Alexander Rossi and Colton Herta led an Andretti 1-2 in the openeing round of practice yesterday afternoon at road America. The teammates exchanged the top spot a couple of times in the last few minutes of the extended session.
Much of the session saw few cars on track as teams tried to save their tires for the race. In the end there was about the same amount of activity as in a 45 minute practice round. The 75 minutes was an experiment, and I would rather see two shorter sessions on Friday than one long one.
Results:
Today’s Schedule:
Saturday, June 11, 2022 All Times Central 7:00 a.m. Gates Open 8:00 a.m. Indy Pro 2000 Q2 8:45 a.m. INDY LIGHTS P2 9:45 a.m.INDYCAR SERIES Practice 2 Peacock 11:00 a.m. USF2000 R#1 12:00 p.m. INDY LIGHTS Qualifying
12:45 p.m. NTT INDYCAR SERIES Qualifying/Firestone Fast 6Peacock 2:15 p.m. Indy Pro 2000 R#1 3:20 p.m. USF2000 R#2 4:20 p.m. NTT INDYCAR SERIES Final PracticePeacock 5:05 p.m. RADICAL CUP R#2 6:10 p.m. Vintage Indy Registry
I will probably get to the track in the middle of the morning practice,and I will have a more detailed report.
Alexander Rossi had the quickest lap in the 30 minute warmup session for today’s Chevrolet Detroit Grand Prix. He also was fastest in yesterday morning’s practice session.
This morning’s practice was the cleanest of the weekend, stopped just once when Jimmie Johnson spun and stalled with about 15 minutes left.
The red alternate tires appear to degrade rather quickly. The teams have some big decisions to make on when to use them. Tire choices will be coming soon, and the starting tire could be the key to the race. There are many options, including a third stop.
As usual, news breaks while I’m in transit. Here is the release from AMSP.
ALEXANDER ROSSI TO JOIN ARROW McLAREN SP IN 2023
“I see the commitment this team has to each other and to me”
Indianapolis, Ind. | June 2, 2022
Arrow McLaren SP has signed American driver Alexander Rossi to a multiyear deal for him to drive for the team, starting in 2023. The arrival of Rossi underpins Arrow McLaren SP’s long-term strategy to become a consistent race winner and championship contender.
Rossi, from Nevada City, California, has secured seven wins, six poles and 25 podium finishes since arriving in IndyCar in 2016. His most notable win came as a rookie when he won the historic 100th Running of the Indianapolis 500 in dramatic fashion, coasting across the finish line on fumes.
The American is a versatile driver who has also made five starts in Formula 1, raced the famed Bathurst 1000 in Australia in 2019, won the Baja 1000 in 2021, and took an overall win at the 24 Hours of Daytona in 2021.
Rossi will join the team following the completion of the 2022 NTT INDYCAR SERIES season.
Arrow McLaren SP will hold a press conference tomorrow (Friday, June 3) at 10:30 a.m. ET with Alexander Rossi and Taylor Kiel, President of Arrow McLaren SP, at the Detroit Grand Prix Media Center.
Alexander Rossi, said:
“First, I want to thank everyone at Andretti Autosport for an incredible seven years. It has been a great ride with an awesome team, and it has been an honor to race for the Andretti name and for Michael for so long. The time has come for a new challenge, with a team that is growing in the sport. I look forward to contributing to the development of Arrow McLaren SP and helping them reach the top. I see the commitment this team has to each other and to me, and I’m looking forward to getting started. It’s time for me to race for another one of motorsport’s biggest names: McLaren.”
Taylor Kiel, President, Arrow McLaren SP, said:
“As we look forward to 2023, we are looking for a driver that will be a great fit and bring experience to the team. Alex is a driver who knows what it takes to succeed in this sport and will strengthen our talented driver line-up. He shares the same winning mindset that I see every day across Arrow McLaren SP and I think we will find a lot of success together in the years to come.”
Zak Brown, CEO, McLaren Racing, said:
“Alex is a proven race winner and an Indianapolis 500 champion, who shares our desire to win. It is essential that we put the right talent in place, both inside and outside the car, so we can consistently compete for championships and race wins as a team. He is someone we have had our eye on for some time and we’re excited to see what he’ll do as a part of Arrow McLaren SP.”
