Chip Ganassi Racing’s Race To Lose?

Team Penske has won 3 of the last 5 Honda Indy Toronto races, but Scott Dixon has won the other two. The “Ice Man” won in 2018, was runner-up in 2019 and won again in 2022 for three consecutive top two finishes on this track. Dixon also has 10 straight Toronto top 10’s including four wins and a runner-up in that span. He also qualifies well here too. He’s started in the top 10 in all 14 tries including 11 of which in the Fast 6. Since 2015, he’s qualified 4th, 1st, 5th, 2nd, 2nd and 2nd respectively. On street courses this season, Dixon has finished 3rd in St. Pete and while he was last in Long Beach, he had a top five car before that incident with O’Ward and fourth in Detroit.

It’s not just him though in the Ganassi camp that you have to deal with.

Alex Palou was sixth a year ago here and eighth, fifth and first respectively on street courses this season. He’s won 4 of the last 5 races on the season including three in-a-row.

Marcus Ericsson finished fifth last year and has 2 podiums (1st, 3rd) in 3 street course starts this season. In three street course tries this season, rookie Marcus Armstrong finished 11th, 8th and 8th respectively.

Ganassi is 2-for-3 on street courses this season and also won the final two races of them last year to give them 4 wins in the last 5 tries.

While Team Penske won the 1st three street races last year, Ganassi was next best in class on these circuits with finishes of 2-8-9-23 at St. Pete, 3-6-20-22 in Long Beach and 3-6-7-22 in Detroit.

Also, Ganassi drivers have won four of the last five races on the season including going 1-2 the last time out in Mid-Ohio.

Can anyone stop them?

Clearly you can’t look past Team Penske.

Penske and Ganassi have combined to have won 7 of the last 8 street course races and 13 of the last 19 of them in general. Only Andretti Autosport (4 wins) and Arrow McLaren Racing (1 win) have won in this span.

With Penske and Ganassi having won five straight Honda Indy Toronto’s and combining for 5 of the 9 podiums this season on street courses and have won 8 of 9 races this season, it may be a race between these two on Sunday.

Ganassi could very well be tough to stop, but Penske may crack the door open though too.

Penske started off 3-for-3 with 3 different drivers on street courses in 2022, but have since gone 0-for-5. In just 2 of the last five, they had the second-place finisher.

They went 9-10-15 in Toronto and 2-6-11 in Nashville a year ago.

This year, they went 7-13-17 in St. Pete, 6-9-10 in Long Beach and 2-7-10 in Detroit.

That’s just two podiums in the last five tries after having three straight wins. Can they make up for it in Toronto, a place where they’ve won 3 of the last 5 races here or do they slip further back?

Josef Newgarden has 2 wins in his last 6 Toronto starts and 5 top 10’s in that same span. Prior to that, his best finish was 11th in 5 tries. He’s made the 2nd round in each of his last 6 Toronto starts too (11th, 8th, 7th, 1st, 5th, 3rd). However, he’s been just a top 10 guy, not a top 5 one in street courses lately. Newgarden finished 17th (St. Pete), 9th (Long Beach) and 10th (Detroit) this year on them. He’s finished either 9th or 10th in 2 of the last 3 years here too.

Will Power is a three-time winner (2007, 2010, 2016) but his last four finishes are 21st, 18th, 18th and 15th respectively too. Power, has just two podiums in his last 12 Toronto starts with 8 of those 12 seeing him finish 15th or worse at that. He qualified 15th and 16th his last two times out in Toronto. That’s why despite a runner-up in Detroit, seventh in St. Pete and sixth in Long Beach, I’m fading him.

Scott McLaughlin was ninth a year ago, but on street courses this season, he’s finished 13th, 10th and 7th respectively.

Plus, Honda is 3-for-3 on street courses this season. Andretti Autosport would be the next team I look at then.

They’ve done so well on Saturday’s (6 front row starts in 9 races). It’s just they’ve not done so on Sunday with only one win to show for it. Can they get out of their own way this weekend?

Think about it, Romain Grosjean should have won St. Pete. A badly timed caution kept him out of winning Barber. Colton Herta should have won Road America and if not for a speeding penalty in Mid-Ohio, he would have been a contender there too. Mix that with Kyle Kirkwood winning Long Beach and there’s no reason to believe Andretti couldn’t have had 4-5 wins at the moment.

Which that plus their past Toronto success could make them favorites.

Herta won twice on street courses in 2021 and should have had a third in Nashville. He was seventh here as a rookie in 2019 after qualifying 16th and second a year ago after a pole. That’s why despite finishes of 20th, 4th and 11th on street courses this season, I have my eye on the youngster.

