“I believe in miracles.” – Zak Brown
Welcome back to another edition of Dre’s Race Review and it’s yet another IndyCar weekend on top of either F1 or MotoGP. Help me out here, thank goodness we take a week off after Laguna Seca next week, jeezus!
Anyway, time for IndyCar to head back over the border to a fan favourite round – Toronto, and it was another game of strategy that led to Pato O’Ward taking his second victory in a week. Let’s get into it.
Green With Envy
There were a few tactical elements of this race that reared their heads from previous races in 2025:
- The green guayule Firestone tire for the weekend, and like Long Beach, it wasn’t built to last. 10 laps, at most. We saw in the race that drivers like Alex Palou had to stretch it to 12 laps and he was hurting by the end of the stint.
- The race was extended from previous editions by 5 laps, upping it to 90 instead of 85. A full tank of fuel was good for roughly 34, so it didn’t really alter the number of stops needed, this was still a 2-stop race on fuel by all measures, but combined with having to run the guayule, it meant you probably had to do 3-stops unless you got a conveniently timed caution.
So, time to toss that coin – Do you bet on an early caution or not? For the majority of the field, the answer was yes. Only three men in the Top 15 elected to start on the Primary tire – David Malukas, Louis Foster and Alex Palou. If you got the early caution on the green tire, then you’re probably in the jackpot as you can ditch that tire early, top up on fuel, and turn it into an effective two-stopper on primaries only.
*flips coin* *sees Scott McLaughlin in the wall on Lap 3*
Alternate tire runners, your luck is in! Turns out Scotty Mac, who was starting 14th and was clearly feeling spicy, ditched his Alternates on Lap 2 at the first chance he could get… only for his pitcrew to not apply his left rear nut properly, it comes off and McLaughlin’s in the wall. Almost all the alternate runners dive in and ditch that tire knowing they don’t have to run it again, shuffling Alex Palou to the top, who can now try and stretch the field out with slower alternate runners behind him and the chasing pack in traffic.
Christian Rasmussen finally having an accident after using up all nine of his lives led to another caution, that didn’t really change things on Lap 15. A quick restart, and Palou takes off, he’s pushing the gap between himself, and Pato O’Ward (Who ditched his greens on Lap 1), to 25 seconds – It’s almost enough for a free pitstop and makes Palou heavy favourite for the win, until…
*Alexander Rossi hits the wall on Lap 30*
Rossi’s very unlucky. He hit the wall between concrete blocks and it ripped his wheel off1. Palou and teammate Scott Dixon get absolutely hosed here. Palou’s 25 second advantage is wiped out, and now strategically they’re in no man’s land. The only blessing is, the caution reduces the amount of time they can be on the green tyre and still make the end (12 was the target), but now they’re guaranteed to lose track position as nearly everyone else is in for their first of two remaining stops. But at least they can mitigate the damage with a bit of green flag running for maybe five la-
*Jacob Abel is put in the wall and wrecks Josef Newgarden on Lap 37, with Devlin DeFrancesco, Nolan Siegel and Callum Illot also involved*
…As they used to say in military, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Palou and Dixon had to pit under green on Lap 41, and they never got that track position back for another caution the rest of the way. The early green tire ditchers win the wall, and after Pato O’Ward ran another overcut to beat Rinus Veekay out for the lead, Pato can run it easy all the way to Lap 88, when Felix Rosenqvist with a front wing that would make Palou’s 2023 car blush, goes into the wall and takes Nolan Siegel with him, ending the race under yellow.
It led to a comfortable win for Pato O’Ward, his second win in a week, and a slashing of his Championship deficit to 99. And with Kirkwood now 74 points back in third, Pato looks pretty locked into the runner-up spot barring major hiccups in the final four races. McLaren left it late, but they are genuinely putting together their best IndyCar season to date. I’d argue this is overdue, but better late than never, even if both major honours will likely elude them again.
Some deserved flowers to the other members of the podium – Rinus Veekay in second has quietly been excellent in the Dale Coyne #18 car this season. If we were power ranking the teams going into 2025, DCR would be second-to-last behind new team Prema. Yet this was Rinus’ seventh Top 10 of the season, and the best result ANY DCR car has had since David Malukas in Gateway back in 2022. An exceptional reward for a man sitting 11th(!!) in points right now.
Then there’s Kyffin Simpson. I had my doubts about Kyffin going into 2025. It was hard not to be cynical. Cayman Islander, paying for his seat, probably moved up from Indy NXT early and seemed stronger in Sportscars. But in Year 2 he’s had some genuinely good results and it seems he’s been the biggest winner of CGR downsizing to three cars and actually giving him more resources to succeed – Which he in return has backed up with some good drives2*. A contender for IndyCar’s “most improved” in 2025.
