What to watch at Road America: Rossi's pace, qualifying history, Palou's lead and more
ELKHART LAKE, Wisc. – All Alexander Rossi needs is a little single-lap speed, and if Friday’s first practice of IndyCar’s race weekend at Road America is indicative of anything, Arrow McLaren’s newest driver may have found some.
A year ago, the ex-Andretti Autosport driver snagged his first pole in more than three years at Road America, the location of his most recent win at the time (in 2019) with an eye-popping advantage of more than 28 seconds. After seven races in his new home, with three consecutive top-5 finishes and currently sitting 6th in points, Rossi told IndyStar on Friday he’s really just missing the qualifying pace on Saturdays.
Outside his mechanical failure in the closing laps at Long Beach that stole a certain top-10, Rossi has logged finishes of 4th (St. Pete), 8th (Barber), 3rd (IMS road course) and 5th (Detroit) in those road and street races, with corresponding starts of 12th, 10th, 10th and 13th.
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“We’re really missing speed in qualifying, and that’s disappointing, but I think the execution on race day has been fantastic, and that’s allowed us to stay in this fight (for the championship),” Rossi said Friday. “But we need to qualify better. It’s just hard with how many good people there are (in the IndyCar field) to try and go from 12th to 1st. You can try, but it’s tough, so we’ve got to be starting in the top-5 or top-6."
Friday afternoon, Rossi paced a 27-car field that all ran a faster lap in practice than his pole speed from a year ago (1:44.8656) thanks to Road America’s repave in the offseason with a best practice lap of 1:41.779 from the No. 7 Chevy driver. Dale Coyne Racing’s David Malukas gave a boost to a team that’s struggled of late with the second-fastest lap in the field (1:41.865) with points leader Alex Palou (1:41.949), six-time champ Scott Dixon (1:41.954) and Arrow McLaren’s Pato O’Ward (1:41.978) the only others to break the 1:42 barrier.
Arrow McLaren was one of a handful of teams that tested at Road America last week, making Rossi a bit tentative to say it would be easy to remain on top. Ganassi, for example, only sent rookie Marcus Armstrong to test and managed to put its second-best driver (Dixon, 4th) ahead of Arrow McLaren’s second-fastest (O’Ward, 5th) and its top-3 drivers all in the top-6, while Arrow McLaren’s third driver on the day, Felix Rosenqvist, finished 8th.
“I think we as a group would be pretty disappointed if we didn’t roll off the truck pretty strong. It’s still early days,” Rossi said. “But certainly the potential is there. It wasn’t a very clean lap by me, so I think there’s quite a bit more pace in it, which is a good sign, but it also was a chunk slower than our pace in testing.”
Importantly, those who tested last week weren’t allowed to run Firestone’s new tire compounds developed for this weekend, given Road America’s repave, so even those with the familiarity with the surface are still getting used to the intricacies of the compound and the difference between the primary and alternate compounds. For example, a handful of drivers – Rossi included – didn’t manage to go faster on reds than blacks toward the end of Friday’s practice.
“Yeah, (the red tires) certainly weren’t faster. There were areas where they were (faster), but a lot of guys didn’t improve. It wasn’t just me,” Rossi said. “And I had a clean lap, so that certainly changes the strategy going into qualifying.
“That being said, I don’t know they’ll continue to be slower, but I think it will take an adjustment on what you’d usually do on blacks versus reds, specifically on this weekend compared to other events.”
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History under fire?
Saturday’s qualifying session (which starts at 1:55 p.m. on Peacock) will be one to watch, given Road America’s repave, with some drivers thinking Dario Franchitti’s qualifying record set in 2000 (1:39.866) is in serious jeopardy of falling. Dixon said the Ganassi crew, with whom Franchitti currently serves as a driver coach, has already begun giving the racing legend a hard time in advance of his mark dropping.
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“I say yes,” O’Ward said, confidently, ahead of Friday’s practice. After practice, Rossi concurred. “Yeah, we can do that.”
Last year’s Road America winner Josef Newgarden doesn’t think it’ll be so simple.
“I do think it’s achievable, but I don’t know if we’ll get there,” this year’s Indy 500 winner said. “The testing times were pretty close, so if the weather’s relatively cool, I think it’s possible, but it’s hard to say that we’ll surpass that.
“But I do think the probability is higher than not.”
How Road America's repave could effect Sunday's race
When it comes to Sunday’s race, drivers generally said the differences won’t be nearly as obvious, helping those that have been a bit ‘off’ in recent years at higher levels than those who’ve been ‘on it’ like Penske and Ganassi.
“Typically when tracks get repaved and the grip goes up, it gets easier for everyone, so then everyone’s less-prone to make mistakes because the track’s more forgiving. So usually, the race is worse (from an excitement standpoint),” Rossi said. “But we’ll see. Good races in IndyCar are where you have a big separation in primary and alternate tires, either in lap time or degradation. You have to have one of them, and we’re still learning about that, so we’ll see how fun it’s going to be.”
