Category: IndyCar

Team Penske’s Josef Newgarden lost out on a chance to pass Alex Palou in the No. 10 Honda for the win last weekend at St. Petersburg and fell to third behind Scott Dixon’s No. 9 car in the final two minutes of the race due to a refueling issue.

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“We had a shift that was unexpected with a lap to go, and we just had to hit the emergency button, which was unfortunate,” Newgarden said. “We kind of started that last lap like, half-emergency mode, and then they said, you just have to pull the chute here. Like, just finish.”

The clarification on the “shift” comment comes from Newgarden’s race engineer Luke Mason, who told RACER, “He’s referring to a shift in the fuel error in the final stint which at the time we thought (was) what had happened, not an electronics/gearbox shifting issue. We had to have him go into a panic fuel-save yellow fuel map, part-throttle lift, and coast for the final lap to make it to the finish as it coasted across the line with nothing in it.

“Unfortunately it cost us a spot to the No. 9, but we had a gap back to the No. 3 and third is a lot better than running out on track and ending up 21st!”

The root of Newgarden’s late-race struggle was traced to his last two pit stops.

“Post-mortem, it looks like we simply had a refueling issue in both our second and third stops and did not get the car full and there wasn’t (a fuel) error shift at all,” Mason said. “The new (spec) fuel flow sensors in the car do a good job of being able to see this now opposed to previous years. Unfortunately, if not for this, we don’t get overcut by the No. 10 and the outcome could have been a little more favorable for us!”

Scott Dixon didn’t spend all of Sunday’s 100-lap race without the ability to communicate with his team on pit lane. But the eventual second-place finisher did lose contact with his Chip Ganassi Racing team somewhere past the halfway point of the opening IndyCar Series race of the season, and thanks to the malfunction, the six-time champion also lost the lead to teammate Alex Palou, who went on to claim the victory.

Speaking to the media after the race, Dixon said the radio problems arose sooner than the halfway point.

“(It) kind of worked on the warm-up laps and kind of for the first 10 and that was about it, but ultimately cost us the race, I think – not coming in when I should have, maybe the same lap as Alex,” he said. “We caught that traffic with about five or six cars and lost about two or three seconds on that in lap, so that was a bit of a nightmare.”

Dixon’s race strategist, CGR managing director Mike Hull, says two-way communication held until later in the race.

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“The radio worked fine before the race where we do our communications checks, and then it worked fine in the race going into the first pit stop,” Hull told RACER. “We did three total pit stops with Scott in the race. He came to us on pit lane for the first stop when we called him on that first yellow, and all was good there. And he pitted on lap 38 when we called him, and then it started getting sounded like wax paper was wrapped around the microphone in his helmet.

“It was really hard to understand the words from him, and then he said on the radio, ‘I’m having a tough time hearing you, but I know you’re talking to me.’ He said, ‘I’m going to go on the fuel light.’ And we continued to talk to him, hoping that he would hear us. He came in for what was the final stop for us on the light, not on the radio message. It was after the second pit stop where it began sounding like wax paper.”

 Using the onboard computer’s live fuel usage data, teams set an electronic warning to trigger on the driver’s steering wheel-mounted dash display screen once they’ve drawn the 18.5-gallon tank down to a point where a pit stop is needed.

Depending on the track, the assistant race engineer could set the warning at a threshold where the driver knows to pit at the end of the lap, or to give the driver more advanced warning of the tank drawing close to being empty. In each instance, the driver will be given pre-race instructions for how many laps they have left to run once the warning appears. Dixon pitted for his final stop when he saw the warning, which came one lap after the No. 9 Honda team made the call to pit that went unheard.

According to section 7.4.3 in IndyCar’s rule book titled ‘Radio Communication’, a clear directive is listed under Rule 7.4.3.1 which states, “During all on-track Events, radio communication between the Driver and the Entrant’s Pit Box is required at all times.”