Grosjean was 16th last year as a rookie but on street courses this season, he has qualified first, third and third and if not for bad luck, would have had strong finishes in all. He crashed while going for the lead with 29 to go in St. Pete, he was runner-up in Long Beach and got into Turn 7 too hot in Detroit and slipped from third to seventh entering his first pit stop and crashed with 20 to go while riding in seventh.

Kirkwood has become a street course ace. Kirkwood qualified 5th in St. Pete and did so crashing. In Long Beach he started on the pole and won. For Detroit, he crashed with pole potential (was 3rd in both practices) and despite being ran over at the start a dropping to 27th, he rebounded to finish sixth.

The next team to watch has to be McLaren.

Pato O’Ward should have won St. Pete after Grosjean and Scott McLaughlin’s crash. He finished second. He had the wrong qualifying strategy in Long Beach but had a quick car. He had the right race strategy in Detroit before a bad pit stop later compounded by a costly driver error. The speed is there. Alexander Rossi has a pair of top five finishes (4th St. Pete, 5th Detroit) in 3 street course starts while Felix Rosenqvist went from 7th in Long Beach to 3rd in Detroit in his last two. Rosenqvist also finished third here last year and fifth as a rookie in 2019. Rossi has also been solid here with being 2nd, 8th, 3rd and 23rd (started 4th) in his last four starts

McLaren now has two drivers in the top 8 in points. Andretti’s best is ninth. Between the four teams though, if you throw in Penske and Ganassi with Andretti and McLaren, they make up 12 of the top 13 in points.

The thing is, these four have really separated themselves in this era.

Since 2022, these four have won all 27 races and if you go back to 2021, they’ve won 37 straight. Furthermore, in this Aeroscreen era (57 races), they’ve won 94.7% (54-for-57) of them.

The last non “Big 4” team to win was Meyer Shank Racing in 2021. In fact, these teams didn’t win the Month of May at all with Ed Carpenter Racing’s Rinus VeeKay winning the GMR Grand Prix and Helio Castroneves the Indy 500.

The only other time they didn’t win was the 2020 Indy 500 with RLL and Takuma Sato.

That’s it.

The separation is real. You have the top 2, the next two, then the rest.

Penske has won 22 times. Ganassi has won 21. Andretti has won 7 and McLaren 4. The other teams are RLL, ECR and MSR each with 1.

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Dixon/Newgarden

Alex Palou has been superman as of late. Over the last 10 races (dating back to last season), he’s won five of them.

The 26-year-old is also on a string of races to where he’s started 3rd, 1st, 1st, 3rd and 4th and finished 1st, 4th, 1st, 1st and 1st. He’s led 220 of the 520 laps (42.3%) in the process. Mid-Ohio was his 8th straight top five finish on the season and 9th top 10 in as many races run this year.

He’s scored 24 top five finishes in the last 42 races.

That’s allowed him to open up a 110 point lead on Scott Dixon and 116 on Josef Newgarden. The thing is, if Dixon and/or Newgarden is going to catch Palou, it has to start with one of them winning on Sunday.

In 2020, Dixon won each of the first three races run and had a top two result in four of the first five overall. In fact, once Dixon won the Aug. 29 race at the World Wide Technology Raceway that year, it was his sixth top two in the opening eight races of the season. With a race on that same track a day later and six overall races left, he appeared to be untouchable.

Newgarden, found himself over 117 points down, going into Race 2 of the St. Louis race weekend. He stormed all the way back and nearly won the title.

How? How does one make up 117 points in six races?

Speed and talent is how and it left Newgarden wondering if he had started better, what if?

In a six-race span to end that season, Newgarden had five top four finishes — four of those in the top two. Dixon, only had one podium and two top fives.

That’s why these two have lived it. They’ve also combined to have won 6 of the last 10 Honda Indy Toronto’s including 4 of the last 6 and 3 of the last 4 at that.

Dixon is coming off of a runner-up finish in Mid-Ohio and has three straight top two finishes here including a win just last season. Newgarden is a two-time winner.

Then it’s a doubleheader at Iowa.

Newgarden has won 6 of the last 8 oval races including being 2-for-2 this season. He’s absolutely a threat at both Iowa and Gateway which make up 3 races in a 5 race stretch.

Dixon may be 0-for-17 at Iowa, but he’s also had five straight top five finishes there too including a pair of runner-ups at that.

Then it’s to Nashville. Dixon won last year and was runner-up in 2022. After is to the Indy road course to where both Dixon and Newgarden have won at. So has Palou, most recently. Then it’s to Gateway.

Palou has finished 11th, 14th, 6th and 13th at Iowa and 15th, 12th, 20th and ninth in Gateway.

The potential is still there.

