“You thought it was going to be different again, didn’t you?”
Well, ain’t this one a familiar tale? Welcome back to the second half of another Dre Race Review double billing, and this week’s extra portion is the first of IndyCar’s dreaded “run-in”; six races in the final five weeks of the year in a quintuple header. The first of the Final 6: Portland. And guess what – You gave Alex Palou clear air and an open track. You know how this story ends. Let’s talk about it.
The Inevitable
Props to Felix Rosenqvist, who’s become so well-rounded in IndyCar that he can now take pole positions at his best and he beat Palou to pole by 0.019 of a second in the Fast Six. The big shock was David Malukas starting P15 after only qualifying ninth in Q2 with a six-place grid penalty slapped on top for an unapproved engine change and Christian Lundgaard failing to get out of Round 1 after his hybrid stopped working. Again.
When the race started, it was Felix Rosenqvist picking up where he left off in Long Beach, controlling the early pace with Marcus Ericsson leaping ahead of Alex Palou on his soft compound tyres, and Christian Lundgaard making up 10 places in the first 10 laps – scything through the backmarkers. Due to the race’s only caution coming out when Graham Rahal hit the wall at Turn 7, some runners like Josef Newgarden, Nolan Siegel and Santino Ferrucci all pitted for new tyres and turn the race into the rarely seen 4-stop strategy while the leaders were likely to stick to three.
And in another classic case of Palou being a strategic sorcerer, running longer and stretching his first stint put him in the lead after the first round of stops, leapfrogging both Ericsson and Rosenqvist. (Money pitstop from the 10 crew helped too.) I’m running out of Yu-Gi-Oh magician cards to compare him to like in past reviews, so let’s go for the new Overframe Dark Paladin, it’s sexy.
Palou got his mandatory soft tyre stint out of the way early, and Palou started pounded out lap times to stretch the lead out to nearly eight seconds as he pulled away from the field. But then Palou ran into the other major problem with Portland – As it’s only a 61 second lap, by half-distance, you’re going to be dealing with lapped traffic during pit-cycles and Palou started losing time when he had to follow Pato O’Ward and Graham Rahal, and inevitably it lead to Rosenqvist coming back to him because the Hard tyre had a crossover point after around 20-laps in the cycle. (It was a tad redundant because you could fit a 20-lap stint into the 110-laps on a 3-stopper and tyre wear was better than expected because the race was cooler than the rest of the weekend, but still!)
Rosenqvist used his third stint to use his soft tyres and he whittled down Palou’s six-second advantage as the latter was in traffic again. But towards the end of that third stint, Rosenqvist, just as he was getting within a second of Palou in the battle for the lead, got blocked in traffic, and key rival Will Power in third lost time by staying out an extra lap (His engineer couldn’t get across the radio message because Power was talking at the time), and then he got blocked by Sting Ray Robb – Who had every right to fight to stay on the lead lap. He lost two seconds in doing so and then killed off the best of his soft tyres in the final stint of the race behind he didn’t have a big enough performance delta to pass Rosenqvist, so Power ended up stuck in third as Palou powered away on his signature scuffed hard tyres to take a comfortable win.
This led to Rosenqvist and Power complaining about the blue flag policy of IndyCar and how it cost them during the race, even if they said it likely wouldn’t have changed the outcome. I love that we get this conversation at least once a year when someone gets a bad beat in a race. I don’t have a particularly strong opinion on this one, but I typically defer to what I’ve said in years past – I’m totally okay with IndyCar having F1’s policy on blue flags where you must pull to one side and let lead cars through, but only if they bring in the wave-around on cautions.
This is the nature of IndyCar. Once you go a lap down, because there’s no wave-around like in F1 or a “Lucky Dog” policy like NASCAR, it’s a race ruiner because it’s nearly impossible to get that lap back. It’s why drivers understandably fight like hell to stay on the lead lap. So inevitably, you’ll get days like yesterday where leaders will feel hard done by, despite the defensive driver doing nothing against the rules or out of pocket. It is what it is.
For Alex Palou, I genuinely love how much his winning just winds people up. IndyCar’s equivalent of a golden labrador continually showing off what makes him such a force on track. He’s the best fuel saver in IndyCar, he’s the best at the end of stints when he needs a banzai lap to take track position, he’s the best in open air, and something that hasn’t been seen by too many people – He’s become the best qualifier in IndyCar as well. And because he constantly spends most of his time at the front of the field, he avoids a lot of the drama and pitfalls that come with being in the midfield. His average start so far this season? Three. The next nearest is Pato O’Ward’s seven. He’s adding tools to his game in Year 7 of his IndyCar career like Thanos collects Infinity Stones.
This was his 25th IndyCar win, putting him level with Gordon Johncock. He’s now only the third man in North-American open-wheel history to have back-to-back six win seasons, the other two – Mario Andretti, and Sebastien Bourdais, the last man who had the series in a vicegrip of dominance. And this may still be only his third greatest IndyCar season at time of writing.
