Alex Palou’s Hot Nashville Win: 4 Key IndyCar Takeaways

Once Alex Palou gained the track position he needed, the outcome felt familiar: give him clean air and an opportunity, and his race-winning skill becomes difficult to counter.

Palou slipped onto pit road just before a caution with 102 laps to go, a perfectly timed stop that put him in control. From there, he protected the advantage all the way to the finish, holding off defending Nashville winner Josef Newgarden during the final 31-lap green-flag stretch Monday to claim his fifth victory of the season.

The Chip Ganassi Racing driver, a three-time defending series champion, stretched his lead in the standings to 83 points with six races remaining as he continues his pursuit of a fifth overall title.

“I’m just so happy that everything worked,” Palou said during his postrace news conference.

Here are my takeaways from a race that was pushed back from Sunday night after heavy rain hit the 1.33-mile concrete oval:

Newgarden had the softer tires for the closing run, a choice that should have given him extra speed for at least a handful of laps, while Palou opted for the harder compound. Even so, the Team Penske driver never found enough pace to reel him in at the end.

Newgarden said afterward that Palou likely would have needed to make a mistake for the door to open. “The restart was what it was. Unless you have a full stint, there’s your stack right there [to the finish].”

Palou felt he could be in trouble, not believing that simply track position would mean he would prevail: “I knew it was going to be very tough just because I saw how [Newgarden] was racing at the beginning of the race with Kyle [Kirkwood]. They were both flat out. … I was not confident at all.”

Two days after going to the hospital for X-rays and scans on his badly bruised right knee, David Malukas recovered from that crash in practice and starting 24th to finishing third.

So while his teammate Newgarden was frustrated ahead of him, Malukas was excited even if he was thoroughly exhausted from the heat, which had already spurred INDYCAR officials to announce Sunday night that the event would be reduced from 300 laps to 225 laps.

“I had almost no time the past few days to get fluids,” Malukas said in his postrace news conference and after his visit to to the medical center. “We weren’t even getting fluids yesterday.

“After that race we knew it was probably going to be a thing. I felt really good, the adrenaline started to wear off, things started to get a little spinny there. I got fluids, picked me up on a little bit of sugar. I’m good.”

Former Formula 1 driver Mick Schumacher earned the first top-10 of his career as he placed eighth at Nashville. Some would say that was because it was more of a track position race, but Schumacher did consistently get track position and didn’t make mistakes.

“The pace has always been good enough for a top-10,” he told me and another reporter after the race. “To actually put it on track is a great achievement — but I knew it was possible all along. … It was consistent on the communication, we had no issues in the pits, a nice, solid race.”

Schumacher’s future in INDYCAR is unclear whether he will return to Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing or possibly go to another team or even make the INDYCAR experience a one-year-and-done quest.

Maybe finishing top 10 on an oval is just what he needed to show what he can do.

“The pace overall this year has been showing that anyways,” Schumacher said. “People know what they get, and obviously, this hopefully will put it into the books that we are able to do this consistently.

“I think there’s a high chance that I’ll be here next year.”

4. Dixon-Rossi Strange Crash 

Scott Dixon slammed into the back of Alex Rossi when Rossi slowed to pit in a strange accident.

Rossi seemed flabbergasted when he talked to reporters outside the INDYCAR medical unit: “It’s insane. I love Scott. I don’t want to say anything bad. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do in that situation.”

Dixon seemed just as curious about how it all unfolded.

“He was kind of struggling a little bit,” Dixon told me and another reporter. “He was kind of running the high line. I had a pretty good run, went to the low—the same with the lap before, and then he kind of covered the low side. And then on the next lap, when I had a better run, I went to the low side.

“Then he went low, and so I went lower, and then all of a sudden he kind of moved back up again, which I thought he was kind of letting me go. And then he slammed on the brakes to come into the pits. So I had no idea that he was coming into the pits [from the] middle of the track. It was unfortunate.”

4 ½. What’s next: Portland

The INDYCAR Series takes two weeks off before racing Aug. 9 in Portland.

That will start a brutal five-week stretch with six races to finish off the season: Portland, Markham (Toronto suburb), Washington D.C., Milwaukee (two-race weekend) and Laguna Seca.

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