Palou “crying inside” at traffic en-route to Barber IndyCar win
- Archie O’Reilly
- 6 hours ago
- 4 min read
Álex Palou joked that he was brought to internal tears after catching backmarker traffic following his final pit stop while in the net race lead of IndyCar’s Grand Prix of Alabama at Barber Motorsports Park on Sunday.
The exchange began with 25 laps remaining, as the Chip Ganassi Racing driver exited the pits side-by-side with Mick Schumacher. The Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing (RLL) rookie was attempting to remain on the lead lap and, in doing so, forced Palou onto the grass on pit exit.
“It was tough,” said the four-time champion. “I think the same lap I pitted, there was like three other cars that pitted so we were side-by-side with Mick. I had to go for it. I don’t know if we actually got contact. Maybe. I got into the grass because I was like: ‘Man, I don’t know if two cars fit here.’ I didn’t know how aggressive he was going to be.”
Schumacher’s teammate Louis Foster - similarly at the tail end of the lead lap - soon entered the picture, passing the German for 24th place into Turn 5 and forcing leader Palou to defend against his efforts to get back onto the lead lap.
Then again after Palou had broken clear of the RLL pair, he encountered yet another backmarker, Dale Coyne Racing’s Dennis Hauger in 23rd. The rookie, despite also being at the opposite end of the order, fought hard to fend off Palou’s bid to lap him, twice holding firm in defence on the outside into the Turn 5 hairpin and Turn 7 chicane.
Finally, Palou made a decisive inside move into Turn 12, but he had haemorrhaged time to Arrow McLaren’s Christian Lundgaard, who had not yet pitted for a final time from the lead.
Such are IndyCar’s rules, cars that are not yet a lap down are not mandated to move over for the leaders and will often opt not to in case a caution brings them back into the fight. They had every right to battle Palou, even though they were fighting for position.
“I knew it was key to get by them because we were virtually fighting [to keep the lead] against the No.7 [Lundgaard] and the No.15 [Graham Rahal] - but especially the No.7,” Palou said. “Those moments you can lose the race in like nothing; you can lose five, six seconds [in] two laps because you’re fighting with cold tyres and lapped cars.
“That was tough. That was very, very tough. Everybody was fighting like it was the last lap of the Indy 500. I was like: ’Please, guys!’ I was crying inside. ’Let me by! I just need to fight with Lundgaard.’
“I understand not 100 percent but I understand a little bit what they are trying to do.”
Lundgaard had been second to Palou by over three seconds before the final pit cycle, but by extending his penultimate stint, the projected gap continued to close. Palou’s lead engineer Julian Robertson theorised that it would be “really close” between the pair once Lundgaard made his final pit stop - and there was every chance he could have come out in the lead.
But as it was, a 17.8-second stop for Lundgaard, owing to a major bobble on the rear-right tyre, allowed Palou to maintain a healthy, 10-plus-second advantage out front.
“We got lucky there with the pit exchange that they lost some time,” Palou said. “I felt in a normal scenario, I would have been able to stay up front. [But] with the lapped cars, it was going to be tough. The only thing that it made me feel better was when they told me he was still out, then I started running really fast. I was like: ‘Oh, maybe we’re still in front.’
“If he was going to be only not more than a second in front of us, we would have been able to overtake him on the first two corners just because of his [cooler] tyre temperature. [But] as a driver, you don’t really know what’s going on. You’re just pushing as much as possible.”
One reason Palou was thrust into jeopardy was because of the race turning from an anticipated alternate-tyre-dominant event to a primary-favoured race, forcing him to run primary tyres in his third stint that had been used for as many as 10 laps in Practice 2.
This was only discovered when, in Robertson’s words, the softer compound “tanked” in the pre-race morning warmup session. By this point, most teams had already used most of their fresh harder tyres, hence why Palou’s penultimate stint was shorter than anticipated and he had to pit earlier than was ideal and exit into the jeopardy-inducing traffic.
“We struggled quite a lot,” Palou said. “I think that’s the first-ever time we did that, using used primary [tyres]. We never, ever do that. We normally love the primaries. It’s a compound that I tend to like to run a lot. [But in] practice you’re entering the pit, you’re locking; that’s not a race set in my mind.
“We just knew we had to go as long as possible on the new reds and on the first stint on primaries to try and get the third stint on used primaries as short as possible. It was still very long. I don’t know how long. It felt like 50 laps [rather than 21].”
With Lundgaard’s challenge tempered, Palou was able to produce a typically assertive and dominant final stint to win the race by 13.2775 seconds. But as he closes to within two points of Andretti Global’s Kyle Kirkwood’s championship lead, he is under no illusion that this was a race as straightforward as it is made to look on paper.
“I feel like it would have been a very close battle and maybe a race that Lundgaard could have won,” Palou said. “If you look at the result and you don’t follow the race, the timings, maybe then you look like you were so much faster than everybody else. That was not the truth. We had an amazing car. We had an amazing race. But it was not easy.
“I prefer when it’s just so easy and you don’t have any issues, you can stay up front and everything runs perfectly. It feels good now [but] I was suffering a lot. There was couple moments where we were in big danger. This one was tough.”
