Oilpressure

What do you get when you combine a track with a history of one good race per decade, and a driver with talent we haven’t seen in more than a decade? A sleep-inducing race, that’s what. Despite what I wrote Friday, I had great hopes for what we might see in Sunday’s OnlyBulls Grand Prix of Portland.

I was seduced by an intriguing qualifying show on Saturday, that saw Felix Rosenqvist snatch the pole away from Alex Palou. I was also encouraged with a Firestone Fast Six that included Rinus VeeKay, Will Power, Marcus Ericsson and Kyffin Simpson. I was mesmerized with the possibility of a surprise winner, despite the fact that points leader Alex Palou was starting on the front-row.

I should have known better.

Much like Long Beach earlier this year, Rosenqvist led the entire first stint. He didn’t appear to have a slow pit stop, but apparently his out-lap was slower than Palou’s pit stop and in and out lap. Rosenqvist pitted first, then Palou one lap later. Once we saw Palou exit the pits ahead of Rosenqvist on Lap 32, we all figured it was pretty well over. It was.

Except for pit stop exchanges, Palou led 60 of the final 78 laps enroute to his sixth win of the season, with five races to go. If anyone thinks that either Kyle Kirkwood or David Malukas is going to threaten Palou for the championship – well, I would suggest you stay away from the gambling sites.

Palou is going to win his fifth championship in six seasons regardless; but he has been helped by the fact that anytime Kirkwood or Malukas have a decent race, they follow it up with a clunker on alternating weekends. In the meantime, Palou just keeps pulling away.

While I have learned to appreciate the greatness we are witnessing, I am getting tired of watching complete and utter dominance. This has nothing to do with Alex Palou the person. But after six years, it’s getting old watching him destroy the rest of the field, except for 2022 when he was distracted from being courted away by Mclaren. Even in his “off” year of 2022, he finished tied for fourth and fifty points behind Will Power. Since then, Palou has had laser focus and no one has even threatened to challenge him.

Palou makes winning look effortless. As Jack Harvey noted in Victory Lane, Palou looked like he had hardly even broken a sweat. That’s what makes it so vexing. Most of the other drivers look exhausted as they climb out of their cars. Perhaps they are just that frustrated doing all they can to catch Palou.

Historians compare Palou’s success to AJ Foyt’s magical season of 1964, when he won 10 of 13 races. The thing is, Foyt followed that season with a bad start to the 1965 season, where his average finish for the first five races was 16.8. In 1966, Foyt failed to win a race all season. He finally bounced back and won the championship in 1967, winning five races including the Indianapolis 500. Palou has had no lapses. If 2022 is what he calls a bad season – that’s why he is dominating right now.

So congratulations to Alex Palou for another win to add to what will soon be a five out of six years championship run. Surely his ride will end sometime. It has to.

TV Coverage:  There were mixed emotions when I flipped over to FOX in time for the race. There was a LIV Golf Tournament on. Not being a golfer, I don’t fully understand what the LIV Tour is all about, but I think it is in opposition to the PGA. I probably understand about as much about LIV Golf, as much as casual racing fans understood about the CART/IRL Split of the 90s. It was too much to learn, so fans just switched over to NASCAR.

While I did not like having to wait 10-15 minutes for the golf to wrap up, I was happy that FOX did not move the start of the IndyCar race to another channel. How many times did we see ESPN or NBC move the start of a race to ESPNNEWS or CNBC? FOX kept it on FOX. We missed some pre-race coverage, but we got to see every lap.

While I thought FOX deserved high marks for their race coverage, I was not thrilled with something they’ve added for qualifying. They call it the sector portal, and it looks like something contrived by EA Sports. Each time a car crosses a sector while on a hot lap, some futuristic looking window appeared and gave the impression the car was smashing through a portal, not unlike when the Millenium Falcon made the jump into hyperspace. It looked cheesy and served no real purpose. I like a lot of what FOX does with their graphics, but this is one they need to throw in the trash.

What Might Have Been:  We all heard the call for Will Power to come into the pits at the end of Lap 86. We also saw Power continue past the pit entrance for another lap, and encountering the (much) slower car of Sting Ray Robb shortly thereafter. As it turns out, Power was communicating with his team at the same time and he never heard the call to pit. The general consensus was that Power made a huge blunder and probably cost himself another step on the podium.

