Oilpressure

Greetings from Louisville, KY. Before getting into a look at the upcoming weekend at IMS, I wanted to let you know that our weekend plans are fluid at best. Life has thrown us a slight curveball, but we are hopeful it will be a good one. If you’ve followed along here since January, you know that Susan had a couple of setbacks with her health this past winter. She is still carrying around a reminder of what sent her to the ER on New Year’s Day – a biliary tube that drains into an external bag.

I had several paragraphs typed out, before I realized I was about to go down a long rabbit hole. Long story, much shorter – while Vanderbilt had no interest in removing the tube and bag, Susan contacted her surgeon in Louisville that did her cancer surgery over four years ago. He is doing the required procedure to remover the bag and internalize the drain. They scheduled it for 6:30 EDT this morning, so we drove up last night after work. It is an outpatient procedure, but they want us to “hang around in Louisville for two to three days” just to make sure there are no complications. Then they will do bloodwork on Monday morning, before sending us on our way.

We brought a wheelchair from home. If Susan is up to it, we may drive from Louisville to Indianapolis to pick up our credentials for the month. If that goes well, we may wheel her up to the IMS Media Center for a bit before heading back to Louisville. Depending on how she feels, we may do the same thing for the race tomorrow. Hopefully, this will help a lot of things both physically, mentally and psychologically. It has been a pretty miserable four months for her. So if you see me pushing Susan around in a wheelchair this weekend, don’t assume the worst. She is just going to be very sore from having her liver dug into, just a few hours earlier.

That’s a long way of saying we may or may not be posting from the track this weekend. All things point to being able to keep our original plans in place for Qualifying Weekend.

As far as the track activity this weekend goes, the Sonsio Grand Prix at IMS is always a full Friday and Saturday. Like last month’s Open Test, it’s another step toward the Indianapolis 500 as we are now officially in the Month of May. Not only is it a compressed schedule for the NTT IndyCar Series, but with many of the ladder series in what used to be called the Road to Indy, there is hardly a time over the two-day period when there is not some type of track activity.

Regarding the NTT IndyCar Series, twenty-six drivers are doing what they can to beat Alex Palou. You couldn’t find a better time to derail the Palou train, because he has won back-to-back races at this event. In August of 2023, Scott Dixon won IndyCar portion of the Brickyard weekend on this course, while Palou finished seventh. But Palou has won the last two races in May on the IMS road course. So if he finds misfortune this weekend, it will be to the benefit of the rest of the field.

There is normally not a lot of carryover from this race to the Indianapolis 500 in a couple of weeks. Santino Ferrucci finished dead last in the Grand Prix last year, after starting sixteenth. In the 500, he qualified sixth and finished eighth. The three fulltime Rahal cars qualified second, ninth and eleventh in the Grand Prix. One week later, they were mired in the tenth and eleventh row, with Graham Rahal sweating it out in the last row shootout for the second year in a row. Except for the fact that the two races take place on the same piece of real estate, there is not a lot one can draw from the Grand Prix to use in the 500.

This race originated in 2014, and only twice has the winner of the Grand Prix gone on to win the Indianapolis 500 – Will Power in 2018, and Simon Pagenaud in 2019. For the first six years of its existence, the Grand Prix produced two winners – Pagenaud and Power. Pagenaud even won for Sam Schmidt in 2014, before joining Team Penske in 2015.

Rinus VeeKay’s lone career win came at this event in 2021, while driving for Ed Carpenter Racing. Shortly after that win, VeeKay had a bicycle accident that caused him to miss Road America. Looking back, it seemed like his career stalled out after that. It appears the change of scenery at Dale Coyne Racing has served VeeKay well. He has had two Top-Ten finishes in four races, and he was definitely hooked up at Barber last week.

Even if Palou does what he usually does this weekend, there are still a lot of drivers who can jumpstart their season this weekend. Colton Herta has had a lackluster season so far. It hasn’t been bad, but being stuck in eighth in points heading into May is probably not where he intended to be at this point. His only Top-Five finish this season was a fourth at thermal.

His teammate Marcus Ericsson is in desperate need of a good finish. He justified his fifteenth-place finish in the points last year as needing time to adjust to his new surrounding at Andretti Global. Four races into this season, shows a two-spot improvement as Ericsson now sits in thirteenth-place in the standings.

