AVONDALE, Ariz. — The new IndyCar season started exactly how the last one ended: with Chip Ganassi Racing star driver Alex Palou on top of the points standings, and the rest of the field scratching their heads on how to catch the reigning series champion as he chases his fourth straight title and fifth in six years.
“Every time I’m on the podium, second or third, he’s first. It’s pretty annoying,” McLaren driver Christian Lundgaard said after finishing third in Sunday’s opener on a temporary street circuit in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Their next shot at catching Palou comes Saturday afternoon at Phoenix Raceway, where IndyCar will hit the one-mile flat oval the day before NASCAR’s top-tier Cup Series races on the same track.
Racing on back-to-back weekends to start the season is an anomaly for IndyCar, which typically has a large gap between St. Pete and its second event of each year.
And even though the open-wheel series has raced at Phoenix before, its most recent trip to desert venue was in 2018, and only five of 25 active IndyCar drivers entered have ever raced there before. Team Penske’s Josef Newgarden won at Phoenix in 2018, Ganassi’s Scott Dixon won two years before that, and besides them, only Will Power (Andretti Global), Graham Rahal (Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing) and Alexander Rossi (Ed Carpenter) have competed there previously.