He’s terrifying, and the series hates it, and that’s why I love watching him. Embrace dominance, America. There’s no-one on the continent as good as Alex Palou, new car be damned. Speaking of which…
The Lightning Round
…It looks fine. I’ve only really spoken about the new IR-28 on the Podcast, but I’ll lift what I said there, here. I think it looks okay. Nothing I love about it, nothing I particularly dislike, even if it feels like its lifted its homework from the F1 2022 and recent Super Formula regulations.
The motivations of the series are pretty clear on this one – They want lap records. A 760-bhp twin-turbo hybrid-V6 with 14 times the battery size of the current system. Spec dampers. Bigger cockpit to suit more body types. 100 pounds lighter than the IR-18. Better weight distribution. They’re targeting Arie Luyendyk’s Indy 500 lap record and they want a faster, more exciting car to watch. I sincerely hope it works. IndyCar’s still been great on ovals for the most part, but they’ve been struggling with the road/street game for years, having to paper cover the cracks with tyre changes, mandated stint rules and more because the heavier cars and the relatively ineffective hybrid has caused more problems than it has solved. Let’s hope it works when 2028 lands.
I’m trying really hard with IMS Productions and FOX in general, but this was another really bad weekend. Being an International viewer has become like IndyCar’s dirty secret in recent weeks, where it’s become a test bed for the commentary box yapping and occasionally asking questions. In Portland, it became a game of testing out weird game show music as a distraction while Kevin Lee gives us insight from the paddock. I’ve been asking for sector timing splits during qualifying like every other racing series on earth, and when we finally got it on Saturday, it was via completely unnecessary portal technology that looked like it was a part of Wipeout in the 90’s. It was laggy, slow and didn’t add anything to the broadcast. This is the series that has struggled to have basic working timing towers for most of the season, why be so needlessly over the top?
Then in Sunday warm-up, Townsend Bell says that Christian Lundgaard, a Top 5 driver in the series last season and on pace to do so again this year, can’t ever be an elite driver in IndyCar because he isn’t an American. In a series where Spanish-born Alex Palou has a 110-point lead and is likely going to take his fifth Astor Cup in six years. It’s not just a terrible take, it’s laced with xenophobia that the only way to be good in the series is to be American, which is objectively not true.
Will Buxton still falls into the basic trap of trying to over-dramatize everything that happens on track. “ROSENQVIST HAS GOTTEN THE GAP DOWN FROM 2.2 TO 1.9 SECONDS!”. It’s one step away from David Mitchell’s famous Sky Sports skit from That Mitchell and Webb Look when he says: “Watch it, watch it, watch the football, it’s gonna move!”.
I genuinely feel sorry for James Hinchcliffe. He’s become one of the best broadcasters in Motorsport over the last couple of years. In F1, he rattled off one of the best grid walks I’ve ever seen at the Hungarian Grand Prix, breaking down every car on the grid, weaving in stats and quotes seamlessly, telling the story of the weekend so far, and not a celebrity cameo in sight. In IndyCar, he’s the third wheel in the booth that feels like a cross between a firefighter and a sub-editor, constantly having to correct his wacky co-horts.
It frustrates me, because IndyCar’s got a genuinely great set of broadcasters. Jack Harvey’s constantly improving in the pits and his warm, friendly demenaour reasonates well with the drivers he’s raced against, Georgia Henneberry the same. Kevin Lee’s one of the best pitlane guys in Motorsport and can lead the booth for Indy NXT, and yet it all combines to be less than the sum of its parts. It’s a series that desperately wants to be taken seriously, but goes about it in a really unserious way. FOX Sports, everyone.
Glad Marshall Pruett’s put most of the rumoured talk about the #9 car to bed for 2027, it’s looking like Christian Lundgaard’s heading over, and rightly so, he’s the best road and street course driver in the series not named Alex for the last two years. And while Kyffin Simpson’s taken another small step forward, the smart money would be for Chip to put Rinus VeeKay in the #8 car alongside him, the latter is driving out of his skin for Juncos Hollinger this season. He’s in the Top 10, the best a Juncos has ever been, and going bar-for-bar with Marcus Ericsson, who’s in a stronger (In theory), Andretti setup. Why not both? (And if that happens, how have the other big hitters in the series missed the opportunity?)
Speaking of which – Kyffin Simpson scored his sixth Top 10 finish of the season yesterday. He now has more than Scott Dixon’s five this season, and is only 16 points behind him in the standings. Woof.
Is Mick Schumacher going to MSR for 2027 the IndyCar version of Enea Bastianini going to Trackhouse in MotoGP?
The Verdict: 5/10 (Meh) – Never really kicked into a higher gear on this one. Power’s final stint being a false dawn didn’t help, but Palou never really looked like he was going to lose once he hit the front, and Portland’s not the best track with dirty air management and a lack of passing opportunities (Even if Simpson’s on Lundgaard was the best I’ve seen all season). Alas. See you in Markham for the new Canadian round.
