Team Penske should be the ones to beat Saturday night in Texas. Fact. They usually are anyways as they’ve won two of the last three NTT IndyCar Series races at the 1.5-mile track. After all, three of the top superspeedway racers in the series today all reside in that camp. Will Power has won half of his last eight superspeedway starts. He also has five top eight finishes in his last eight tries too.

Simon Pagenaud is the same way. Five of his last eight superspeedway starts have resulted in a top four finish as well. He’s not finished outside the top eight in that time frame too. Even their Team Penske teammate Josef Newgarden has gotten a better handle on them. Seven of his last 12 superspeedway finishes were in the top five including five of his last seven fifth or better.

Some say Penske’s team this past spring with Scott McLaughlin could have given them an unfair advantage. Team President Tim Cindric says not so fast. The test was more beneficial to McLaughlin than the team he noted.

“I think it was really more helpful for him,” said Cindric on Thursday. “At the end of the day, it was just him being able to get up to speed and be in a position to understand what an oval is like and how fast it really is. I think the perception is that it may. It probably depends on what side you sit on.

“But what we ran there with him was obviously something very different than what we would plan to race with our guys because you’re trying to give him the maximum level of comfort. He didn’t really run — I can’t remember even how many laps that he ran, but just getting to the point where he could hold the thing full throttle all the way around was a bit of a learning curve. You have to remember he’s never been on an oval whatsoever before.

“But yeah, any time you go there — I don’t think we learned too much more than I guess we anticipated doing. I don’t really know how to answer the question because it’s all going to be really a matter of perception. Every team that didn’t get a run there is going to say that we gained all these big advantages and we’re going to say that really it wasn’t that big of an advantage. It was a bit of an inconvenience in some ways to go do it in the way that we did it right after the previous test, but we felt like we had him here in the country and it was a good opportunity for him to learn what that was all about.

“In fact, he was actually scheduled to try and run the Richmond open test and the reason for the Texas test was that they weren’t going to allow him to run the Richmond open test with the other competitors unless he had run on an oval, so the background to why we actually went to Texas was it was the only oval that whoa could run, that we could actually get him cleared to do the Richmond open test.”

What could give them an advantage though is their NASCAR program.

“I think the fact that we’re running a NASCAR team out of the same building has probably given us a lot bigger edge on what to understand at Texas than maybe running Scott McLaughlin there for a few laps,” Cindric continued.

But, what if I told you the Honda boys have been the top manufacturer at the Texas Motor Speedway lately?

While Newgarden won last year’s race in a Chevrolet powered car, Honda drivers accounted for leading 194 of the 248 completed laps though and took four of the top five finishing positions including six of the top eight even. Newgarden, was the only Chevy driver to lead and he did so all at the end. In 2018, Honda led 66-percent of the laps (162 of 248) and took eight of the top nine finishing positions then as well. That’s Honda leading 72-percent of the Texas laps over the last two years.

Scott Dixon and Alexander Rossi are surely ones to beat because of that too. Dixie, has four podiums in his last six superspeedway tries while Rossi has six top four finishes in his last seven tries on them including a runner-up in this race last year to Newgarden. They’re the ones to beat for a reason.

Young Colton Herta was strong last year until the end when he crashed with Dixon while another second year driver in Santino Ferrucci was actually at his best on superspeedway’s.

You can’t count out Ryan Hunter-Reay, Graham Rahal nor last year’s pole sitter Takuma Sato either. All have potential to win at Texas any time they lineup.

So, will Penske carry the banner for the bowties out of the gates on Saturday night on network television in primetime or will the Honda camp dominate the show for a third straight year?

While everything is different about this year’s race and has drivers nervous, Rossi says that despite them having more cars than anyone on Saturday, it’s not necessarily an advantage either.

“No, because I think there’s a lot of teams that have more testing than us with a very new component this year, so it’s a disadvantage for us,” Rossi said. “But the fact that we do have multiple drivers is good come race day, but we have to use that information correctly.

“I’ve said it many times before, we have a huge opportunity to really kind of try different things across different cars, but it’s also easy when you have that many cars and that many opinions to kind of get lost a little bit. I think the way that the team has been structured this off-season is really, really good, and I have a huge amount of confidence in our ability to process that information, but we just have to keep that in mind, especially on shortened events when you come back to have a debrief and you have five opinions flying around and you don’t have a lot of time to make the decision, you’ve got to categorically go through the things and be able to process the information that you can use for yourself and not.

“It is an advantage if we do it correctly, which I think over the past couple of years the team has been expanding and we’re prepared for it, so I’m looking forward to it. But in terms of there not being testing, I don’t think us having more cars is an advantage at all. Like I said, there’s quite a few other teams that have had quite a few more days and laps than we have had up until this point.”