Before the first wheel turned at St. Pete 17 days, it was widely assumed that Alexander Rossi would leave Andretti Autosport at the end of this season. Rumors have him going to either Ganassi in the fourth car currently driven by Jimmie Johnson, or Will Power’s seat in car 12 at Penske. I am okay with this. The speculation has simmered since late 2021.
Yesterday, Racer magazine’s Marshall Pruett posted a piece about Pato O’Ward in which the AMSP driver says it is possible he will be in a different situation in 2023. he wasn’t clear whether that ride would be in Indycar with another team or in another slot within the McLaren organization.
Meanwhile, Michael Andretti continues to pursue his goal of F1 team ownership. His quest looks to widened. He still hopes that the current Formula 1 owners will accept his new team. There is also talk that he is speaking to Red Bull about buying the Alpha Tauri team. Should Andretti acquire an F1 component to his racing empire, Colton Herta will move to the European based circuit.
Colton Herta
Last week Herta signed a development driver contract with McLaren, which gives him an opportunity to get more super license points to qualify to drive in F1.
The good news is that Andretti is not likely to have a Formula 1 team until 2024, and it is unlikely that McLaren will have an open F1 seat before then for O’Ward. Rossi apparently will stay in Indycar for the forseeable future.
We need to enjoy watching Herta and O’Ward this year and next. After that, who knows? It isn’t as if the cupboard of young talent is bare should the two young guns leave. Kyle Kirkwood, Christian Lundgaard, and Callum Ilott will easily take over the spotlight.
We are just one race into the 2022 season. Can’t we just enjoy the racing at this point and save all the musical chairs stuff until late July? Silly Season seems to arrive earlier every year, but three weeks after the first race is way too early.
My Texas coverage starts later today. I will be on site this weekend. Please follow along.
Alex Palou celebrates his third win of the year and retaking the points lead. Indycar photo by Chris Owens
Pit strategy and cautions can make or break your race. They hurt Graham Rahal, who arguably should have won the race, and Pato O’Ward, who lost the lead in the points standings They helped Alex Palou, Alexander Rossi, and Scott Dixon, who ended the day on the podium. Palou’s team waiting an extra lap to call him in on lap 44 was the winning move today.
The podium. Photo from my friend Brad Proctor
Why can’t Indycar drivers get through the first turn at Portland cleanly? Today’s melee wasn’t as destructive as the first two years after Indycar’s return, but it turned the race on its head, especially with the way Race Control reordered the field. It took a later caution to reverse what happened at the beginning.
Is Alex Palou the next Scott Dixon? Nothing seems to faze this kid-neither two consecutive finishes in the 20s, nor being shuffled to the back of the field after winning the pole. He just does what he needs to do in order to win the title. Today was a big step in that direction.
Palou not only leads O’Ward by 25 points, he now owns the first tiebreaker with his third win of the year. I really didn’t think we would see a driver win three times this season.
The points chase realistically is down to three-Palou, O’Ward, and Josef Newgarden. Dixon is 49 points behind, essentially a full race in arrears. Marcus Ericsson was barely hanging on, and losing 15 more points to the leader pretty much ends his title bid.
I hope in their new television deal that indycar has forbidden NBC from using the “Points as They Run” graphic. It is pointless and meaningless. Drivers don’t earn point as they run. They earn points when they finish. This graphic was displayed at least five times in the first 28 laps, a time in the race where it is totally not necessary.
Points as They Finished
It seems that the Team Penske drivers have had a lot of contact with each other during races this season.
Nice to see Alexander Rossi finally get on the podium in 2021. I think he will win one of the next two races. Rossi dominated two years in a row at Long Beach.
Palou’s repeat win means the series can only tie the record for most different winners in a season with a maximum of 11.
I will be back tomorrow with more on today’s race. Thanks for following along this weekend.
Conor Daly and Alexander Rossi both enjoy World Wide Technology Raceway, and they are looking forward to good results Saturday. Both drivers said they enjoy racing there. Rossi is eager to race at the track near St. Louis after his team had a very good test there this year. Rossi is anxious to see how the one day event plays out.
” I love that we’re having the night race again,” Rossi said, “I think that’s critical for short oval racing. Short oval racing but for the 500 is meant to be raced at night, easier to follow cars. Everything about it is better. Looking forward to that, having the fans back. Yeah, I think it’s going to be an interesting kind of experiment for us to do a one-day event. See how that goes.”