Honda is 3-for-3 on street courses this season and won the final two of them a year ago. Do they shine at Toronto (Sunday) and Nashville (Aug. 6)? Ganassi is 2-for-2 at Nashville and has won 2 of the last 3 in Toronto. They’ve won 4 of the last 5 street course events overall too.

Where Honda has the street course reign, Chevy has the same on short ovals.

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Tom Blomqvist, Ryan Hunter-Reay

Both drivers are in for a challenging weekend ahead in Toronto. For Tom Blomqvist, this is his INDYCAR debut. For Ryan Hunter-Reay, this is his first street race in 23 months. Which is why I’m watching how both adapt to the conditions this weekend.

In the case of Blomqvist, there’s no doubt about it – this weekend is a bonafide try out for the current IMSA driver. He’s made mention several times that he’d love an opportunity to continue collecting paychecks from Meyer Shank Racing. However, he’d also like to do so as an Indy Car driver though too.

With both current drivers for MSR being free agents, there’s a path for the highly decorated sports car driver to advance up.

Which is why I’m curious what he can do in his debut this weekend. While it’s his first race, it’s not his first time in the car. He tested last October at Sebring for them which is a track that typically leads to some street course setups.

I’m not saying Blomqvist needs to get a top 10, but this car did last year and with an audition ahead, what can he do with it?

He’ll still face a steep learning curve. He’s never been to Toronto before. He hasn’t been in the car in eight months and it’s at a circuit with walls on each side of him.

Still, Blomqvist is competitive and wants to show MSR that when the series is back in 2024, he wants to be too.

For Hunter-Reay, the 18-time victor was well aware of the challenges that he might face ahead. If this car and this team were operating on all cylinders, then he wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with.

That’s why his first start with the team at Road America was more of a learning experience than not. This was his first time outside of a test in the Fall of 2021 with ECR, to run on a road course. He didn’t run at all in 2022 and his only start since the 2021 season finale was in this past May’s 107th Running of the Indianapolis 500. He did so with Dreyer & Reinbold Racing.

Now, he was making right hand turns too for which he had to get acclimated with that, the team and the Chevrolet power plant.

While he’d start last, he’d improve 10 positions in that race to come away 17th. The good news from that is that they now had a full weekend’s worth of data to pour over and a week off between races to do so. Plus, the next race was on a like track at Mid-Ohio.

After another week off to digest what they’ve learned through the first two race weekend’s, it’s time to head north of the border for Sunday’s Honda Indy Toronto.

This weekend will be vastly as challenging for Hunter-Reay as it was in Road America. That’s because this is his first start in Toronto since 2019. It’s also his first street race in general since August 2021.

Street courses race entirely different than natural free flowing road courses. So, it’s almost back to square one for the Floridian.

“This will be my first street course race behind the wheel of the No. 20 BITNILE.COM Chevy, so we’ll be working through our long test list of items in both practice sessions ahead of qualifying,” Hunter-Reay continued.

The good news is, Hunter-Reay has competed in the streets of downtown Toronto a total of 16 times, dating back to 2003. He scored a podium finish for three consecutive years, culminating with a victory in 2012.

However, this weekend isn’t necessarily about results on track. It’s about making ECR better still for next season.

Street courses haven’t typically been a strong suit for this team over the last few years. Daly was 21st, 12th, 12th, 20th and 17th on these tracks respectively last year while Rinus VeeKay was 6th, 13th, 16th, 13th and 12th himself. They each finished outside the top 10 in St. Pete, Long Beach and Detroit too. 

So no one is expecting Hunter-Reay to come in and challenge for a win, let alone a top 10. This is more so a fact-finding mission to help this program improve for the future.

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RLL

This was the point last year that turned the season around for Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing. They had tested at Sebring in the off week between Mid-Ohio and Toronto and it paid dividends.

Graham Rahal went on a nice run to end the season with 5 top 10’s over the final 8 races including a pair of top five results. He had 4 top 10’s in the previous 9 with a best finish of 7th in that span.

Christian Lundgaard also had 5 top 10 finishes in the same final 8 races including a pair of top five finishes too but one of those was a runner-up result on the Indy road course. He had 2 top 10 finishes in the first 9 races.

Credit that Sebring test and Toronto for that second half surge.

Now that we’re back this weekend, can they do so again?

Graham Rahal is tempering his expectations.

“Detroit was a major disappointment, which worries me a little for Toronto because I think there’s still a lot of questions for us on our street course package,” Rahal also admitted in Mid-Ohio. “But the road course package, you look at Indy GP, you look Road America, and you look here, and we’ve been competitive.”

It’s no secret that the street course program for RLL is lacking in comparison to the natural road courses. They finished 6-9-22 in St. Pete, 12-13-14 in Long Beach and 16-17-25 in Detroit.