Now I’m 965 words into this review – Can I call a chaotic strategy race “bad” if I had this much to say on it? No. Do I think the series got away with it to an extent? Yes. I don’t like Firestone’s direction in having a soft tire that has the preservation of chewing gum. It’s very F1 2012 and I don’t think that was the reason the season was good. I don’t like having a tyre situation where one tire is good for 8-10 laps and another can comfortably do 40. That’s the sort of thing that normally eliminates strategy, rather than add to it. But here, it worked. Sprink in an absolutely banzai fight sequence between Dixon, Palou, Power, Malukas, Rosenqvist, Lundgaard and Armstrong, and you have a pretty good IndyCar chaos race.
It felt like ordering a Five Guys. You know it’s guaranteed to be delicious, but it’s also going to make a huge dent in your wallet.
The Lightning Round
CONTENT WARNING: It’s fucking grim seeing FOX Sports use it’s collaboration with Barstool Sports right away to get one of their own over to promote the race. A reminder that Barstool is owned by Dave Portnoy – A racist who has joked about blackface, used the N-word, and once said: “Even though I never condone r*** if you’re a Size 6 and you’re wearing skinny jeans you kind of deserve to be r***d right?”. In shocking news, he also has multiple sexual assault allegations against his name. This is who IndyCar is now having promote their events, less than a week after celebrating Myles Rowe as the series first black Indy NXT winner. Just saying.
Santino Ferrucci didn’t make the start of this race because he crashed so hard in warm-ups they couldn’t repair the car in time. Glaze that one, Townsend.
Alex Palou was due a Nat-1 roll eventually, he’s been at least 19 for most of the season. And funnily enough, it was his call to go with their strategy. 40% of the time, I think he wins. Alas, there’ll be no title coronation at Laguna Seca, I’ll tell the children.
Speaking of Nat 20’s… Pato hip-checked Will Power into the wall and didn’t get hit with an avoidable contact penalty. Now I can’t say for sure who was in the wrong as we only got the 360’ cam from a sideways angle, but Pato may have gotten away with that one. Seemingly, Kyle Novak was just got to let all Turn 3 passes go by for anything less than first-degree murder.
No seriously, how many ladders did Josef Newgarden walk under last off-season? It’s not even funny anymore how unlucky he’s been. No-one was at fault for that caution, but of course, he’s the big casualty. His fifth DNF of 2025, and his sixth finish of 20th or lower. That man’s season is miserable, and McLaughlin’s isn’t much better either. Four races left for Penske to avoid their first winless season since 1999.
It’s funny. I think the fastest man of the weekend was Kyle Kirkwood, cementing his King of the Streets status. Had the fastest lap of qualifying… but it was in Round 2 as he made a mistake on his final hot lap. He lines up out of position on the opening green flag and has to drop three positions. And then to top it all off, he gets spun on pit road by Marcus Armstrong. Sixth in a race he arguably should have won is gonna hurt like hell. Still a decent street day for Andretti again though with a 4-5-6, and good to see Marcus Ericsson finally get a decent result after another really difficult year.
Prema’s best result in IndyCar thanks to Callum Illot finishing 8th – Good for them. And man, did Callum need that, he’s another driver that I expected a little more from this year.
And at what point do we collectively say Jacob Abel just isn’t at the level of IndyCar? It’s horribly awkward because he pays for his seat (It paid for Rinus’ too), and from what has been said, he’s a genuinely delightful human being – But as I’ve said on M101 before, if the first thing you can say about a driver is how nice he is… he’s probably not very good.
Remember when Colton Herta was a shoe-in for Cadillac F1? Now he needs to beat Scott Dixon just to get a Superlicense. He’s 84 points behind with four to go. Valtteri Bottas time?
The Verdict: 7/10 (Good) – I can’t call that one boring, that’s for damn sure. A genuinely intriguing strategy race, with some chaos from crashes and borderline penalty-level passes made this a pretty good race all-told. Even if I’ve still got indigestion from the amount of potato I just ate. See you at Laguna Seca.
- Check his Instagram story if you want to see the evidence… you know, before it vanishes off the internet. ↩︎
- The only problem with this statement in balance is… the man you cut in Marcus Armstrong, is 7th in points and has objectively been better. Only thing Chip likes more than winners, is having his bills paid for. ↩︎
