Pre-race decision left Alex Palou 'looking really bad.' How the IndyCar leader pulled off his 6th win
ELKHART LAKE, Wis. — In his half-dozen IndyCar victories nine races this season, Alex Palou and the No. 10 Chip Ganassi Racing crew have won just about every way you could imagine and yet, Sunday's was something new.
The two-time-defending series champion has eked ahead off a final pit exchange (St. Pete), pulled off a late-race pass for the win (Thermal and the Indy 500), dominated from pole (Barber) and lost the lead early, only to race his way back to a relatively comfortable victory (IMS road course). As the season reached its halfway point Sunday afternoon at Road America, perhaps it was only fitting Palou and Barry Wanser put on a strategy masterclass on a day where the possible forks in the road were many and any attempt to try and actively keep track of all the road maps at play was certain to leave one with a migraine.
'It was tough. It was a crazy race. It just felt like there was a lot going on. Lots of yellows, obviously, that were shaking how we were looking,' Palou said. 'We were looking really bad at the beginning, then really good, then terrible, then really good again.
'It was tough to be up there, but we just had to stay focused on battling against the people that were on our strategy.'
That first battle in the No. 10 camp took place before the race even started, during the 30-minute window following Sunday's morning warmup when teams must declare the tires they'll start on, a call that, depending on how the opening stages of a race go, whether it been caution-crazy or caution-free, could play an outsized role in the drivers and teams who'll find themselves in contention for a win later on.
As Wanser, Palou's strategist, explained, the duo declared primaries, but further intervention within the CGR camp got Palou waffling. With the deadline looming, Palou decided he wanted to flip, but by the time they attempted to put the call in to IndyCar to switch, it was a few minutes too late. So start on the slower, harder, more durable primary tires they did — largely surrounded on the grid by a sea of alternate-tire-clad rivals who swallowed up the No. 10 car on Lap 1 even before a caution for a stranded David Malukas fell before the lap was complete.
By that point, Palou was down from second on the grid to seventh on the ensuing restart. But as Wanser explained, though the choice to start on primaries was illogical, given what they'd learn about their competitors pre-race, it proved to be the best choice in the long run. The day prior, Palou, Wanser and Co. had made a major push to take pole, opting to use a third set of new alternates during the Fast Six to try and seal the deal, while fellow title contenders and serious threats for the race win Scott McLaughlin and Christian Lundgaard saved a set to use for the race instead.
Had they used that lone set of new alternates for the race start, Palou might not have dropped any spots to start with, but the disjointed race start meant any value gained by running alternates over primaries was minimal. In response, Palou had them in his back pocket to use later, even though Wasner said he made a tire strategy call mid-race on using that new alternate set on stint No. 2 that was earlier than he'd discussed with Palou pre-race.
A rare occurrence on the radio, Palou let his displeasure with the mid-race switch-a-roo known.
'I got to be grumpy for a couple laps, and then I saw it was worked out, and I started saying 'thank you' again,' Palou joked. 'It was interesting, but for sure, we got the win because of the team that we had on both pit stops and strategy.
'I knew (using alternates on the second stint) was going to help us there, but it was going to hurt us a lot on the last stint, but honestly, the pace we had today in the No. 10 car was amazing, and we were able to save fuel even on primaries to be quite fast.'
In a race with so many strategies at play, and seemingly even more splintering off every pit exchange, Palou was forced to manage chunks of laps where he'd be battling at the front, followed by stops that left him buried in 13th or 14th behind cars that, according to how the race would finish up, weren't really his true competition. But by Lap 22, as the yellow flags flew for Conor Daly's off-track excursion, Palou could've inherited the lead had Wanser opted for him to stay out, rather than pit at a time where the team wasn't sorely in need for fuel.
With it being the race's fourth caution, Palou's second stint only ran 12 laps, several of them under caution, and Palou said he still could've run five laps more before diving in, similar to what Felix Rosenqvist (runner-up) and Kyle Kirkwood (fourth) opted to do. But pitting there ultimately gave him track position at the end of the race, a roll of the dice that he felt made the difference in the win that fell into his lap with Scott Dixon forced to pit late and Rosenqvist still a couple seconds back by the checkered flag.
'That was the moment that I would say gave us the win,' Palou said of Wanser's call on when to make his second of three stops.
But Wanser and Palou didn't feel comfortable until a ways later. Though they knew Dixon had pitted two laps before them on his second stop, the No. 10 stand continued to watch late in the race as the six-time champ rolled off competitive lap times again and again. By their math, Palou was going to be cutting it close on fuel as is, ultimately enough post-race to run a cooldown lap, but not fire off any celebratory donuts.
So how was Dixon holding onto his gap on his teammate, they kept wondering?
'I even said to all the engineers on the stand, 'Are we missing something here? Because Dixon is running (fuel) numbers and lap times that (Palou's) not going to be able to get, based on the number we gave him,'' Wanser said. 'They double checked everything, triple checked, but we were pretty confident we were going to be fine.'
Had Dixon lucked into a late-race yellow, Palou said he wasn't sure he had enough speed in the car to swoop around the outside for what would've needed to be a pass for the win on his teammate.
'When I was following Scott, I could see that he wasn't saving as much as I was. I was like, 'This guy is crazy. How is he going to do it?'' Palou said. 'If it was another driver, I would have probably just focused on myself, but I know that Scott can make crazy stuff happen.
'If he gets a yellow and he's still P1, we're not going to be able to pass him. We were still trying to get that first-place position on track, just in case there was a four-lap yellow at the end, and he would've still been leading and maybe ended up with a win.'
In all, the chaos kept things interesting, and Palou's Sunday kept him longing for something else the next time out, too.
'We couldn't do donuts,' he joked. 'I would've liked that, but at least (we had) enough to make it to Victory Lane.'
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