There is too much choking in the pits in this championship

— Jon 🛞 (@jon.turningfortune.com) Mar29, 2026 at 2:46 PM

I was glad to see Graham Rahal get a good result because it gives me hope for the RLL resurgence; the series needs another competitive team, and Mick Schumacher needs a competitive car. Mick is clearly taking some time to bed into IndyCar, but I continue to believe he can get his sea legs.

I am beginning to worry about Will Power, but I will keep the faith.

Engine leases are a chokepoint. We don’t know what’s going on with Prema Racing, and therefore we don’t know whether one or both of their leases will be available. There seems to be some momentum on still running one Prema car with Callum Ilott, which would be nice. Katherine Legge and her devoted sponsors are wrangling for the other one, but there’s also the minor detail of a Chevy team who would be willing to run it.

On top of the 25 regular-season drivers, Helio Castroneves is back with MSR to continue attempting to win a fifth 500, and Takuma Sato is back with RLL. Arrow McLaren has confirmed Ryan Hunter-Reay in its fourth car, and Ed Carpenter will drive his team’s third car as per usual. Andretti usually runs a fourth car, and Marshall Pruett reports that people contacting the team with interest have been told the seat is taken. We can presume that’s for Colton Herta. Dreyer & Reinbold Racing intend to run Conor Daly, and Abel Motorsports hope Jacob will actually get to start this year. That would be 32, some of which are not confirmed.

Will we get to 33 with Callum or Katherine — or better yet 34 with both? Stefan Wilson and Devlin DeFrancesco are also reportedly seeking rides. The problem is the rides don’t exist. The best case seems to be 34 if Prema gets its act together and some Chevy steps up to prepare Katherine’s car.

It’s just an awesome circuit. It’s wide enough to make moves but challenging enough to make mistakes. There are rises and dips and bumps and all the obstacles a street circuit is good for. It’s in a multi-sport complex, so it seems great for access and spectators. I’m already looking forward to the next one.

And as for the racing, well, it was an utter clean-up for Andretti. Max Taylor made an excellent show of himself to win the IndyNXT race, Marcus Ericsson got his first IndyCar pole position, Kyle Kirkwood won, absolutely pouncing on Álex Palou and then driving away, Will Power got his first Andretti podium, and Ericsson finished fourth. This is all despite having an all-time classic Andretti pit stop nightmare day on every car. They really need to get that figured out.

So, we’re three races in, the championship is not already over like last year, and the first new race was fantastic. Markham will hopefully be at least close to the same level. Somehow, though, I don’t think the other one is going to meet the standard.

Dye was on some bootleg streaming app for people who like to open packs of baseball cards or something, and he started bragging about having no idea who David Malukas — driver of the Team Penske #12 Verizon Chevrolet in the IndyCar Series — was when they met at the St. Petersburg race weekend IndyCar and the Truck Series shared. Dye then went on to perform a homophobic caricature — apparently intended to be of Malukas — for an excruciatingly long time.

Dye has been suspended by NASCAR and his team and will be required to complete sensitivity training in order to return to racing. He posted an extremely bad Instagram apology. He will be replaced in this weekend’s Truck Series race at Darlington by A.J. Allmendinger.

DRR is clearly a great team for him to run the 500 with while he figures it out, and they are rumored to be targeting 2028 to get into the series full-time with the new car in 2028. He seems like a shoo-in for their veteran driver if he is able to work on the program with them starting now. Landing ARCO to sponsor the team is a pretty solid start.

Well, the first concrete step towards doing it is complete, and it’s a humiliating compromise. The circuit layout has been revealed, and rather than the promised glorious four-mile run between the U.S. Supreme Court building, the Lincoln Memorial, and back along the National Mall, it’s a 1.66-mile tootle around in front of the Capitol with seven turns, three of which are 90 degrees, and only one of which is to the right.

The minuscule course should make it easier to pave over Washington’s world-famously decrepit street surfaces, but someone in Washington will have to actually do that in order for it to happen, and that seems like a big ask. As for the racing, well, I hope you like slow corners. They should be easier to handle than normal, though, because the longest straight is a quarter mile shorter than the typical IndyCar street course, so the cars will never be going terribly fast.

