Dixon wins, Ganassi soars but Felix Rosenqvist was IndyCar's biggest winner at Toronto

There may be nothing that can save his IndyCar career, but Felix Rosenqvist clearly will not be going without a fight. The driver who at Mid-Ohio wouldn’t publicly say whether he’d rather be in Formula E or American open-wheel racing told IndyStar definitively on Friday ahead of the Honda Indy Toronto that IndyCar was his desired home of the future during his new multi-year deal with McLaren Racing.

Then he went and showed it. Having qualified 8^th on Saturday at a street course where he swept an Indy Lights weekend in 2016 and took 5^th as an IndyCar rookie in 2019, Rosenqvist grabbed his first podium finish in more than two years Sunday, finally breaking through after knocking on the door in some fashion just about every stop on the calendar this season.

“I think this weekend hopefully makes (McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown) doubt some things,” Rosenqvist said on the Peacock post-race show.

Though Rosenqvist said Friday that, as he understands it, there are few – if any – certainties across McLaren’s four programs next year (beyond perhaps Alexander Rossi in IndyCar and Lando Norris in F1), the signing of another championship caliber IndyCar driver into the mix in Alex Palou is no doubt threatening to his position. Perhaps Palou lands in F1 and Brown, seeing just how much Rosenqvist has come on of late in IndyCar, keeps him around for at least one more year at the expense of his new Formula E team. But Brown has made no secret that there will be no playing of favorites across the four programs. All four need to have race-winning capabilities on them, with the goal of reaching trajectories that can lead to championships.

Moving Rosenqvist to Formula E, where he’s won three times, would no doubt achieve that, as the series moves to a new generation of cars in 2023 that would level the playing field for his time away. But there’s a not-so-impossible scenario where the Swedish driver emerges this year as Arrow McLaren SP’s best finisher in the points standings, sitting just 32 points back of teammate Pato O’Ward. Both have suffered a pair of DNFs for mechanical failures this year – though both of O’Ward’s have come in the past three races, and when you look at the last six races as a whole, now that Rosenqvist has clearly found comfort in the car and with his engineering team, there’s an argument to be made he’s been more consistent and reliable overall across both qualifying and races.

That’s not to say O’Ward isn’t still a better bet for a championship across an entire season, but the gap between them has clearly closed. Now with some pep in his step, Rosenqvist clearly feels comfortable speaking his truth and showing a bit of an edge and some bravado. And sure, you’d probably still want Palou in that seat over Rosenqvist if you had to pick, but just because the Spaniard is driving for AMSP in IndyCar in 2023 doesn’t mean he doesn’t jet off to an open F1 ride in 2024, by which Brown has stated he doesn’t want to pull Rosenqvist back and forth as a placeholder.

We may be watching the closing chapter of Rosenqvist’s IndyCar career – at least for the foreseeable future, but it’s great to see him back as himself. Running away, he was my biggest winner of IndyCar’s trip to Toronto. Here’s the rest:

Winners

Chip Ganassi Racing

Sunday for Chip Ganassi Racing was every bit as much about Dixon’s historic 52^nd win that tied Mario Andretti for 2^nd-all-time in the series as it was the depth the team flashed and their resilience to the chaos brewing in the background. CGR finished 1^st-5^th-6^th in a race where potential results were nowhere near top-of-mind for those that had witnessed the mess around Palou’s future since Tuesday night. Now, there’s genuine belief again that any one of their three best drivers could emerge the champion this year and extend Chip Ganassi’s title streak to ‘3’.

Clawing from 9^th to 5^th, Marcus Ericsson nearly doubled his points lead from 20 to 35, while Palou carve the mid-pack up for his leap from 22^nd to 6^th. He’s still within 37 points of the lead without a win this year. Should he rattle off a couple down the stretch, it’s hard to imagine him not repeating with his recent run of form. And then there’s Dixon, now within 44 points instead of the 67-point gap he entered the weekend with, could threaten A.J. Foyt’s record seven titles as early as September.

None of these behind-the-scenes issues will go away in days or even a couple weeks, but if nothing else, Sunday showed that on-track, it shouldn’t matter.

Colton Herta

Given the recent history of two of Colton Herta’s last three poles (23^rd, crashing out of Long Beach and 19^th, crashing out of Nashville), I was incredibly curious to see which version of the Andretti driver we’d see on the streets of Toronto Sunday. Since the 22-year-old joined the series full-time in 2019, he’s amassed 27 starts in the first two rows – nearly half of his 57 starts – but even in those, Herta’s been very ‘boom or bust’. He’s finished 14 times in the top-5 and 12 times outside the top-10 – eight of those outside the top-15.

Bear in mind, several of those poor results have stemmed from mechanical failures, poor pitstops or a mix-up in strategy, but we remember most the over-aggressive moves that lost him likely podiums at Nashville a year ago and Long Beach earlier this year when things weren’t quite going his way. Instead, Herta took what the race brought him and fought (but not overly so) to regain the lead after Dixon snagged it at the start of the second stint. And when that wasn’t happening, he held onto 2^nd-place and preserved an overall strong weekend. The more Herta can find that version of himself, the better off he’ll be.

Most of RLL

At least when it comes to Graham Rahal and Christian Lundgaard, most of Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing may have finally found a bit of a groove. Rahal’s 4^th-place finish Sunday in Toronto, making up 10 spots in the process, was by far the team’s best performance this year. After grinding his way to three top-10s over his first four starts, a tough month of May and start to June clearly wore on the veteran driver as he lamented the team’s lack of engineering depth he believed was holding them back.