Based on the team’s and the driver’s acknowledgement that they couldn’t hear each other in the latter stage of the race, the No. 9 car would appear to be in breach of the regulations. In reading the single sentence for Rule 7.4.3.1, it’s also worth nothing that no guidelines follow the rule with instructions for what must be done by a team if communications fail during a session or race.

The obvious expectation would be for the team to ask for the car to be black-flagged and ordered to the pits so the matter can be rectified, if possible. But there are no rules that say the team must self-report the issue to IndyCar. IndyCar also monitors and records all radio channels, which would give it the ability to detect if a communication breakdown between team and driver, or spotter and driver, takes place.

But with no known detection or enforcement policies written on the matter, it would appear to be an area that will come under review for the next round of rule book updates. It’s also worth considering a revision to Rule 7.4.3.1 to further define “radio communication between the Driver and the Entrant’s Pit Box is required at all times” as meaning functional, easy-to-understand communications, since the team and driver in this instance lost that ability while the race was ongoing.

According to IndyCar, and despite the admitted absence of in-race communication between Dixon and the No. 9 team, the series said there’s no action to be taken.

“IndyCar officials confirmed two-way radio communication – both live in-race and via an audio track recorded throughout the duration of the race – on the No. 9. So no infraction,” IndyCar said in a statement shared with RACER. The series found the act of communication took place throughout the race, which met the minimum criteria of the rule, but the communication between driver and team was not clear.

The IndyCar Series generates upwards of 30 reports per race that feature a wide range of facts and statistics of interest. Some items are obvious while others are arcane; enjoy the array of info pulled by RACER from Race 1 at St. Petersburg.

INDYCAR RACE STATS 2025 Race 1, St Petersburg

POLE SITTER: Scott McLaughlin, Team Penske, 59.4624s (RECORD: Will Power, 59.3466s)
WINNER: Alex Palou, Chip Ganassi Racing
WINNING MANUFACTURER: Honda
FASTEST RACE LAP: Josef Newgarden, Team Penske, 1m01.6900s
BIGGEST MOVER: Pato O’Ward, Arrow McLaren, started 23rd, finished 11th, improved 12 positions
PASSES (TOTAL/FOR POSITION): 75/53 (2024: Unavailable)
MOST PASSES: Christian Rasmussen, Ed Carpenter Racing, eight
MOST PASSED: Jacob Abel, Dale Coyne Racing, 17
CHAMPIONSHIP LEADER: Alex Palou, 51 points
TIME OF RACE: 1h51m08s
AVERAGE SPEED: 97.173mph
LEAD CHANGES: 10
LEAD CHANGE SUMMARY (ON LAP, LEADER):
1. 1, McLaughlin, Scott
2. 32, Armstrong, Marcus
3. 35, Herta, Colton
4. 36, Newgarden, Josef
5. 38, Dixon, Scott
6. 39, McLaughlin, Scott
7. 46, Lundgaard, Christian
8. 69, Dixon, Scott
9. 73, McLaughlin, Scott
10. 75, Palou, Alex
CAUTIONS: 1
CAUTION LAPS: Six (OUT OF 100)
CAUTION SUMMARY (DURATION, TOTAL LAPS, SUMMARY):
1, 1 to 6, 6, Contact: Cars 6, 12 and 45 in Turn 3
RED FLAGS: 0
RACE LEADERS (LAPS):
1. McLaughlin, Scott, 40
2. Palou, Alex, 26
3. Lundgaard, Christian, 23
4. Dixon, Scott, 5
5. Armstrong, Marcus, 3
6. Newgarden, Josef, 2
7. Herta, Colton, 1
PENALTIES (CAR NO., REASON, LAP, PENALTY): None
FASTEST ON PIT LANE (PIT IN TO PIT OUT AVERAGE): Arrow McLaren, Pato O’Ward No. 5, 33.3659s
SLOWEST ON PIT LANE (WITHOUT AN OUTLIER): PREMA Racing, Robert Shwartzman No. 83, 36.7645s

If you missed the IndyCar Series Race 1 at the Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg, here’s a quick look at the takeaways of interest from the 100-lap contest.

