1. After knocking on the door for the last month, Alexander Rossi kicked it down with a standout performance at Road America, leading 54 of 55 laps on to an emphatic victory by 28.4391 seconds over the Team Penske entries that had made his last four weeks a complete nightmare. This was not a surprise; at least the victory was not a surprise. Rossi has this tendency if he is in the vincinity of the top step of the podium he usually gets there in a timely fashion.
Three runner-up finishes in four races isn't what any driver wants but for Rossi he doesn't drop off. He doesn't go from second to 12th. He comes back in the next race and finds himself back in the fight and if two or three races it hasn't happened, just give it one more because he will likely breakthrough.
It happened last year at Long Beach and Mid-Ohio and it happened this year at Long Beach and now Road America. I think the biggest difference this year is he hasn't coughed up many points because of his own mistakes. Austin was the one that got away. He should have at least finished second but a caution coming out before his final pit stop shuffled him back and he had to rally to finish ninth.
Rossi has been stout this year and when he is on it everyone is in trouble. He may not have started on pole position today but he beat Colton Herta on the outside of turn one and three and he had a 1.3 second lead after lap one. It is something we are accustomed to seeing in Formula One with Lewis Hamilton. Rossi needed a fantastic start to summer and he got it in Wisconsin.
2. Will Power may have earned the least thrilling runner-up finish of his career. He pressured Herta on the first stint when Herta struggled on the alternate tire but he was already nine seconds behind Rossi at that point. He never had Rossi in sight outside of when Rossi was exiting the pit lane as Power was entering his box. Power was the best Penske entry today and second is a fitting result.
3. Josef Newgarden stayed on Power's rear wing all race and it got him a third place finish. It might be a little bit of shocker for the Penske teammates after the dominant run Newgarden had last year and the horsepower advantage Chevrolet has been touting all year. Honda locked out the front row and neither Penske could keep up with Rossi. Newgarden had to fight late to hold on to third but he got it and on a day Rossi was in another zip code, Newgarden didn't slip up and he keeps the championship lead though it will be tight heading into Canada.
4. Graham Rahal didn't put a wheel wrong and he finished fourth. Rahal is damn good at this track but every year he seems to only be third, fourth or fifth. If one of these years his team could find that last quarter-second he is going to win this race, which would be long awaited for his family. Road America aside, it is two consecutive top five finishes for Rahal, the first time he has done that since 2017.
5. It appeared it was going to be the day from hell again for Scott Dixon in turn five on lap one. Dixon was running wide anyway but slight contact with Ryan Hunter-Reay sent Dixon around and dropped him from the less-than-stellar middle of the field to dead last. Dixon picked his way through the field thanks to starting on the primary tire. He was 12th when he made his first pit stop and from there he got up into the top ten. At the end, Dixon found his way pass Colton Herta and James Hinchcliffe to get a fifth place finish.
If he doesn't get spun it would have been interesting to see how high Dixon could have climbed. Seventh is a great day and he wasn't going to get within touching distance with Rossi but could he have positioned himself to get on the podium instead of being in a drag out fight for fifth in the closing laps? Probably. It is an outstanding performance for Dixon but after the month of June he had Dixon needed a little better.
6. Everyone seems to be kicking Felix Rosenqvist out of the Ganassi seat for the last three weeks and he response with a run from 18th to eighth at Road America and finishing directly behind his teammate Dixon. Rosenqvist didn't put a wheel wrong and he started on the primary tire as well. That got him spots early and set him up for this result. Rosenqvist followed his teammates footsteps late and got a sixth place finish out of it.
My goodness, two top five finishes and now six top ten finishes from his first ten starts is respectable for a rookie but it seems like everyone is anticipating Chip Ganassi chewing up and spitting out another young driver just like he did last year to Ed Jones. What people forget is Rosenqvist has been on the top of Ganassi's list for the last four years but he couldn't get him because of Formula E commitments. Unless the bottom falls out in the next seven races, Rosenqvist is staying put at Ganassi for a sophomore season. Ganassi might be an asshole but he isn't tossing this Swede to the curb.
7. James Hinchcliffe was the first driver of the three-stoppers to pit on the first stint and from there he was making up ground. It was clear if you stopped first you were going to have advantage in the pit cycle and it got Hinchcliffe into the top five. It was a tough battle late between him, Herta, Dixon and Rosenqvist and he got held up by Herta. That battle kind of took the two out of it and allowed the Ganassi cars through. It has now been 15 races since Hinchcliffe's most recent top five finish. He nearly had one today and that makes seventh a slight disappointment.
8. After blooming early in spring, Colton Herta wilted and could not buy a result in April, May or June. He looked great today and he was second or third best today. What hurt Herta was his car was junk on the alternate tire at least two laps before others at the end of stints and that cost him ground. That cost him a spot to Power before the first stop and he went from fifth to eighth in the final two laps because of it.
Add to that a lengthy first stop because of a re-fueling issue and Herta went from podium contender to eighth. I think if Herta has a clean first stop he would have found a way around Power on the second stint because his car was great. This should have been a better result than eighth. If anything, Herta has inherited the points cough that plagued Rossi last year.