Road America, where he and Lundgaard took 8^th and 10^th, was a brief hint that better days may be ahead. After the duo finished 12^th and 11^th at Mid-Ohio, another strong day across the board at Toronto, including Lundgaard starting 8^th and finishing 10^th, backs that up.

Outside the goal of podiums or a win, the latter of which seems a bit out of reach at the moment, the team next would want to see Jack Harvey finishing alongside them in similar fashion. The Brit took 13th at Road America, not far off his teammates, but since, he's finished 20th at Mid-Ohio and 19th at Toronto. The former was a slight improvement over his 24th starting position, but Sunday, Harvey was positioned well at the start in 13th. Two poor pitstops, including an initial one that left him 19th after the first cycle, left insurmountable hurdles to clear on a day when Harvey felt as if he finally had some pace to play with.

Simon Pagenaud

You came away from Meyer Shank Racing’s past two years of running full-time in IndyCar with Jack Harvey feeling like there was this level the team just wasn’t able to tap into. Pagenaud’s proven that theory correct. Yes, of course, the Frenchman is an Indy 500 winner and series champ, but even the best drivers in the series can only do so much up against a list of consistently upper-echelon cars from Penske, Ganassi, Andretti, AMSP and RLL that typically reaches a dozen. With his fifth top-10 finish over the past six races, Pagenaud has MSR 10^th in points – 11 out of 8^th and 33 out of 6^th.

Even when he suffers a setback in qualifying, as he did Saturday (18^th), Pagenaud has proven again and again this year that a team that struggled with strategy a year ago can carve its way through an increasingly deep field. In that six-driver group of Andretti and MSR, with the latter’s technical alliance, it’s no hyperbole to say on race days, Pagenaud and the No. 60 crew have been the most reliable this year.

Losers

Team Penske

On a weekend where their key title contenders were dealing with unexpected drama, it was instead Team Penske that came away from Toronto scratching heads with a weekend to largely forget. What’s worse is, more than halfway through Sunday’s race, things weren’t tracking that way. Having qualified 3^rd, Josef Newgarden had held onto that spot, in relation to the front-runners’ positioning, into the second round of stops. It was then the two-time series champ suffered an uncharacteristically slow stop as his crew labored to take off and change the left-rear tire, and he dropped to 11^th. Newgarden slipped to as low as 13^th on the Lap 49 restart and eventually settled into 10^th, where he finished.

Teammate Scott McLaughlin, coming off his Mid-Ohio win, sat 4^th heading into the Lap 66 restart but slipped up and fell like a rock, dropping five spots on that single lap down to 9^th where he’d finish. Their running mate, Will Power, continued the worst string of qualifying runs in his career and (16^th-15^th-21^st-16^th) couldn’t muster his Mid-Ohio luck and was forced to settle for 15^th.

It's weekend’s like this I worry about Penske’s chances to break Ganassi’s back-to-back title streak. With three CGR drivers in the top-5 and one of them leading the way with a 35-point cushion, I just wonder if there’s enough 3^rd, 4^th and 5^th-place finishes in the tank for Newgarden, Power and McLaughlin to be there at the end. Ganassi’s trio has combined for five finishes outside the top-10. Penske? They’ve had 11.

Pato O’Ward

The Arrow McLaren SP driver needed a massive bounce-back weekend after a pair of DNFs due to mechanical failures not of his own doing. What he got instead was a struggle up to 11^th from 15^th, on a day where his teammate had a podium finish and four of the five drivers ahead of him in points either maintained their leads, increased their gaps or jumped ahead of O’Ward. All weekend, both he and strategist Taylor Kiel simply said O’Ward just couldn’t get comfortable, and it showed.

The Mexican driver and his team continue to lack the ability for his bad days to end with him running 7^th or 8^th, only that much more crucial when you consider the now six times he’s finished outside the top-10 for various reasons in 2022. Barring a run of consecutive wins and four or five podiums to cap the year (he only has two thus far), it looks as if O’Ward will again fall short of his title dreams.

Rookies

Outside Christian Lundgaard’s 8^th-place finish, Sunday was yet another rough day for IndyCar’s pool of five full-time rookies in 2022. When you take away Lundgaard, who’s begun to separate himself a bit in the Rookie of the Year race (20-point lead on David Malukas), the other four have combined for seven top-10 starts but just three top-10 finishes and 15 top-15 starts but just nine top-15 finishes in 2022.

As he often has been this year, Malukas was plagued by a poor pitstop, losing seven spots to the leader-pack when nearly the entire field stopped on Lap 47, dropping from 5^th to 14^th (with two cars staying out). He’d eventually finish 12^th, but there was clearly more speed there. Similarly, Callum Ilott took 14^th after starting 7^th, hampered by wing damage he suffered on Lap 21 that briefly left him a lap down and saw him sitting 23^rd at the halfway point. Despite the great work over the race’s latter half, it’s easy to wonder again ‘what if’ with such a strong starting spot.

Elsewhere, Kyle Kirkwood suffered his fifth DNF of the year, giving more than a half-dozen crashes for an A.J. Foyt Racing team struggling with budget woes related to the lack of checks from ROKiT. And Devlin DeFrancesco, running in his hometown, thought he had even more than his 12^th-place starting spot due to an impeding penalty he suffered in the Fast 12, then came home 18^th.

It’s likely a testament to just how deep IndyCar’s talent pool is nowadays, that even a star-studded rookie class full of international talent has just two drivers in the top-20 in points through 10 races, and none better than 16^th (Lundgaard). What’s been more curious, though, is the lack of podiums or even top-5s from that group. Typically, you can count on a couple of those sprinkled in, but instead, they’ve done well to come away 8^th or so.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Felix Rosenqvist biggest winner at Toronto as he tries to keep seat