Daly added, ” Yeah, it’s one of my favorite tracks. I couldn’t tell you why. Ever since our very first test day with Foyt, where we were quickest, we kind of all looked at each other, This is weird, not really sure why this is happening. I love racing there. Love the way that track challenges us as drivers and challenges these cars. It will be fun. I’m just happy to be racing, honestly, which is nice.”
Alexander Rossi photo by Chris Owens, Indycar
Rossi talked about his season and how situations have prevented him from showing better results. the last three races have had mostly better results, and he is confident of a strong finish to the season.
” Yeah, I mean, the pace has been great; it hasn’t really resulted in much. Obviously with the field now, every small mistake and issue and mis-step in setup decisions from session to session has a bigger effect than it used to. It requires everyone to really be perfect throughout the weekend. It is what it is. I think the Indy GP, this past race was good. Nashville we obviously had good pace, but it didn’t result in anything. Yeah, I mean, I think it’s all down to some circumstances ultimately/”
, who isDaly talked about the challenges Romain Grosjean driving his first oval race this season, faces.
“… it’s going to be tough without a doubt. I think when you show up to, like, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, it being your first oval, there’s so much practice, right? There’s so much testing. Romain obviously got to test, which is great. When you’re out there, at Indy when we practice, you get a lot of traffic, you get kind of a feel for what’s going on. Realistically there’s so little track time in Gateway, he’s going to be thrust into a very, very new situation.”
The Bommarito Automotive Group 500 is scheduled for a green flag start at 8:40 pm EDT Saturday night.
Photo: Pato O’Ward leads the group during testing at IMS Friday. -Joe Skibinski, Indycar
Jay Frye declared it a good day. It gave Indycar a direction although there is still work to do.
“When we came into this, we thought really at the end of the day that this would precipitate more questions than answers. That’s probably what happened, right. Which is fine. That’s what we expected,” the Indycar president told the media after the four var test at Indianapolis Motor Speedway Friday.
“We did learn a lot. But it did also create a lot of other questions,” Frye concluded.
The test, with drivers Scott Dixon, and Alexander Rossi representing Honda, and Josef Newgarden and Pato O’Ward driving Chevrolets, involved various versions of push to pass in an attempt to simulate what the hybrid component might look like in 2023.
Frye explained what Indycar was looking for.
I think today we’ve got a lot of data off the car in a direction on what approach to go with,” he said. “In the way that we have push to pass, with the hybrid system that would kind of be obsolete. You’ll have a bank of energy that you have with the hybrid system that once it will go away, that you will be able to recharge it so it will be on all the time basically. With push to pass there’s an amount of time or there’s an amount of pushes. That’s what we looked at today. We just gave the drivers for every 200 seconds, you’re going to go do a 20 lap run. Use it as you want it. Most used about half, so 100 seconds. It was interesting to see how it played out.”
“We thought they would have liked that for a longer time. This is new. We’ve never done this on an oval. We’ve tested it at Pocono, Texas and Phoenix before but that was with the old package. For this new one, it definitely is much better than it was before which is cool,” Frye concluded. He also noted that trap speeds which are normally around 230 mile an hour, were 236 miles an hour Friday.
The new, larger 2.4 liter 2023 engine, and the hybrid energy recovery system should give the cars 200 more horsepower in 2023. Frye said the series will not allow that much all at once, but adjust the and work up to 900 horsepower.
Alexander Rossi, Scott Dixon, and and Josef newgarden discuss what they learned in Friday’s test at IMS. Photo by Chris Owens, Indycar.
The Pit Window spoke with three of the drivers after the early end to the test day.
Scott Dixonliked some of the changes and noticed the increase in speed.
“Obviously there’s a lot of power and some of the durations are quite long,” Dixon said. “10 seconds at 70-80 horsepower, especially in a car that’s trimmed out. Your average lap speed could jump by several mph. There’s some good changes to see how you can apply that and to what effect or not effect on the tire and in regards to running in traffic.”
Dixon’s concern with the push to pass is how long a driver would be locked out of the system after using it. He prefers a shorter lock out time.