So what are the bureaucratic-nightmare reasons this circuit is so compromised and the race is deeply unlikely to happen at all? Well, they’re all things we knew immediately: Racing on the proposed course would require an act of Congress to override a ban on commercial advertising, which would take a million years and probably a whole lobbying team to accomplish, there are laws in place to protect historic buildings from loud sounds and vibrations that would be hard to get around (not that I’d expect the current administration to care overly much about destroying historic things), and, well, they just can’t shut down that much city and build that much barrier in time.

I am moving my Freedom 250 doomsday clock hands five minutes closer to midnight.

Frankly, I thought the NASCAR races at Phoenix this weekend were a big step down into the normal midseason feeling that NASCAR is a grind. The races weren’t bad, and the outcomes were just, but there was nothing particularly distinguished, either. I know a lot of race fans find recovery drives through the pack to be inspiring racing — and Sheldon Creed, Shane van Gisbergen, and Sunday winner Ryan Blaney all provided excellent demonstrations of that — but to me that’s of a second tier to battles of evenly matched cars and drivers on challenging tracks. Don’t tell NASCAR this because they might not agree to do these anymore, but the big March weekend at Phoenix Raceway was comprehensively carried by IndyCar.

Fortunately for the storyline, Phoenix turned it on its head. Palou wrecked out of contention early in the race, and with Josef Newgarden surging back to his traditional position at the front of any short oval race, there is now a championship leader other than Palou for the first time since the 2024 season. Palou’s incident coming up on Rinus Veekay may have been a bit of a spotter fail, and another potential spotter fail of the same nature took Will Power and Christian Rasmussen out of contention later on. All day, Rasmussen continued to earn his reputation as the craziest man in IndyCar short oval racing, and it would have been quite a romp for him if he’d been able to hang on and win.

More shoutouts are necessary. Shoutout to Mick Schumacher for qualifying FOURTH in his first oval race ever. He didn’t have a glorious finish, but he sure had a glorious start. Shoutout to Dennis Hauger for one of the best saves I’ve ever seen (seen below). And — Will Power fan that I am — I must reserve my final shoutout for David Malukas for taking the 12 car to pole. That guy really has to prove he deserves the equipment upgrade he got, and this is some pretty good proof.

This year, we’ll see their LMDh hypercar on track ahead of its racing debut next year, and McLaren execs are doing some press about how they’re justifying this effort. They’re calling it Project Endurance. They’re going to make and sell track-only consumer versions and host driving events with them, that sort of thing. Obviously this is for the mega-elite — McLaren’s GT cars were already very high-end, and this is going up-market — but maybe it’s also the kind of thing that convinces the mega-elite to stay invested in motorsports.

MX-5 Cup also raced, and they were fun as always, but nothing remarkable happened. The conditions were pretty wet for the first race, but it mostly just resulted in crashing rather than standout performances. Bobby Gossett stuck it out and won his first MX-5 Cup race, so congratulations to him. Justin Adakonis also got his first win in race 2, congrats to him as well. Earl Bamber did fine. Sébastien Bourdais did not do fine.

The highlight of the St. Petersburg race weekend was the first ever street race of the NASCAR Truck Series. The star studs in the star-studded lineup did make their appearances. Colin Braun finished best of the guests in P9, but he was the one with meaningful NASCAR experience. James “Jimmy Hinch” Hinchcliffe finished right behind him in P10, which was actually the most impressive drive any guest had because he was turned around by Dario Franchitti early on, then turned himself around a couple times, and he still drove through the pack. But — against what probably anybody in the entire world expected — the star of the first ever NASCAR Truck Series street race was the NASCAR Truck Series.

Yes, the regulars came prepared, and they fought it out lap after lap. It was an honest-to-god street race, and it was won in marvelous fashion by Layne Riggs, whom I used to not like, but that is now completely wiped away. He trained in the Ford Racing simulator with Joey Hand for months for this race, and it showed.