However, Lundgaard doesn’t share Rahal’s outlook. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

“Honestly, I do think that we’re going to have a fast car,” he says. “We made a lot of progress going into that weekend last year. I think at the time in the season it was my best qualifying result, and I think at the time as well, it was the best finish we had that year up until that point.

“Just thinking about that, I think, we knew that we were making progress that part of the year of last year, and already now, we’ve seen an increase in performance early in the season. We outperformed ourselves compared to last year in Mid-Ohio. So we just need to stay on that trajectory.

“I think going into Toronto, it’s very important that we keep our head cool and kind of focus on our own stuff. Then I guess we’ll have to wait and see, but I do think we can come away with at least a match of a fourth or potentially even a podium.”

As far as why his views are different and why he’s faring better results wise than his two teammates, Lundgaard thinks that it’s because of his vast array of cars that he’s driven overseas and the evolution of them has given him experience from every which way that he can.

“I think, because I’m so young and I’ve driven a lot of cars in Europe that’s, in my opinion, quite difficult to drive and I’ve also driven some easy ones and just my experience with the F1 team back in a few years ago when I was doing a lot of simulator work, you’re just very involved and you drive a lot of different cars, a lot of different — I wouldn’t necessarily just call it setups, but the evolution of different cars, and you understand the differences and how you need to drive certain cars,” he says.

“I wouldn’t say you develop the skill, but you sort of do. You just get a better understanding, and you improve your talent. I guess that’s why on certain occasions Graham will complain more about the car than I will because we kind of just get on with it.

“We saw the car this weekend was in a good window for him at Mid-Ohio, and he was fast. There’s no question that Graham is a good driver, same for Jack, but I just think I can do things they can’t do just because of my previous experiences.”

Which his why despite RLL expected to possibly struggle over the next four races, Lundgaard is more confident than his teammates are heading into them.

You have Toronto this weekend, a doubleheader in Iowa next followed by Nashville the first weekend of August.

On ovals this year, granted they were superspeedways, RLL finished 18-19-24 and 18-19-33.

Lundgaard though, feels like the momentum is there still and that most of these tracks at the end of the schedule are perfect places to finish even further up than they did a year ago.

“Honestly, right now obviously we’re optimistic, leaving Mid-Ohio,” he told me. “I think last year the best car qualified 13th, which was just not transferring from the first qualifying group. This year we had two cars in the Fast Six and one on the Front Row and me in 5th, and we had Jack up in 11th as well.

“Just looking at that specific race from last year to this year, we moved a lot, and we really struggled at Mid-Ohio last year. Now we’re coming into a track where we didn’t necessarily struggle as much, but we built a good foundation for Nashville at Toronto last year, and we were very competitive at Nashville.

“So coming in here, I do think, just looking at that, that it is sort of a turning point, at least I hope so. We want to continue building on what we’re building on now and basically don’t really leave those performances.”

RLL was able to pick up test days recently in Sebring and at Iowa too. It was the Sebring test a year ago for which propelled them forward. Does the Iowa one this year do the same?

In 2022, in the same street races preceding Toronto, RLL finished 7-11-13 in St. Pete, 7-15-18 in Long Beach and 14-15-26 in Belle Isle. They went to work at Sebring in the middle of the summer to help them learn for Toronto and Nashville.

It paid off.

RLL went 4-8-19 in Toronto and 8-10-23 in Nashville.

They’re stronger everywhere already this season for the most part which with what Rahal says vs. what Lundgaard said, who’s right?

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Pit Cycles

With another street course, it’s going to make Sunday’s race very much one that rewards track position. This year, track position is back. 2 of the 3 races were won from the pole and the other from fourth. Even if you go back to all of last season, five of the eight were won from the front row and six of the eight from the top two rows.

Have teams gotten smarter on these tracks or have the drivers gotten better?

18 of the last 20 races in Toronto including 29 of the last 31 races were won from the top seven. The only other starting spots since (13th in 2001, 11th in 2014 and 11th again in 2015). So, it says it’s important in Toronto still.

However, with that said, that’s going to make pit cycles interesting too.

Doing the undercut is a move that a lot may try. You also avoid the “danger zone” by doing so and if you luck out and get a caution while trying this strategy, you’re set to flip the field.

However, sometimes the overcut works too if you’re minimizing the tire fall off over the course of that said run.

I think the alternate tires are going to fall off over the course of a stint, so doing an overcut while on the greens may not be a wise move. But, doing so on primaries could be open so long as you start the plan early on in the run to save your tires for a longer stint.

That’s why pit cycles and if cautions fly during them are something I’ll be keeping my eye on.