Alexander Rossi doesn’t think the push to pass would change anything on an oval.
“Yes it’s a pretty big horsepower boost with the push to pass,” said the Andretti Autosport driver. “We’re going to have to look at it to see if it changed anything for the better or worse. It’s definitely different. We got that test accomplished and have some hard data to look at for the future.”
Josef Newgarden was happy to help Indycar gather data and glad that he learned some tings.
“I thought it went well. When you learn something in testing you’re happy about it. I thought we learned some stuff today on our cars on how things works and how they could potentially work in use scenario.
“The horsepower bump was tunable. You could definitely raise the horsepower increase up or down so that jump in the performance off the corner could be bigger or smaller. The length of it is all adjustable. We ran through a couple of scenarios and a couple of configurations. It’s definitely noticeable. A couple of configurations were noticeable. If you want to run a system like that, it’s really what’s the right configuration to give to the field. I think that’s the type of info we were trying to arm INDYCAR with and now it’s on to them to see what we do in the future.”
Frye said that testing of the hybrid system would likely be in January and February of 2022.
Notes
It was wonderful to watch cars on the IMS oval again. It has been more than a year since I have seen the oval used.
Improvements made by Roger Penske are obvious. Most noticeable is the new video board on the back of the Pagoda. it spans the entire width of the building and the high resolution screen is fantastic.
The main thing is how clean the plaza and Victory Circle are. I was so used to how the areas appeared, but I now realize that they were long overdue for sprucing up.
Testing for the Indianapolis 500 is schedule for April 8 and 9, between the mass vaccination clinics at the Speedway. I assume the turn 2 mounds will be open as they were yesterday.
Alexander Rossi will tell you exactly what he thinks.
“No, I just think we sucked globally. Like there wasn’t anything we were doing right, whether itwas qualifying performance, whether it was race performance, pit stops, my driving. None of it was good…Last year just sucked. It sucked on track, it sucked off track. It was a terrible year for everyone except for Scott and Takuma, so good for them.”
The Andretti Autosport driver did see a reason for optimisim toward the end of the season with four podiums and a strong performance at St. Pete, where he was ina position to win until a late crash ended his race and frustrating season. he takes the blame for the incident.
“..the end of the year went really well for us for the most part,minus St. Pete, which is on me.There you go. I’m not going to get into the details of it because it’s not necessary, but I think we’re operating at a really high level right now, and I’m excited to get on track in Barber.”
Rossi said that the team’s testing has gone quite well, and that they are ready to come out of the gate strong. He believes the schedule with fewer short ovals plays to the strength of the Andretti team overall.
” I think street courses followed by the superspeedways followed by road courses are Andretti Autosport’s strong suits and we only had one of those last year which we did not capitalize on whatsoever…Fortunately short ovals really aren’t a huge factor anymore, so yay for that.”
Rossi believes a lot of the issues in 2020 revolved around the condensed track time at races, and not getting to where they needed to be quickly enough.
“…at the end of the day as much as we as a team struggled with the minimal practice time, I did, as well. Like I wasn’t doing a good enough job getting up to speed quick enough, which was putting us on the back foot and having to take pretty big risks in qualifying. Sometimes it was okay, sometimes we qualified — quite honestly we qualified all right all throughout the beginning of the year. We were just never kind of in the top three, which is where you’ve got to be these days. It’s where you’ve got to be to go out and win races.”
Rossi is excited for the 2021 season to begin. he is very about the way preseason testing has gone, and believes he and team can put 2020 in the past. I thought last year was an aberration for Rossi. I look for a strong year from him, and he will be contending for the title all season.
Alexander Rossi led a strong showing by Andretti Autosport at Sebring on Tuesday with a quick lap of 52.27 seconds. Teammate Colton Herta was second, followed by Jack Harvey and Ryan Hunter-Reay.
The Rahal Letterman Lanigan duo of Graham Rahal and Takuma Sato were next in line.
Photo-Chris Owens Indycar
Harvey, of Meyer Shank Racing had a technical alliance with Andretti last year. I look for a strong year from Harvey. The team has a full year under their belt, and having Helio Castroneves as a teammate for six races should help as well.
Dalton Kellett and A, J, Foyt Racing tested both days and seemed happy with the team’s progress.
The Pit Window by Mike Silver 