I have grown to really like Ericsson. He’s not flashy and seems to be a really good guy. But I’m not sure if he will ever replicate those years he had at Ganassi. If he can’t start stringing some good finishes together, he and VeeKay may be doing a seat swap in 2026.

Alexander Rossi is in the same boat with Colton Herta. He’s not in danger of losing his ride, but I think he has higher aspirations other than doing well enough to not get fired. Since a botched late pit stop in the 2020 Indianapolis 500 took him out of contention of that race, Rossi hasn’t been the same. He seemed to go through the motions in his last couple of years at Andretti, and seemed to be an afterthought at Arrow McLaren for two years. Many fans have written him off by saying he is now on the level team where he should be. I still think of him as an elite driver, but hanging around ninth-place purgatory is not the way to prove the doubters wrong. He needs to start having elite finishes, regardless of what Alex Palou does.

Scott Dixon finished second in the season-opener. Like Rossi, he is in no danger of losing his job. Like Rossi, he needs a good finish this weekend just to get him in the right frame of mind for the 500. His finishes after St. Petersburg have been tenth, eighth and twelfth. He’s better than that.

At Team Penske, one driver is driving for his future – Will Power. Power has had decent finishes after the disaster at St. Petersburg that was not his fault. But your record is what it says it is. Since finishing twenty-sixth in the opener, Power has a sixth and two fifth-place finishes. But he is a free agent at the end of the season. It will take more than that to convince Roger Penske to retain a driver who will be 45 at the start of next season. Power needs to start a string of podium finishes this weekend at the Grand Prix.

If Power is not retained after this season, many say he will be replaced by David Malukas. We aren’t hearing that quite so much as both Foyt cars have gotten off to a very shaky start. Malukas is currently ranked eighteenth in points, while teammate Santino Ferrucci is not much better in fifteenth. Assuming sponsorship is not an issue, both are safe for next season (I think), but if Malukas has any illusions about replacing Will Power at Penske, he’d better pick up the pace. Right now, he doesn’t look exactly like Penske material.

While there is not a lot of carryover in performance from the GP to the 500, having a solid run in the Grand Prix can get a team and driver in the right frame of mind going into the week of practice before qualifying. It will be interesting to see who succeeds this weekend, and who doesn’t.

There is also a new tire rule that is going to be tried out this weekend. Instead of teams having to run one set of blacks and reds for at least one two-lap stint – this weekend they will be required to run two sets twice; thereby knocking out the possibility of anyone trying a two-stop race. I tend to look at any change as bad, but I don’t think I like this. I don’t like any manipulation of the rule book to simply spice up the show. This falls under the category of manufactured drama. If a team wants to try a two-stop strategy, let them. Anytime the chance to try a different strategy is taken away – I see that as a bad thing.

While we are talking about the blacks and the reds, why is FOX insistent that their announcers refer to them as hard and soft? If they don’t like using the term black or red/green – why not just call them primary and alternate. Hard and soft sounds a little…obscene.

As I mentioned, it is a compressed two-day schedule. Practice One today gets underway at 9:30 am EDT on FS2. Practice Two, also on FS2, will begin at 1:00 pm EDT today. Qualifying will be shown this afternoon at 4:30 EDT on FS1. Saturday’s Morning Warmup can be seen on FS1 at 11:30 am EDT. The FOX race broadcast will begin at 4:30 pm EDT on Saturday. There will be no track activity on Sunday and Monday.

So who will win on Saturday? Last week, I picked Scott Dixon to win, and he qualified next to last. He did well to finish twelfth, but he finished…twelfth. Alex Palou has won three out of the four races this season. He is proving me foolish to select anyone else but him. Besides it’s not good for the health of the series to have someone dominate like he has been doing. History has shown us that whenever I pick a driver to win a race, they usually crash out early and have a terrible finishing position. So until he proves me wrong, I will pick start picking Palou to win, even though it seems so obvious. Therefore, my pick to win Saturday’s Sonsio Grand Prix in Alex Palou. Why not?

George Phillips

This entry was posted on May 9, 2025 at 4:04 am and is filed under Indianapolis 500, 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.