PLYMOUTH, Wisc — While Alex Palou had jumped out to a massive points lead entering this weekend’s Sonsio Grand Prix at Road America (1 p.m. ET, USA, INDYCAR Radio Network), his competitors noted that the championship is still far from over.
All it would take is a mistake or two by Palou and the championship would be blown right back open.
That mistake happened early on in the Saturday morning practice session. Just seven minutes into Saturday morning’s NTT INDYCAR SERIES practice session, Palou crashed hard into the Turn 14 tire barriers.
Luckily, Palou was able to walk away unscathed, but he said he was pushing too hard in trying to find the limit and unfortunately, stepped over it.
The thing is, 11 minutes later, two unlikely competitors also had a crash. Will Power and Scott Dixon crashed in Turn 12 which left Power fuming mad at his rival.
See, Power was already frustrated by the lack of pace in Friday’s practice. Just prior to the two tangling in Turn 12, Power was riding behind Romain Grosjean on track. Grosjean, moved to his right to block Power who had a run on him entering Canada Corner.
That had to make Power mad already. However, just in front, Dixon spun in Canada Corner all by himself and was able to get back going right in front of these two. Dixon knew Grosjean was coming so he allowed him to pass to Dixon’s inside. Afterwards, Dixon veered to his right to get out of the way. Unfortunately, Power was already there and the two locked wheels and skated into the concrete wall.
Power jumped out of his car and went to confront Dixon. He even pushed him before the two were separated by the safety team.
Dixon made mention that he didn’t even know Power was there and said the two spoke in the medical car and that Power understood.
It shapes up a wild season for which we finally have some driver confrontations. Between Dixon vs. Pato O’Ward, to O’Ward vs. Marcus Ericsson and now Power vs. Dixon, it’s been a great season for drama and we’re not even to the halfway point.
With 1st, 4th and 8th in the standings having issues, it opened the door for the others to shine.
Once again, Alexander Rossi (1:40.9112-seconds) was quickest in his No. 7 Dallara-Honda. He bettered his Friday time (1:41.7790-seconds) by .8-seconds and looks like a legitimate pole favorite.
His former teammate, Colton Herta, was P2 in his No. 26 Dallara-Honda with a time of 1:41.0584-seconds. While being second, it was a messy session for Herta who got off course a couple of times including bringing out the second to last red flag in the session for being stopped in the Turn 12 runoff.
Felix Rosenqvist (1:41.2572-seconds), David Malukas (1:41.3010-seconds) and Marcus Armstrong (1:41.3488-seconds) rounded out the top five of a wild session.
It was a messy one overall with five red flags flying in an hour total of time which left the drivers far short of the 45 minutes of action.
Part of the incidents was with this being qualifying day and the margin between advancing to the next round and not being to the slimmest of times, you have to get everything out of your car each lap. That’s why in this practice session, you push the limits for which is why we saw so many drivers getting wide in the corners. With the track being so smooth via the repave, getting off the line is still slick and once you do so, you’re a passenger.
Right now, McLaren have won the weekend with being 1-5-8 on Friday and 1-3-7 on Saturday morning.
Ganassi was just 5-23-26-27 but three of the four had issues with Palou and Dixon crashing and Ericsson getting off track in Turn 14. They were 3-4-6-10 on Friday.
Penske also struggled again. A day after going 15-16-17, they went 9-12-25. Andretti improved to being 2-8-16-22. The thing is, Romain Grosjean (18th, 22nd) is struggling while Herta (9th, 2nd) is shining.
RLL is the quiet team that’s performing again. They went 7th (Christian Lundgaard), 11th (Graham Rahal) and 23rd (Jack Harvey) on Friday and now 11th (Lundgaard), 13th (Harvey) and 15th (Rahal) respectively on Saturday.
It will be interesting to see who makes it to the Fast Six later today (1:55 p.m. ET, Peacock, INDYCAR Radio Network) since there’s not much time to fix the crashed cars, there’s not much data to work off of with a messy session and no one outside of McLaren is standing out.
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