Winners and Losers: Grand Prix of Monterey

Written by Morgan Holiday

Credit: Chris Owens

Álex Palou took his fifth pole position and eighth race win of the year at Laguna Seca in the Grand Prix of Monterey. The achievement put him one race closer to breaking the near impossible record of 10 race wins in an IndyCar season.

Palou’s dominance is a wonder to watch weekend after weekend–but once again DIVEBOMB takes a look at some of the other storylines of the weekend.

Winner - Christian Lundgaard

This past weekend, Arrow McLaren driver Christian Lundgaard picked up his first podium at the Laguna Seca track.

Lundgaard has had a pretty satisfying debut year with McLaren so far, having now picked up five podiums and sitting fifth in the championship standings.

Coming into the Monterey weekend it didn’t look like it was going to be another podium weekend for the Danish driver–while he qualified pretty well he still just missed out on a Fast 6 appearance, putting him seventh for the race start.

In the race, Lundgaard started on the harder primary tyre, which he ran for 20 laps before pitting for the alternates. He was able to complete the race on what proved to be the faster alternate tyres, allowing him to cut his way through the field to an eventual second place finish behind Palou.

Lundgaard is still 112 points behind his teammate Pato O’Ward in the standings, but he has proved more than once this year that he’s capable of not just staying with, but beating his more experienced teammate.

Winner - Callum Ilott

Credit: Joe Skibinski

PREMA Racing’s Callum Ilott was the receiver of the not-so-coveted Biggest Mover of the race award in Sunday’s race at Laguna Seca.

While for some drivers, the biggest mover award is more indicative of a bad qualifying than anything else, Ilott’s drive from 24th to sixth was a little bit different than that.

Ilott’s previous best result with IndyCar’s newest team, PREMA, was a 13th place finish at Mid-Ohio. While the team has shown flashes of pace, particularly on ovals, Ilott had only picked up one top 10 finish coming into the Laguna Seca weekend (at the race weekend prior in Toronto).

Ilott reportedly struggled with the car in the beginning of the weekend, qualifying 24th on Saturday. But apparently something clicked between Saturday and Sunday, and Ilott was able to gain a whopping 18 places on his way to his best result of the year and PREMA’s highest finish to date.

 All four of PREMA’s top 10 finishes have come in the past seven races, a great indication that the team’s performance is on the up. While Robert Shwartzman has been the PREMA driver to shine more this year (it doesn’t get much more impressive than scoring pole position in the Indy 500 as a rookie), this race was a good boost for Ilott in his season with the debuting team.

Winner - Marcus Armstrong

Credit: Josh Hernandez

Marcus Armstrong stock continues to rise in 2025 as he scored yet another top 10 finish, his seventh in eight races.

The Meyer Shank Racing (MSR) driver missed out on the Fast 6 on Saturday, qualifying 10th for the race. On Sunday he improved to eighth, staying in the top 10 and improving on his starting position.

Armstrong has been consistently out-classed, if not by much, by his teammate Felix Rosenqvist throughout the year, and fairly so. Rosenqvist has been both in IndyCar and with MSR for longer. But the New Zealander has continued to make strides, and his eighth place finish on a race weekend where his teammate finished 24th, four laps down after an incident early on in the race, is a huge result.

Armstrong now sits seventh in the standings, just eight points behind Rosenqvist in sixth. With just three races left in the season, all it takes is a couple more good results for Armstrong to secure his first top 10 finish in the standings, and maybe even out-score his teammate.

Loser - Kyffin Simpson

Credit: Joe Skibinski

Another driver whose stock has been rising towards the end of 2025 is Chip Ganassi Racing’s (CGR) Kyffin Simpson. In recent weeks, Simpson has made a huge step forward in terms of his IndyCar results, securing his maiden podium last time out in Toronto.

But unlike Armstrong, Laguna Seca wasn’t a reflection of that upward momentum. Simpson qualified a middling 14th, and made contact with Rosenqvist on Lap 1 of the race, ending his day very prematurely.

That crash put Simpson dead last in the race classification, marking his third DNF of the year. Whether or not the issue that caused him to make contact with Rosenqvist was a car problem or driver error, it rounded out a disappointing weekend for the CGR driver.

Loser - Kyle Kirkwood

Kyle Kirkwood’s weekend in Laguna Seca was uncharacteristically sloppy and disappointing. The Andretti Global driver has the second most race wins of anyone this year (three), but has recently slipped down to third in the standings behind O’Ward.

Kirkwood has been both quick and consistent throughout the entire year, but Monterey was an anomaly. For the sixth time this year he qualified outside of the top 12, this time down in 18th after finishing ninth in the first session of qualifying.

He did manage to improve in the race, but just two places to a 16th place finish. His day was also marred as an error he admitted was his own fault took Rinus VeeKay out of contention.

Up through this past weekend, Kirkwood only had four finishes outside the top 10 this year. In a year where winning is hard due to Palou’s dominance but Kirkwood has managed it more than any other driver, a messy weekend like this is both uncharacteristic and disappointing. After holding second place in the standings for so long, he’s slipping further away from being “best of the rest” after Palou.

Loser - IndyCar race control

Credit: Travis Hinkle

IndyCar’s race control came under criticism following Sunday’s race at Laguna Seca for several delayed yellow calls.

On Lap 25 after the incident between Kirkwood and VeeKay, but the yellow flag was not called out initially due to the fact that it would close pit lane which would interrupt pit stops. Later in the race, on Lap 77, race control again delayed calling a caution after Marcus Ericsson was left stranded in the gravel after Turn 6, seemingly waiting to see if he would be able to continue on.

General opinion was that neither pit stops nor waiting to see if the driver could get the car moving again were valid reasons to delay calling a caution, as safety should be paramount to any other concerns.

Fortunately, there was no resulting fallout in the race in terms of actually unsafe conditions, but it’s not a win for IndyCar to have their race control come under scrutiny like that.