9. Simon Pagenaud was the man on a move at start going from 16th to seventh in the first nine laps! He started on the alternate tire and he seemed to not have the wear issue that the rest of the field experienced. He kind of stalled out after that and ninth was all he could do. He did have a battle with Herta, which was for like sixth or seventh and the two drivers made contact side-by-side, both drivers lost time, Dixon got pass those two and Pagenaud didn't have anything after that.
10. Takuma Sato stole a top ten finish late and this might be a missed day for Sato. He started sixth but didn't spend much time at the front while his teammate Rahal was within touching distance of the podium. It has still been a great year for Sato.
11. Quickly through the rest of the field: Ryan Hunter-Reay was fortunate not to get penalized for the contact with Dixon but he looked good on that first stint. He was in the top ten after the first pit stop but what killed Hunter-Reay on the final stint was the alternate tire and he dropped to 11th in the closing laps. This is a big miss for him. Sébastien Bourdais was on the edge of the top ten all race and he was directly behind Hunter-Reay for it seemed 40 of 55 laps. Marcus Ericsson had an off, nearly hit the barrier in turn five and recovered to finish 13th. Not bad for his first time to Road America.
12. Spencer Pigot started in the top ten but he lost ground again and that seems to be a theme for Ed Carpenter Racing. The team has qualifying pace but it is only good enough for eighth, ninth or tenth and in the race the team doesn't have it. Pigot got 14th out of this one but it has to be better. Jack Harvey rounded out the top fifteen. This was a quieter weekend from Harvey and Meyer Shank Racing than we are used to but not bad. It seems like Max Chilton cannot do better than 16th and I guess it is a good thing he beat his teammate Patricio O'Ward by a position.
13. Zach Veach is in a terrible sophomore slump. Santino Ferrucci was the one guy to take on the four-stop strategy and it got him into the top ten before his second stop but his third stint was dreadful and his third stop came only ten laps after the second and 19th was all he could do. Matheus Leist and Tony Kanaan were 20th and 21st respectively. It isn't getting any better. Ed Jones fell back, just like his ECR teammate, and he finished 22nd. Marco Andretti had an engine going sour and that is a bummer for him after he started tenth.
14. Firestone did a great job this weekend. The tire drop off was great but the issue with Road America is the track's length makes the pit windows miniscule. It was really a choice between a 13-lap stint, 14-lap stint or 15-lap stint and everyone was doing it on three stops. The one way that could be fixed is if the tires dropped off more. The alternate tire was getting hairy after nine or ten laps, which is good but if it was starting to get bad around six or seven laps in it might force drivers to make an extra pit stop.
Once again, Firestone cannot keep making a softer tire and part of it is the conditions. Today was not a scorching, sunny day. It was overcast and comfortable. If the temperature was ten degrees higher then maybe the alternate tire would have dropped off in seven laps and drivers would have stopped after 11 laps and either decided to do four stops or stretch it and make it in three stops.
The only other thing I can think of to add variety at Road America is have the teams start on half a tank of fuel that way everyone would have to stop at lap seven or eight but then again that wouldn't create variety but rather just force everyone to make four stops.
I think it should be pointed out that while everyone is pretty much forced to make three pit stops it was a great race. Rossi ran away with it but Newgarden, Rahal and Herta were jockeying for position, Dixon went from 23rd at the end of lap one to fifth at the checkered flag, Dixon and Hunter-Reay were picking off drivers almost every lap at the end of the first stint, Pagenaud went from 16th to seventh in the first eight laps, Rosenqvist was making up ground, Herta lost ground and worked his way back up and then down again and there was not a caution in this race!
People are going to look back and see a 28-second margin of victory with Rossi leading 54 of 55 laps and think this race was a bore but it was not that. Not every race has a 27-second margin of victory but I am keen on saying that a race is more than the race for the lead and the broadcast pointed out it out in the closing laps. While Rossi had a 26-second lead, the gap from second to 12th was 26 seconds.
This was another beat down from Alexander Rossi but there was plenty of jostling for position up and down the order and it was a reminder of how great Road America is as a racetrack.
15. The television cameras picked up on a chunk of curbing that had come loose and was sitting on the edge of the racing line and that was with just over 20 laps to go. Many wanted a caution as a safety precaution and I get it because that could have cut down a tire or hit a driver but in the same breath the booth was pointing out the marbles in the kink and the potential danger if a driver got off line trying to make a pass.
I get it but we can't just throw a caution for every stone and for marbles. That was a large chunk of concrete and the aeroscreen cannot come soon enough but where is the line? It wasn't debris as in something extraneous on the racetrack such as a wing endplate or an aluminum can and I think that is why no caution was displayed.
That might not be good reasoning for some but I get it and if you look at where the concrete was on the outside of turn seven you know cars are very rarely side-by-side in that corner and if a car were to have hit that chunk it would most likely have been with the left side tires and thrown it off course and not into another car and put a driver in jeopardy. Once again, that might not be a good reason for some because it is still there and you never know what could happen but I don't think race control makes decisions and disregarded the safety of the drivers. The track would not have stayed green if race control felt the drivers were in danger.
16. IndyCar gets another week off and then it will be a visit to Toronto, the final street course race of the season!
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