WHO WON?

Alex Palou of Chip Ganassi Racing. It was the three-time IndyCar champion’s 12th career win (from 82 starts) and 33rd podium. It also marked Honda’s first win of the year.

WAS IT A DOMINANT WIN?

It was not. Palou took the lead on the 75th lap, which he never relinquished, but polesitter Scott McLaughlin from Team Penske was looking like the class of the field while leading for most of the opening half of the contest. A tire strategy choice made before the race took him out of contention. He’d come home fourth.

DID ANYBODY ELSE COME CLOSE TO VICTORY?

Yes, Team Penske’s Josef Newgarden chased down Palou over the last dozen laps, all while Palou was struggling to put Sting Ray Robb a lap down and saw a lead of five seconds evaporate and fall to less than one second. A shifting issue going into the last lap forced Newgarden to focus on resolving the matter, which let Palou’s teammate Scott Dixon get by and take second.

WHO STOOD OUT BEHIND THE PODIUM FINISHERS IN A POSITIVE LIGHT?

* It was a quiet day by their standards, but Kyle Kirkwood (fifth) and Marcus Ericsson (sixth) got off to a good start with Andretti Global. The team was sharp on Friday, came close to pole on Saturday with Colton Herta who claimed second, and Herta was going well until a slow pit stop took him out of contention. But as a whole, the Andretti camp were the closest to Ganassi and Penske.

* Arrow McLaren’s Christian Lundgaard led 23 laps, albeit while on a pit strategy that was out of sync with the preferred strategy. He’d fall back to eighth at the finish, but there was no denying that in his first event for the team, Lundgaard was the top performer, having led the team in qualifying and the race.

* His teammate Pato O’Ward, who had a forgettable qualifying run to 23rd, and had to perform an extra pit stop to deal with a punctured tire, salvaged what could have been a disastrous opening to his championship quest by taking 11th at the checkered flag.

* Dale Coyne Racing’s Rinus VeeKay starred in qualifying by making the Firestone Fast 12 on debut for the team and turning it into a top 10—securing ninth—to give the team a boost from the opening race.

* Like O’Ward, qualifying didn’t go the way Ed Carpenter Racing and new lead driver Alexander Rossi planned after placing 20th, but in the mix of race strategies on Sunday, he vaulted forward to grab 10th. ECR teammate Christian Rasmussen followed suit, turning his 24th-place start into a 15th-place finish.

* Graham Rahal was in the same situation, having started a lowly 21st and risen to 12th for Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing.

WHO DIDN’T STAND OUT BEHIND THE PODIUM FINISHERS?

* If there was a surprise during the weekend, it was the distance between Team Penske and its technical affiliate team at AJ Foyt Racing. With Santino Ferrucci’s run to 10th in last year’s championship, the best for the team in two decades, it was a surprise to see newcomer David Malukas start 17th, Ferrucci start 19th, and for the two to have relatively anonymous weekends on their way to 13th and 14th, respectively. It wasn’t a terrible start, by any means, but to see Penske drivers start on pole and finish 3-4 while the Foyt drivers were more than 40 seconds behind Newgarden and McLaughlin at the checkered flag was a surprise.

* It was another soft start by the RLL team, which was led by Devlin DeFrancesco in qualifying (14th) and had Rahal fight from a rearward position to take 12th among the 23 finishers. Rookie Louis Foster didn’t get a chance to help after being taken out on the opening lap.

* The Juncos Hollinger Racing team showed promise on Friday, but it didn’t transfer into qualifying or the race where Conor Daly went from 22nd to 17th and String Ray Robb went from 26th to 21st, helped in part by four drivers crashing out of the race.

WERE THERE ANY MAJOR DRAMAS OR HIGHLIGHTS TO EMERGE?

* The first-lap crash at Turn 3, which took place for the second time in the last three years, carved three undeserving drivers from the contest as Nolan Siegel, Will Power, and Foster were done on the spot.