I am so, so happy to see how much the increased emphasis on road and street courses has up-skilled all three NASCAR fields.

I have little doubt that McLaren strung Palou along about an F1 seat that was never really his. It’s also clear that Palou and his circle flagrantly mismanaged his career at this point, and he only landed on his feet because of Chip Ganassi’s largesse — and being one of the best race car drivers in the world.

Regardless of any of this or how much it cost various parties, McLaren got to be the best Formula 1 team without Palou, and Ganassi got to be the best IndyCar team with him. McLaren’s IndyCar team could certainly use Palou’s services, but I’m sure they’ll figure things out eventually. It is water-under-the-bridge time as 2026 on-track action starts in, oh, 15 minutes as of this writing.

So they have managed to settle. Terms were not disclosed, but clearly one of them is that Palou has to say, “McLaren never misled me, they are a wonderful racing team, this was all my fault — and also there were bad, bad people around me who did not have my best interests at heart.” Even if McLaren did mislead him, it’s in his interest to get over it. That goes for everybody involved. Let’s go IndyCar racing.

Putting Doug Boles in charge of the series was the first sign of long-term internal harmony, to me. Doug is the guy responsible for the greatest motor race on Earth — the thing nobody around IndyCar will ever mess with — and putting the whole series under his purview is a powerful firewall. The thing is, he can’t directly handle everything both up in the suites and down on the track at the same time, so it’s important to watch how he organizes his troops.

Last year, regulation and officiating were the most obvious things to shore up, and spinning off an independent structure for that was a smart first step. Appointing overseers for it with NASCAR and FIA experience was a smart second step. Now, the issue is, the season is here, the actual officials on staff are essentially the same, and they’ve still been unable to hire a boss for them. But Raj Nair shrewdly went out in the midst of a bad news cycle and rattled off a lot of very specific observations about where the series is at with officiating, and that made me trust that they’re at least thinking correctly about what to do next.

He was many other things, of course, including a racing driver and a successful businessman, but the aptly described “motorsports park” named for him represents something essential about the soul of racing. Motor racing has the kind of effect on people that they pour themselves into it with everything they have, building on its future to benefit not just themselves but everyone who loves it for generations to come. Barber was that kind of guy who built that kind of place.

The push for the first new IndyCar since 2012 has been excruciating, but clearly satisfying the engine manufacturers was the central issue. They’ve finally done it. The new formula is good, but giving them charters to field factory-backed cars is even better. That will let Honda and GM (and hopefully some more, eventually??) have their own engineers work directly on race cars. Honda is already talking to Meyer Shank about entering the factory car with them, which is a beautiful parallel to how the MSR Acura GTP program is run in IMSA. I love this. It’s all upside.

But have you seen who is driving at St. Pete?

• Sebastien Bourdais is doing the Mazda MX-5 Cup race (what????)
• Dario Franchitti is doing the truck race
• A lesser known but no less talented Andretti, Adam, is combining Truck Series duties with his usual (and dominant) Trans Am running this year, and he will be in a truck at St. Pete
• No less than Mayor James Hinchcliffe is also doing the truck race, returning to the site of his first IndyCar win to make his first NASCAR appearance (all while running back and forth to the booth for his IndyCar TV duties)
• UPDATE FEB 18: Earl Bamber is also doing the MX-5 Cup race
• UPDATE FEB 21: Colin Braun is driving the Ram free agent truck

This all makes me wonder: Who will the guest star crossovers be at Phoenix?

The arrangement is a little bit shady now, but I think it could stand to be legitimized. IndyCar severely limits testing — just like Formula 1 does — to keep the cost of competition at a level that is manageable for small teams; otherwise, the teams with the most money could do the most testing and maintain an unsurpassable advantage as was essentially the case in bygone eras. However, Formula 1 provides a formal way for teams to run Testing of Previous Cars (TPC) programs running cars that have aged out of present-day specifications, and customer teams without old cars of their own can even borrow them from their works team, as Cadillac did before its first season.

