: Helio Castroneves, Team Penske Chevrolet leads
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Motorsport.com's Top 10 IndyCar drivers of 2017

Team Penske-Chevrolet scored 10 victories in the 17-race 2017 Verizon IndyCar Series schedule, but remarkably there were still 10 different race winners and the finale featured four realistic title contenders. David Malsher assesses the elite.

Josef Newgarden, Team Penske Chevrolet
Sébastien Bourdais, Dale Coyne Racing Honda
Sébastien Bourdais, Dale Coyne Racing Honda
Spencer Pigot, Ed Carpenter Racing Chevrolet
Spencer Pigot, Ed Carpenter Racing Chevrolet

The Penske domination continued for a second straight season, but this was also the year in which we saw a win for Dale Coyne Racing from Sebastien Bourdais, James Hinchcliffe’s first victory since his life-threatening shunt at Indy two years ago, the first roadcourse triumph for Alexander Rossi, Takuma Sato scoring the first Indy 500 victory for a Japanese driver and the first win in three years for Helio Castroneves.

2017 was also a year in which criticism of Race Control seemed almost to disappear, when Curtis Francois proved at Gateway Motorsports Park that IndyCar’s oval races can be successful, and when two teams (Juncos Racing and Harding Racing) and several aspiring fulltime IndyCar drivers (Zach Veach, Jack Harvey, Esteban Gutierrez, Ed Jones and Zachary Claman DeMelo) made their series debuts, although Jones was the only full-season rookie in 2017.

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