The key to that riveting racing, Dixon explained, will come down to how the track rubbers in offline. After Friday’s practice, several spoke of it being fairly slippery – something that led to several red flags during testing last week – with the lack of running the new surface has seen. With drivers able to take more speed into the corners and accelerate better out of them, shrinking the braking zones, drivers said to expect for that much tighter opportunities for drivers to strike and execute a pass – with some uncertainty whether lunging around the outside will offer them the grip they need to execute a move.
Newgarden, for one, longs for the surface of old.
“I’m just not a new pavement guy. I don’t mind it. It’s fine, and it’s a different challenge, but I think it’s more fun when you have to figure out an old surface and have to get the most out of the car,” he said. “There’s typically more tire degradation because of that. With a new surface, you have to be very precise and more committed because of the level of grip requires a different race car in some aspects because the lateral loading is going to be way different than when you have less grip.”
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The other popular topic of conversation Friday? Alex Palou’s historically-high 51-point advantage in the championship through seven races, something IndyCar has seen just three times in the last two decades – twice of those coming during the Indy 500’s double-points era.
Predictably, the 2021 champ downplayed his advantage entering a race where he won during that title-winning season, though he did note he feels like he’s performing better than ever.
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“We were really good (in 2021), but there were races where we’d have really strong results, and then ones that weren’t as strong. We did that quite a lot in ’21, and we were still pretty consistent, but not nearly as much as this year,” said Palou of a year where he had a run of five podiums in six starts as well as back-to-back DNFs. “I think we have a faster car, honestly, and we can see that in races where we can pull a bigger gap sometimes (this year).
“But I still wouldn’t say we’re as good as it looks on points. We’ve had really good results, but we’ve never had a bad one, and that’s why we’ve been able to be up there like this. I think other drivers could be better than us if they’d had consistent races.”
Those hot on his tail – Marcus Ericsson, 51 back (2nd); Newgarden, 70 (3rd); Dixon, 79 (4th); O’Ward, 82 (5th) and Rossi, 97 (6th) – agreed. Between them, they’ve suffered an engine failure (Newgarden, St. Pete), had contact in pitlane (Rossi, Texas) and been nudged into the tire barriers (Dixon, Long Beach) along with various mechanical failures and on-track incidents both of their fault and not.
“It’s a big lead for sure, but at the same time, if he has a DNF and I win, suddenly (the lead) is back to (almost) zero again,” Ericsson said. “Alex has done a tremendous job this year and put himself in a really good spot, but there’s still 10 races to go, and a lot can happen.”
Despite back-to-back DNFs, O'Ward undeterred
Among those still in the thick of the title hunt, no driver may be more in need of a seamless weekend than O’Ward, who logged four top-4 finishes (including three runner-ups) in the first five races of the year, but who’s since crashed out in back-to-back races with risky moves some might argue weren’t necessary.
With under 10 laps to go in the 500 while running 3rd on the first of three late restarts, he dove inside Ericsson entering Turn 3, under the premise he felt he needed to execute on his great draft on Ericsson, if he were to have any hope and closing in on eventual-winner Newgarden. According to O’Ward, Ericsson pinched the No. 5 Chevy in the corner – enough he had to take his foot off the gas before he lost control and spun into the wall. Instead of what would’ve likely been his third consecutive top-4 finish at the 500, he had to settle for 24th.
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A week later on the streets of Detroit, O’Ward suffered a poor pitstop, where his crew failed to secure a wheel properly, forcing him to be pushed back into his spot to diagnose and remedy the issue. O’Ward would fall a lap down, and while trying to keep ahead of leader (and eventual-winner) Palou, which would’ve put him two laps down and made it that much tougher to try and get on the lead-lap and navigate back into the top-10, O’Ward crashed before the race’s halfway point.
He finished 26th. And yet, when asked Friday if he felt he needed to race any differently to try and claw back into the title race – after Will Power’s 2022 title run where the Penske driver embraced taking the results he was given and not over-driving the car – O’Ward pushed back.
“I approach every weekend the same. I’m just not wired to be fine with just running to the finish line with 60 laps to go and staying 22nd. To me, it’s a risk worth taking when you try and save your race to get into the top-10 – or possibly better – than just pounding around and waiting,” he said. “I’ll never be that, and I’ll always sleep peacefully at night.
“I’m a racer. I’m not going to just be okay with taking defeat so early in a race. When you take a risk, they can take you out of a race, or really turn your race into a positive thing, and that’s what we’re here to do. It’s not always going to play out.”
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: IndyCar: What to watch at Road America; Rossi's pace, Palou's lead