* Scott Dixon’s radio was malfunctioning, which led him to use a low-fuel warning on his dash to know when to make his final pit stop. The stop ended up being one lap later than desired, and Palou was able to use what became an undercut to take the lead and the win.

* Colton Herta was the leader on lap 35. He pitted on lap 36, waited as his right-rear tire changer struggled to get the wheel onto the hub, and returned to the race in 13th. The team was unable to fill his fuel tank during the stop, so he returned on lap 47 to complete the process, which added a fourth stop to his day and killed any chances of recovering from the lap 36 stop. He’d finish 16th.

* And it was definitely a case of missed opportunities for Meyer Shank Racing. Felix Rosenqvist qualified third, teammate Marcus Armstrong qualified fourth, and they left the event with Rosenqvist in seventh and Armstrong out as a result of a mistake — contact with the wall — in 24th.

FOX Sports has made quite an impression with the first two NTT IndyCar Series driver promos that debuted in January on its NFL broadcasts. In a great example of how a client and an advertising agency can generate meaningful products in collaboration, FOX Sports engaged the Los Angeles-based wing of the Special Group, and from within the company, creative directors Alice Blastorah and Josh Hacohen have hit home runs with the research and treatments put to use with Josef Newgarden and Alex Palou.

“I don’t want to get complacent, but I feel like we’re right in the zone, and we’ll get better,” FOX Sports marketing VP Blake Danford told RACER. “Get that core audience involved. Get them active, get them talking. Put the material in front of these huge audiences, let the core help drive, let the audiences get intrigued and curious, and then hopefully the conversations continue on social, get talking on TV and radio, and it’s a collective, right? We’ve all got to be in this together for this to really work.”

It’s the brash-and-insider-y feel in the Newgarden and Palou promos that stand out, and if you didn’t know it, you might think Blastorah and Hacohen were hardcore IndyCar fans, thankful to get the assignments for their favorite racing series, and know all the inside details.

In fact, the pair were newcomers to IndyCar; total neophytes when the project was commissioned.

There’s a third promo on its way this weekend when FOX airs the NFL Super Bowl. There’s no guarantee Pato O’Ward’s ad will run during the game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles itself, which more than 120,000,000 viewers will watch, but its national debut is slated for the FOX network at some point during its daylong presentation of the country’s largest ratings generator. Palou and Newgarden are also expected to be in attendance for the game in New Orleans.

Marshall Pruett: Tell me about having IndyCar as a brand-new property to play with. I say “play with” because it looks like that; fun, inventive, but with some roots to how things have really been unique to the FOX Sports brand for so many years.

Josh Hacohen: We did a ton of research. It was getting acquainted with not just a surface level way with the sport, but really learning about the fans, the drivers, how things work, the quirks about it, what makes it different from F1 and NASCAR, and what makes it special.

Part of it was, we got really excited about what differentiated it, which was for us and our strategy department, this is the fastest (circuit) racing on Earth. That sets it apart right away. More than something like F1 or NASCAR. It felt like it came down to the human behind the wheel. And for us, we looked at that F1 Drive To Survive documentary, and just seeing how, all of a sudden, F1 took America by storm.

It was this documentary that led with the people. And if you care about the human behind the wheel, you’re going to care about the sport. And for us, we were like, there’s so much about these (IndyCar) drivers. There’s such great personalities. They’re more than marketable — they’re humans you want to get to know and not just in a five-minute Conan O’Brien interview-type thing but really get to know these little specifics about them. So for us, it was like, we don’t have an hour-long episode of a docuseries. We have 45 seconds.

We wanted to build these larger-than-life personas, because it felt like it was the way in. It felt like what got us interested. It’s all well and good to say it’s the fastest sport, and you can have a really fast montage and just talk about the sport and talk about some of the quirks of the sport, but without the humans, there’s no real connection. If you get to know the quirks behind what this person is, you’re going to care a lot more than if you learn about the quirks of the sport itself.

