Oilpressure

We are pretty much at the halfway point in the 2024 NTT IndyCar Series season. With Thermal being a non-points race for this season, I don’t really count it – but some do. If you are like me and don’t count it, we have completed eight races of a seventeen-race season. If you do count it, we are nine races into an eighteen-race season. Either way, we are about halfway through the season.

Alex Palou leads the standings at the moment. He won the past week’s race at Laguna Seca, leading many to proclaim this to be the start of another Palou beat-down of the field like we had just before the midway point last season. Palou won four races in a five-race period last year – the only exception being the 2023 Indianapolis 500, when he finished fourth. Many think Palou is about to reel off another series of wins. I don’t think so.

Palou has not seemed quite as dominant this season, last weekend notwithstanding. For the matter, Chip Ganassi Racing has not seemed as strong as in the past. I still think that Ganassi has spread themselves a little thin with five cars this season, two driven by rookies and one by a second-year driver. I’m thinking that is distracting from the overall effort and is affecting Palou and Sctt Dixon – although both drivers have two wins (again, not counting Palou winning at Thermal) and they are currently first and third in the championship. I guess if this is a down year for Ganassi, then count me in. Still they don’t seem to have quite the edge as they have in the past, for some reason – at least in my opinion.

Others are predicting a Palou collapse, with so many ovals on the back-end of this year’s schedule. Of the nine races remaining, six are on ovals; and many point to the fact that Palou has never won on an oval. But don’t fool yourself into thinking Palou is an amateur on ovals.

Since his debut at Texas in 2020 when he finished twenty-third, Alex Palou has driven in twenty-one oval races. His average finish is tenth, and that factors in mostly mediocre oval finishes in 2020 when he was driving for Dale Coyne. Since joining Chip Ganassi Racing in 2021, Palou has scored thirteen Top-Ten oval finishes, which include six Top-Fives and three podiums. He may not have a win, but to dismiss his abilities on an oval would be a mistake.

The same people that are saying that the ovals will torpedo Palou’s championship chances, point to Josef Newgarden’s recent record on ovals. Which is pretty impressive. Counting this year’s Indianapolis 500 win, Newgarden has now won seven of his last nine oval starts – dating back to Iowa 2022, when he won Race One and was leading Race Two, when his rear wing collapsed sending him into the wall. Between then and now, the only other oval he has not won is Gateway, in 2023. He has won all of the others.

To expect that kind of oval dominance late in this season is not realistic. Don’t get me wrong, Newgarden is outstanding on ovals – but he is mired in ninth, more than one-hundred points behind Palou. There are several other drivers way ahead of Newgarden (Scott Dixon & Will Power) that he would been to leapfrog over. I just don’t see it happening.

A couple of weeks ago, I called this year’s championship battle, a three-horse race – Palou, Power & Dixon. I’m willing to expand it to include the drivers down to seventh.

Colton Herta and his Andretti teammate, Kyle Kirkwood, are fourth and fifth behind Dixon, but there is a lot of distance between Herta and Kirkwood. Herta is thirty-six points behind Dixon, and sixty-eight points behind Palou. Kirkwood is seven points behind Herta. Behind them are two Arrow McLaren teammates Pato O’Ward and Alexander Rossi. O’Ward is seventy-seven points behind Palou, and Rossi is ten points behind O’Ward.

Why have I gone all the way down to seventh? Because I think when it is a done, O’Ward and Rossi will have surpassed Herta and Kirkwood. Do I think either of them will win the championship? No, but I think O’Ward and Rossi have a better chance to put pressure on the Top-Three than Herta and Kirkwood do. I have nothing to base that on, it’s just a gut feeling. I still think the champion will come from the current Top-Three of Palou, Power and Dixon.

I’m not going to go back and tally it up, but my picks for championships is better than my individual race picks. Could they be any worse? I still like the focus I’m seeing from Will Power. I think he will parlay his win at Road America to not one, but two additional wins for the season. I say that Will Power will squeak out a third NTT IndyCar Series championship over Alex Palou, at the season finale at Nashville Superspeedway. We’ll see.

George Phillips

This entry was posted on July 1, 2024 at 4:02 am 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.