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Opinion
The Month of May at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway began, as it has in recent years, with the Grand Prix event on the infield road course. Saturday was the thirteenth time the IndyCar Series has run on the track built for Formula One at the Brickyard.
The circuit has been modified since, and provides pretty good racing, with plenty of overtaking opportunities, setting up the best month of the racing season.
No matter where you stand on the idea of running a road course race at Indianapolis in May – for the record, I prefer a race there to start the month, rather than a sparsely-attended practice session on the oval; a bang rather than a whimper is the way to open proceedings – a race at the Brickyard is a race every driver wants to win.
Read on for all the talking points from 2023’s first chance at Brickyard glory:
The streak continues: five IndyCar Series races in 2023 and five different winners, with 2021 series champion Alex Palou joining the party, driving to what was in the end quite an easy victory, the Ganassi squad’s second of the season after Marcus Ericsson won the season-opening event in St Petersburg.
Palou led early, overtaking the Rahal Letterman Lanigan Honda of polesitter Christian Lundgaard late on the first lap on red alternate tyres and spent the rest of the race on primary tyres. It was a brilliant drive, making sure to not over-use his rubber on a day when choosing the correct tyres was the difference between a good finish and the alternative.
McLaren’s Pato O’Ward came home second, sixteen seconds behind, playing the role of IndyCar Series bridesmaid yet again. O’Ward’s teammate Alexander Rossi netted his first podium for the team he joined in 2023, filling the last step on the podium: a McLaren 2-3, with teammate Felix Rosenqvist in fifth, behind polesitter Lundgaard.
Best of all for Palou, who came almost from obscurity to win the title in 2021, he is now leading the points heading into the Indianapolis 500. Whilst there is little actual racing crossover between what happens on the road course and the oval, the No. 10 driver and crew will certainly be in a good place mentally heading into the week of practice. Same goes for the McLaren squad.
I’d grade the Indy GP a B+ after a run of A-grade races to start the season.
Honestly, hard to give it a whole lot more than that given the fact that Palou won by sixteen seconds, which was a pretty solid beating. That said, it was far from a boring event. NBC cameras and the IndyCar Radio Network turn announcers did a good job of highlighting plenty of great battles throughout the pack.
At least the complainers out there will be happy we didn’t have a fuel mileage race! Tire mileage instead.
Importantly, there was a good crowd, which various reports set at around 50,000 – by far the biggest attendance in a long time. Don’t let the empty bleachers fool you: IMS is so big that it swallows up anything other than a crowd of four times that number, but the fans definitely turned out for the GP in big numbers and would have come away happy with what they saw. The IndyCar Series has plenty of momentum heading into the sport’s biggest fortnight.
Dixon finished sixth, three spots up from where he stated the race. All in all, a typical Scott Dixon drive. The kind of points accumulation day that seems him nearly always in the championship hunt.
Meanwhile, Will Power was barely sighted on the broadcast and didn’t improve on his starting position of twelfth. An uncharacteristic kind of day from the defending IndyCar Series champion.
McLaughlin, on the other hand, had quite a day: he was caught up in the first corner melee that’s almost expected at this point, losing a front wing, battled back through the field to near the top ten, only to run out of fuel at the end and finished sixteenth, the last driver on the lead lap, which was also where he qualified.
One of the storylines of the season thus far has been how off the pace Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing has been. Lots of change during the offseason (including bringing in some brainpower from the Formula One world) has seen the team take a little while to get going. Friday was good for them, with young gun Christian Lundgaard taking pole – his first in IndyCar – and hopes were high across the entire squad, with Jack Harvey qualifying fourth and Graham Rahal eighth.
Saturday wasn’t quite so good, but Lundgaard, on a day of what if’s and what might have been, proved that he has the speed, continuing a recent trend of the RLL squad being fast on the IMS road course. Graham Rahal came home in tenth after a few setbacks, whilst early drama resigned Harvey to a twentieth-placed finish. Fourth and tenth after the season they’ve had so far must have felt something close to a win for Bobby Rahal’s squad, even if their hopes of bringing home some trophies didn’t quite eventuate.
Overnight change is expected in the fast-paced world we are all inhabiting, but rarely does it happen. It takes time for everyone to be on the same page. Who knows? We may well look back on the Indy GP as being the turning point for the team.
Also, don’t forget that Graham Rahal believed he had the speed and strategy to win the Indianapolis 500 in 2021 before losing a wheel after a pit stop, ending his day in the turn two SAFER barrier, and he has shown speed at Indianapolis on other occasions, too. I’ll be keeping an eye on this squad through practice this week.
In further good news for the entire RLL squad, the IndyCar Series returns to the GP course during the Brickyard weekend double-header with NASCAR in the North American summer.
It was a quiet day for the Aussies and New Zealanders in the IndyCar Series, but young Lochie Hughes from the Gold Coast – remember the name! – won the third race of the USF2000 weekend driving for Jay Howard’s squad to further extend his points lead in that series, headed to the Indianapolis Raceway Park short track in two weeks’ time.
Indianapolis 500 pole qualifying and bumping is early next Monday, Australian eastern standard time. The field of thirty-three will be set, with one unlucky driver going home.
Who gets bumped? That is a tough question to answer.
There are a handful of Indy 500-only entries: Ryan Hunter-Reay (Dreyer and Reinbold Racing), Stefan Wilson (Dreyer and Reinbold Racing), Katherine Legge (Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing), R.C. Enerson (Abel Motorsports), Tony Kanaan (Arrow McLaren) and Marco Andretti (Andretti Autosport) alongside oval-only programs for Ed Carpenter (Ed Carpenter Racing) and Takuma Sato (Chip Ganassi Racing) who are automatically behind the eight ball from the outset, given the best driving, crew and race strategy talent is usually snapped up by full-time teams.
Enerson is the thirty-fourth entry. Easy to suggest it will be him going home, due to the lateness of the program, but there are some smart people attached to the Abel Motorsports effort, so I’m not convinced Enerson is the odd man out.
I’m not even convinced that one of the one-off entries is definitely going to be the thirty-fourth qualifier. Devlin DeFrancesco running full-time for Andretti hasn’t been great.
Nor has Meyer Shank’s Helio Castroneves and Simon Pagenaud – though I imagine both those Indy 500 winners somehow find a way. Could rookie Benjamin Pederson at AJ Foyt miss out? Marco Andretti? Maybe rookie Augustin Canapino for Juncos-Hollinger Racing. Hunter-Reay and Stefan Wilson are running for Dreyer and Reinbold, who traditionally run well at IMS.
If I had to name three or four on the bubble now, without the benefit of seeing practice times: DeFrancesco, Pederson, Enerson and maybe Canapino. Of course, a veteran could ruin their primary and have backup issues this week. Or crash in qualifying.
Whatever happens, it will be a very intriguing day of last chance qualifying.
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