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The IndyCar Series is back in action for 2023, and the series roared into life on the streets (and airport runways and taxiways) of St Petersburg, Florida for the now-traditional season opener in front of an enormous crowd, shrugging off the off-season cobwebs in postcard-perfect weather.
It wouldn’t be IndyCar – the world’s most competitive four-wheeled racing series – without plenty of drama and excitement, and St Pete delivered more than we could possibly have asked for.
Here are all the talking points from the season opener in sunny Florida.
Marcus Ericsson wins
The Swede, last year’s Indianapolis 500 winner, fired an ominous warning to the rest of the field that he is perhaps as genuine a title contender as his Ganassi teammates Scott Dixon and Alex Palou in 2023 by surviving the carnage – of which there was plenty on Sunday afternoon – and taking advantage of drivers ahead of him crashing out (Scott McLaughlin and Romain Grosjean) or suffering mechanical issues (Pato O’Ward – a plenum problem) to take the first checkered flag of the new season.
He got past O’Ward on the ninety-seventh of one hundred laps to sit at the head of the field for the first time all day, and led the Mexican home for his fourth career IndyCar Series victory.
Dixon, recovering from his involvement in the opening lap stoush – see below – finished third, rounding out the podium, a 1-3 finish for Chip Ganassi Racing. It was a Honda 1-3 as well, which will make the powers-that-be at HPD very happy.
The top five was completed by Alexander Rossi, debuting for McLaren, who came home in fourth, and Juncos Hollinger Racing’s Callum Ilott charging like the proverbial from twenty-second to fifth, in one of the best drives of the day, and the team’s best-ever IndyCar Series finish.
Lap One red flag
Carnage in the first lap – the first corner, even – used to be such a regular thing at St Petersburg that it really didn’t feel like a St Pete race until a few cars were scratched from the field a handful of yards after taking the first green flag of the year, with some notable cases of drivers showing, shall we say, questionable decision-making abilities.
We’ve had a few years where things were much more orderly going into that tight first corner and accelerating out from there, but that all went to mush to open the 2023 season. It was like the St Pete of old, but more dramatic, because we had a red flag barely out barely half a minute into the 2023 season.
McLaren’s Felix Rosenqvist and Ganassi’s Scott Dixon made contact in turn three that touched off quite the chain reaction, leading to the field being given the red.
Devlin DeFrancesco ended up taking flight in his Honda and spinning around like a helicopter’s rotor – a ride like we have rarely seen on the streets of St Petersburg.
“It was a wild ride,” the Andretti pilot said afterward, suggesting that he might just be IndyCar’s mater of the understatement.
All in all, five cars didn’t cross the start-finish line at the end of the opening lap, including both AJ Foyt Racing (Santino Ferrucci and Benjamin Pedersen) and Michael Shank Racing (Helio Castroneves and Simon Pagenaud) machines. Not a good start to the year for those two teams, and definitely an expensive one.
There was plenty of damage to plenty of cars across a wild day on Sunday, and Dallara, chassis manufacture for IndyCar, is going to be busy between now and Texas. St Pete looked more like the aftermath of a NASCAR plate race than anything else.
McLaughlin and Grosjean Tangle
As if the turn three, lap one melee wasn’t controversial enough, we had – as I alluded to above – the coming together of polesitter Grosjean (who led 37 laps in his Andretti Honda) and Penske pilot McLaughlin (leader for 31 laps), both drivers ending up in the tyre bundles around turn four after battling for the lead. It was a move that Grosjean wasn’t thrilled by.
McLaughlin apologised, noting that he isn’t the sort of racer who generally barges others off the track – and he would be right. Nonetheless, the incident robbed the event of it’s two most dominant drivers. It was, however, a boon for Ericsson and O’Ward.
Harvey to Hospital
Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing’s Jack Harvey was taken to hospital for precautionary reasons after steamrolling into the back of Ed Carpenter Racing’s Rinus VeeKay on a lap 41 restart.
It was a case of ‘nowhere to go’ for the British driver, who, doing his best Devlin DeFrancesco impression, launched through the air and over VeeKay’s car, landing nose-first on the other side. It was a vicious impact with the car landing nose first post-flight.
It was a relief to see Harvey tweet after the race that his condition was “nothing a little ice and a cold beer won’t fix!”
Yet again, the safety features so prevalent in modern IndyCars come to the fore, perhaps saving Harvey from a much more serious injury. The aero screen, maligned by some for reasons I don’t understand, is worth it’s weight in gold.
Rossi’s McLaren debut was uneventful
IndyCar Radio’s Nick Yeoman said it best on Twitter after the race: Alexander Rossi, lifting the curtain on his McLaren tenure, came home fourth and managed to keep his nose clean.
Which is saying a lot for the 2016 Indianapolis 500 champion who, in recent luckless seasons at Andretti, managed to get tangled up in everyone’s problems, nixing too many good races to count.
Hopefully the fact that Rossi avoided so much chaos around him is a good sign in what I suspect will be his one golden opportunity to prove he belongs in the upper echelon of IndyCar racing.
Will Power’s day
The Toowoomba Terror’s title defence got off to a decent start on Sunday, avoiding most the craziness around him to finish seventh, though he did earn the ire of Colton Herta after the two touched near the halfway point, that contact ending with Herta running into the tires and out of the race.
The Andretti driver was less than impressed with Power, who copped a penalty, lining up at the back of the field on the ensuing restart.
Rookie Watch
New Zealander Marcus Armstrong, driving the No. 11 Honda for Ganassi (a car he will hand over to Takuma Sato for the oval events this year, including at Indianapolis), led home the rookie pack, with Argentinian Augustin Canapino one place back.
The best-named IndyCar Series driver of all time, Coyne Racing’s Sting Ray Robb, was sixteenth and the fourth rookie, Benjamin Pedersen, had a debut to forget, caught up in the lap one mess.
The drive from Canapino is one to laud, considering he has next to zero open-wheel experience, coming from touring car racing in Argentina. To be on the lead lap at the end of his first IndyCar Series race, no matter the circumstances and what happened around him, is no small feat.
Andretti Disaster
After capturing the pole and putting two other cars into the Firestone Fast Six, Michael Andretti’s team were on top of the world on Saturday.
On race day, the team disintegrated, all four cars failing to finish, mostly through no fault of their own. Talk about the highs and lows of motorsport. Andretti’s squad experienced them all in the space of about twenty-four hours.
On to Texas
The cars and stars of the IndyCar Series have about a month to think about things and to catch their collective breath before hitting the high banks of Texas Motor Speedway for the first oval race of the season.
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