While I agree that the miscommunication probably cost Power an opportunity to overtake Rosenqvist for second, I don’t place the blame on Power or just bad luck. We did not hear the call until Power was at the end of the long back-stretch. I was thinking that it was probably not in real time, and he had been instructed to do so at the beginning of the lap. We were just hearing a delayed communication. But in the postrace interview, Power confirmed that he got the call when he was in Turn 10 – the end of the backstretch.

To me, you don’t leave things like that to chance. As we witnessed, things happen with radio transmissions. I’m thinking you shouldn’t wait until the driver is ten seconds away from pit entrance to make that call. Surely they knew long before the call was made to Power that they were bringing him in. Why did they wait so late to actually tell him?

I don’t know if this was Ron Ruzewski or whoever, but poor communication cost Power and the team a spot. In the grand scheme of things, this didn’t affect the race winner or the championship. But add this to a long list of Andretti Global pit snafus for this season.

Another Good Showing:  Christian Lundgaard had just about everything go wrong in the first round of qualifying. He had his dash go out, an electrical issue that had to go through a system reboot and then a hybrid issue to top it off. Consequently, he started dead last in Sunday’s race. For many drivers, that would signal an early end to their day, but Lundgaard has showed us that starting last is nothing more than a challenge. Less than two months ago, he won at Road America after contact on the first lap forced him to the rear of the field.

For a while, it looked like history was repeating itself. By the time Graham Rahal brought out the only caution of the day on Lap 7, Lundgaard had already charged up to fourteenth – from starting twenty-fifth. While he didn’t win, Lundgaard salvaged ninth – proving once again his prowess on road courses.

Another Good Showing (Part II):  Along with Lundgaard, Rinus VeeKay is considered one of the two favorites for the coveted ride at Chip Ganassi Racing that is being vacated by Scott Dixon at the end of the season. VeeKay made the Firestone Fast Six and finished fourth in the race. This was no fluke. I don’t think people realize how far VeeKay has taken this team He just scored his third fourth-place finish in the last five races. Juncos Hollinger Racing had not scored more than two Top-Five finishes in a season until this season.

Most seem to think that Lundgaard to Ganassi is a done deal, but if it was me doing the hiring – I would give VeeKay a long look. Not only do I consider him the more rounded driver, I think he would be better at schmoozing sponsors – something that is important to keeping PNC Bank happy.

A Podium Reboot:  If you’ve been to IndyCar races away from IMS, you’ve probably witnessed the podium celebrations after the race. Whether at Barber, Road America, Milwaukee or apparently Portland – they are all pretty much the same. And that’s the problem.

Doug Boles has done a phenomenal job since taking over the reins of IndyCar as well as IMS. He has bigger fish to fry than worrying about reworking the podium celebrations, but someone underneath him needs to take this on.

Most of my contemporaries I speak with in the various media centers agree with me that podium celebrations are on the level of awarding ribbons to a prize hog at the county fair. The worst may be whoever is the emcee. He sounds like a WWE castoff who is ready to RUMBLLLE!!!.

Normally these celebrations are reserved for spectators at the track. But on Sunday, I suppose they had time to kill on the network, so they showed everyone what they have been missing by not going to the races.

IndyCar has made great strides in recent years. They have honed their product and polished it over the years to present themselves as a major sports entity that is to be taken seriously. Now they need to polish the carnival setting that is the podium celebration.

Drive of the Day:  I’m not going to elaborate on this because I already have up above. It’s Christian Lundgaard.

All in All:  Yesterday’s OnlyBulls Grand Prix of Portland was what I would call a typical Portland race. The tire strategy was interesting, but not exactly fascinating. There were some good drives, some miscommunications and a few miscues from teams and drivers you would expect them from.

It wasn’t a horrible race, but my expectations were low going in. It was a pretty day and shiny race cars were out on track, so that made it a good day. I am looking forward to the next four races – two brand new venues no one has raced before at Markham and Washington DC; before heading to the double-header at Milwaukee. Then the season closes out Labor Day weekend at Laguna Seca. The offseason will be here before you know it.

George Phillips

This entry was posted on August 10, 2026 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.