It was a human-first thing for us — that’s what we pitched when we first started. Our first idea we were calling it to ourselves, was “240 mile-per-hour bios” but in a way that you can catch everything and care about these drivers. We’ve all seen commercials that go too fast, and you’re like, “I don’t know what just happened in that commercial.” For us, a really big challenge was to figure out how to write in a way that when it all passes by, you go, “I might have missed some of that, but it’s great. I feel really good about it.”

Marshall Pruett: Where did you start?

Josh Hacohen: We wrote the Newgarden one first. And it just flowed out of us. It was really because we had done all the research, and with the research, we had made ourselves not just learn about the sport, but care about it and care about the people. So because we cared, it flowed right out of us. It just felt like the perfect marriage between what real fans would really care about and how to get everybody else to clue in and be like, “Maybe I will tune into the first race and just see what these guys are doing.”

Welcome to the fastest racing on earth. March 2 on @FOXTV.@IndyCar | @josefnewgarden | #INDYCARonFOX pic.twitter.com/yWFIOlDVa3

— INDYCAR on FOX (@IndyCarOnFOX) January 12, 2025

Marshall Pruett: I love that recognition right off the jump for a couple of reasons. Our sport is a bit of a unicorn among the others. We have these 1500 to 2000 unique parts and pieces that come together to form the tool we use to put on our sport. It’s not a football. There’s no commercial saying, “Watch Sunday because we use a football or we swing a bat.” But we pitch these highly complex machines, and we use drivers inside them to compete and entertain. It’s a weird concept next to other sports. And it’s ultimately the people who throw the ball, catch the ball, swing the bat, or turn the wheel where we see these amazing sporting things happen.

Were you aware in your research that there’s a whole lineage here with years-long, if not decades-long complaints from diehard IndyCar fans pleading to “feature the damn drivers.” Focus on them, not the car, not the spectacle?

Alice Blastorah: I mean, I’d like to say yeah, but not knowing much about the sport, we didn’t realize there was this craving to know more about the drivers. But in our research, getting deep into the Reddit threads, into X, etc., we did understand there was more of this desire to celebrate those personalities and just seeing the amount of fandom with Pato, for instance — he has malls full of people showing up, just crying, screaming his name, huge pictures of his head. So, so we thought that was a really interesting entry point because these guys, they’re like superheroes.

They’re all extremely talented, and very good looking, so why not market that first? As we got deeper and deeper into our research, we felt like the right way forward was to lean into their personalities. We didn’t want to just do another generic bio where you could find facts that they can Google, they can Wikipedia, so we were just really leaning into the bizarre elements about them, just to build them into these legends and create these large personas, which seems to be working.

So we started crafting very specific lenses for each driver, like for Newgarden. He’s this very calculated, all-American, precise guy. He’s just absolutely precise in everything he does.

Josh Hacohen: When I read the script to him — and we didn’t have Tom Brady in the original script with Newgarden — he just said, “You know, one day I want to be Tom Brady. I want to be the Tom Brady of this sport. I look up to people like that. I’m so glad that you guys are taking the interest to market this and let me know what I can do. I can do whatever you want.” And for us, that was like, “OK, Josef is totally game for this.” He is.

And just like in the commercial, the guy wins, even when he loses. He goes, “If you wanted to make me a villain, make me a villain. I will lean into it. I will love it.” And you know what? Even if we did — which I don’t feel like we did, but if we did — he would have nailed that and been lovable in that role, too, because the guy just goes for it. So for us, it was like these guys all had their had their thing. To Alice’s point, Josef, he came in larger-than-life and was willing to do whatever we wanted. That was a huge. We already met our character.

Marshall Pruett: For him to say, “I’m all in” shows you built some trust with him. Alice, tell me about the Palou promo. He can walk down any street in America, maybe except for Indianapolis, and go unrecognized, which is a crime. How do you come up with a treatment for someone who would have his coming-out party through this promo with FOX?

