Oilpressure

Over the years, the IMS road course has produced a few duds. Today was not one of them. If you are a true racing fan, this race had practically everything. If you like crashes (which I don’t) there was a pile-up on the first lap, which took Josef Newgarden out of the running and all but sealed the championship for Alex Palou. It also featured a bold move by a second-year driver, looking for a job on the opening lap.

Devlin DeFrancesco made an impressive move on the outside of the main straightaway, moving from starting fifth, to taking the lead through the first set of turns. His lead was short-lived after the re-start, but he deserves credit for making such a gutsy move.

There were multiple strategies on display. Then there was a driver who moved up from starting fifteenth, got caught up in the Lap One melee, yet found a way to move up and take the win from the pole-sitter. Then the last twenty laps was as exciting to watch at the front as any race we’ve seen this summer.

I started following the time difference between winner Scott Dixon and pole-sitter Graham Rahal, as Rahal kept closing in. When I started following, Rahal was about 6.5 seconds behind Dixon. Then it was 6.0, then 5.8. As the laps kept counting down, so did the time difference. Traffic was never a real factor for either, because the back-markers behaved and moved over for both.

Both drivers were on the red alternates. Dixon had about four more laps on his tires than Rahal, but Dixon was on sticker-reds, while Rahal was on used-reds – so the tires were all about even for both.

With two laps to go, Rahal had closed the gap to 0.77 seconds. When the checkered flag flew for Dixon, he was only 0.4779 seconds ahead of Rahal.

I took the following video of Dixon’s car being loaded onto the Victory Lane podium. Stay with it until the end to see Emma Dixon trying to heard her children together. I apologize for the vertical video. I started it that way without thinking. Once I realized what I had done, I thought it would be worse to flip it over. Oh, well…

Both drivers were hungry, and both deserved to win. With the win, Dixon was able to keep his streak alive of winning in every season since 2005. The win extended the streak to nineteen seasons for Dixon.

In the press conference, both drivers seemed emotionally spent – but Dixon was obviously more upbeat. They both spoke with great respect for each other. Both drivers have a lot of class and it was good to see there was no snipping involved. (All press conference photos: Susan Phillips)

I felt sorry for third-place finisher Pato O’Ward, who was mostly ignored during the press conference. He was dejected after driving a good race and finishing third. But because he finished eight seconds back, few people asked him any questions.

I’m sure I’ve seen races on the IMS road course that were just as good as today’s race – but I can’t name them. A Simon Pagenaud/Scott Dixon battle in 2019 that was pretty good comes to mind, but few have been as exciting as today’s race was.

As I look out the window to my right, the Xfinity race has been halted for lightning. The sun is now coming out, so they will probably start back on rain tires, as soon as thirty minutes after the last lightning strike passes. I’m grateful that the IndyCar race was not affected by weather.

That is going to do it for us for the weekend. We will not come back on Sunday for the Cup race, so this will be our last day at IMS until next spring. At least we got to come back in August. Susan has been wanting to visit a famous cake shop in Carmel for the past couple of years, so we will take it in gto keep her happy, before we head home.

I’ll close with just a few photos I took today (including a clean-shaven Romain Grosjean), just before the race. Susan will have a post sometime on Sunday, then I will be back here on Monday with my usual Random Thoughts post. Thanks for following along. Check back tomorrow for Susan’s post.

George Phillips

This entry was posted on August 12, 2023 at 5:30 pm and is filed under IndyCar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.