IndyCar could conceivably allow this formally with cars like the Panoz. It also remains to be seen what will happen to all the DW12s in a couple years when the new IndyCar finally arrives. There is a balance to be struck between ensuring drivers have enough relevant seat time to be in fighting shape and keeping teams on a level playing field for testing current-spec race cars.

Everything we’ve seen from Cadillac F1 so far has this nice, understated, black/white/silver thing going, but their test livery did not suggest impeccable taste. Are they going to sully the car with neon booger green? Will Cadillac be the new Kick Sauber?

I guess we're just gonna have to call Will Power's car "The Snot Rocket", huh #IndyCar

— Cale Putnam (@caleputnam.bsky.social) Feb 2, 2026 at 6:28 PM

Now, clearly, this is right up there with the worst-conceived motorsports events of all time, and the ways for IndyCar to wriggle out of it are myriad. Graham Rahal might think it’s a good idea for all the ✌️ “exposure” ✌️ and whatnot, but, listen, Graham. As someone familiar with putting on insane events in inhospitable environments in late August — aside from literally everything else about this — I assure you this is going to make IndyCar look like a bunch of idiots.

But does it even have a snowball’s chance in hell of actually happening? Coming back from IndyCar media day, it sounds like James Hinchcliffe and Alex Rossi are a little worried it might.

UPDATE 1/30, 12:10 PM: The President has signed an executive order decreeing that this IndyCar race shall happen. Fascinating to consider what, if anything, this changes about the odds of it happening.

You know what, though? I am not sure I considered the scope and magnitude of Antics possible with Scott McLaughlin and David Malukas on the same team. There is some endearing potential here. Anybody heard from Josef?

Regardless, this was a dumb situation, and I’m glad it’s over. You can’t break contracts, but also I would easily believe that Zak Brown or authorized associates gave Palou enough hope about F1 to be described afterwards as “misleading.” It sure is tempting to imagine what the 2025 Formula 1 season would have been like with Lando Norris facing Álex Palou in the other seat. But on the other hand, by staying with Ganassi in IndyCar, Palou has made himself a sort of analogue of Verstappen rather than having to go head-to-head with him.

This test was also the on-track debut of Will Power at Andretti Global. In most top-level racing series, changing teams and cars after almost 17 years might seem terrifying. In IndyCar, though, it’s pretty much the same deal, given that everybody’s been driving the same car since 2012. No, seriously, it’s actually pretty momentous. This time last year, we thought Will might be heading into his last season in IndyCar, and now he’s driving a Honda and going to kick Penske’s ass.

I and many other observers find it a little strange to choose to stretch the drivers further when you’ve got two monsters raising their hand to jump in. That raises the question of whether the IndyCar guys couldn’t hack it this year, which Penske Racing President Jonathan Diuguid had to insist to press is not the case:

“The November test is difficult to glean performance stuff[,] but I think if you did glean performance [data], Josef and Scott were if not the top performing guys in those cars, they were on part with the guys we had there.”

(Newgarden, remember, was in the 2024 incarnation of this car and helped win Penske his first Rolex since 1969.)

Rather, Diuguid told Sportscar365, they decided to run three-driver squads for hand-wavey “administrative” reasons having something to do with driver seat time fairness, making fewer seat inserts, and fewer setup compromises.

To be clear, I absolutely believe this explanation to extent that I am already too bored to know the reasoning in more detail. I just always prefer the most fun driver lineup.

Scotty, we now know, does have a Rolex ride. Josef is not participating.

What bums me out is that Robert Wickens is not in the lineup, at least for Daytona. The story of his heroic return to racing in the sprint rounds with special hand controls to drive this car — and be quick about it — was one of the best IMSA storylines last year, and a full-time drive was clearly close to happening in 2026. Marshall Pruett actually said it was happening on Monday, in a post that also blew DXDT’s cover on announcing Scotty, but apparently either he was wrong or things changed. DXDT full-time driver Mason Filippi’s co-driver for the sprint rounds has not been announced yet, so hopefully that’s Wickens’ job again.