🥛 @AlexPalou and @CGRTeams can almost taste it. Welcome to the fastest racing on earth. #INDYCARonFOX I @IndyCar pic.twitter.com/XUUKyJYf9N

— INDYCAR on FOX (@IndyCarOnFOX) January

26, 2025

Alice Blastorah: I can relate to Alex, because to me, he is more of that reserved, introspective person, very kind, very sweet, but you can tell he’s more meticulous, thinking, very calculated. That’s why, with him, we wanted to give him a completely different flavor than Josef and really lean into those introspective parts about him, thinking about racing constantly and obsessing over it. We didn’t want to go over the top with this brazen flavor with him.

Josh Hacohen: With Josef, it was the absurdity. And in Alex, the absurdity was happening around him. We wanted to make sure that it came across that he’s a one-track mind. Alex hung out with us a lot in the video village, and that was awesome for everyone. We’re just having casual conversation and I asked him if he was a Real Madrid or Barcelona fan. He’s like, “Yeah, Real Madrid.” But then he just qualifies, after some further conversation about it, and says, “But really, I just like racing.”

Like, you gotta be the only Spaniard to be like, “I’m not even picking a side. I’m picking racing.” It’s amazing. It just felt like such a perfect example for us of, “This guy is dead set on racing. He’s a one-track mind.”

Marshall Pruett: This is maybe a weird one. Were you aware, when it comes to Josef and the mentions of milk in his promo, of ABC’s 2014 Indy 500 promo and the ‘Milk Gimp’ bondage piece called ‘Veins of Milk’? Because I’m watching yours, and I’m seeing him the multiple mentions of milk, and I’m like, “Oh, there’s a whole like subreddit angle here…” Did you know about it?

Alice Blastorah: Oh, we knew about it. I definitely think they were going for a shock factor there but yes, we were well aware of it, and then no comment after that!

Marshall Pruett: You’ve aired two of the three, so tell me about Pato and what you found there with him? Kid from Monterrey, Mexico, who spent a large portion of his life growing up in San Antonio… there’s 1000 things you can do and he will be able to serve all them.

Alice Blastorah: With him, he’s also got a very distinctive, different flavor. You can feel his passion and personality just pouring out of him. And he’s more of this daredevil type that we’ve been working through that archetype. So without giving too much away, yeah, we’re really leaning into his Daredevil-type attitude and just way of being.

Josh Hacohen: He’s like the young bad boy. It’s like Beatlemania around him. As we’re crafting larger-than-life personalities, he’s already larger-than-life in terms of the entire hemisphere loves this guy. So without giving anything away, what do fans love about him? What is it about him that sends people into loving Pato? Even the IndyCar subreddit right now, everybody is just like, “Pato is coming. They’re holding Pato for the Super Bowl.” There’s this anticipation, because they’re because they’re in love with Pato, and we just wanted to figure out why, and put that on display. That’s all I can say about that for now, but there’s a lot of fun stuff coming.

Marshall Pruett: Tell me about reception to your work you’ve seen so far with the Josef and Palou pieces.

Josh Hacohen: I just said to the agency, as we talked about this, that I’ve never made advertising for more a more grateful audience. It’s truly incredible to see. You get a real sense of the community, first of all, in how they feed off the commercial and then each other, and how excited they are to be marketed at all, let alone marketing they enjoy. We’ve been in the business a long time. We’ve made a million ads and had a lot of big placements. So for us, we were over with looking at the comments, but when they flooded in from our partners at FOX, they sent some breakdowns and just said, “You’ve got to just look at this.”

It’s been a crazy few months coming up with this work. We work out of LA, and there were the fires, so it was really hard to get these made. But when it goes out in the world and you see how much it means to people, for us in advertising, it’s hard to attach your identity to something like that, because we make polarizing things. We really see a lot of good and bad comments and you don’t want to hitch your identity to that. But just seeing this and all the hard work be validated in this way — almost unanimously validated — was something you don’t see in advertising and it’s just a beautiful thing. It just makes us want to make more for this audience, to give them everything they wanted, and more.