Winners and Losers: Indy 200 at Mid-Ohio

Written by Morgan Holiday

Credit: Dominic Loyer

The Indy 200 at Mid-Ohio crowned Scott Dixon the third race winner of the 2025 IndyCar season, while championship leader Álex Palou came in second.

DIVEBOMB takes a look at who did well this weekend and whose performance fell short.

Winner - Chip Ganassi Racing

No team had a better weekend than Chip Ganassi Racing, whose two top tier drivers finished first and second in the race, while young Kyffin Simpson made a massive step up.

Palau took his third pole of the season, while Simpson qualified a career best in third after making the Fast 6 for the first time. Simpson’s IndyCar career thus far has been relatively uninspiring, so a good result (as well as some choice praise from his championship leading teammate) is exactly what he needed.

Simpson scored his first IndyCar top ten finish at Long Beach earlier this season, and in the seven races since has finished in the top ten three more times. At Mid-Ohio he stalled in pit lane during the race which hurt his chances at a maiden podium, but coming home in tenth place is a satisfactory result for the 20 year old.

While Palou’s slip up in the final laps of the race cost him the win, his second place finish allowed him to extend his already dominant championship lead. And if a driver was going to get past him for the win, the team will be happy that it was Dixon who capitalised. 

Chip Ganassi likes winners, and Dixon and Palou are now both winners this year. A 1-2 finish with young Simpson in tenth is a great result for the team, and they’ll all ultimately be very happy with this weekend.

Winner - Colton Herta

Credit: Dominic Loyer

In truth, the Indy 200 at Mid-Ohio was a pretty boring weekend on paper for Colton Herta, who qualified fifth and finished fourth. But a boring weekend was exactly what he needed.

The Andretti Global driver finished both practice sessions in the top ten, though both sessions saw him going off the track at least once with rear grip issues, and he even hit the barrier in Practice 1. But a solid qualifying on Saturday saw him finish fifth, and he was able to make up a place in the race by overtaking a fuel-saving Pato O’Ward right at the end.

Herta’s season, as has become a bit of a trend with him, has been up and down. He’s a fast driver who tends to get caught up in issues and seems to fall foul of ill fortune more often than most. 

Mid-Ohio was a rare weekend where, outside of his issues in practice, nothing major went wrong and he was able to secure a solid top five result. This kind of weekend is what Herta needs to find more often if he’s looking at securing a championship at some point.

Winner - Arrow McLaren

Credit: Dominic Loyer

Another team that can be happy with the performance of all three of its drivers is Arrow McLaren. 

It’s been a great first season with McLaren for Christian Lundgaard, who took his fourth podium of the season at Mid-Ohio.

Lundgaard finished both practice sessions in the top ten before setting the fastest lap time in the first group of qualifying on Saturday afternoon. He then set the second fastest lap time in both of the following qualifying sessions, ending second to Palou for the race start.

While the Danish driver wasn’t able to fully challenge either Dixon or Palou in the race, he held on with a solid drive for a third place finish, and was comprehensively the best non-CGR driver of the weekend.

The story of Pato O’Ward’s weekend is a little bit different, as he went out early in qualifying and started from 14th. From there he was able to recover to fifth on strategy and fuel-saving, narrowly missing out on a fourth place finish to Herta. 

O’Ward won last year’s race at Mid-Ohio, so a fifth place finish will be sorely disappointing. But it’s another great result for a team that has struggled with up and down results this year.

Nolan Siegel is the least experienced of the three McLaren drivers, but the 20 year-old secured his best ever IndyCar qualifying result with a fourth place start, ahead of O’Ward. He wasn’t quite able to keep up with the front-runners in the race and finished 11th, but with just two top ten results to his name this year, it’s good to see Siegel fighting towards the front and it will be good news for the team.

Loser - Team Penske

Credit: Dominic Loyer

Team Penske could easily describe their year so far as a nightmare, and the Mid-Ohio weekend only emphasised the struggles they’ve been having. After all three drivers went out in the first group of qualifying, they finished 23rd, 26th and 27th in the race, with the two latter cars retiring.

Scott McLaughlin, who sits 11th in the championship after ten races, had the best weekend of the three. He qualified 11th in Group 1 on Saturday, putting him 21st for the start of the race. He pit five times throughout the race, more than any other driver on Sunday, and came home in 23rd. And that was the best result of the weekend for Penske.

Will Power, currently ninth in the standings, qualified just behind McLaughlin and started the race from 22nd. But any chance he had to make up ground was quickly squashed as he came into the pits with a fire started on the rear of his car and retired from the race on Lap 12.

Josef Newgarden has had the worst year of the three Penske drivers, sitting 19th in the championship standings. Mid-Ohio marked his third straight crash, after crashes at both Gateway and Road America last month.

Newgarden qualified 18th, still a frustrating result but higher up than both of his teammates. But it all came crashing down on the first lap of Sunday’s race, as Newgarden spun going into the first corner and went into the barriers, damaging a few other cars on his way out of the race. 

With just three top ten finishes to his name so far this year, it’s been a dramatic fall from grace for both Newgarden and Team Penske. They’ll be hoping to rebound this coming weekend in Iowa.

Loser - Santino Ferrucci

Credit: Dominic Loyer

Mid-Ohio saw the end to a run of good form for A.J. Foyt Racing’s Santino Ferrucci. After four consecutive top five finishes, including two podiums, Ferrucci qualified a lowly 17th and finished 16th in Sunday’s race.

But it wasn’t just a middling result that soured Ferrucci’s weekend–as there were not one but two incidents that he was controversially caught up in.

In Practice 2, Ferrucci got dangerously close to hitting Josef Newgarden, the latter on a slower lap and the former frustrated by the traffic. No action was taken about this incident, but it did raise some eyebrows.

Then in the race, a battle between Ferrucci and Conor Daly caused sparks to fly when Ferrucci pushed the Juncos Hollinger Racing driver off the track. For that incident, Ferrucci picked up a three-place drop penalty in the race, which certainly contributed to his poor result.

Ferrucci has always been a controversial driver, and after a streak of really good races from him, it’s frustrating to watch him slip back into the kind of behavior we’d like to see remain in his past.

Loser - Christian Rasmussen

Credit: Dominic Loyer

Ed Carpenter Racing’s Christian Rasmussen was on the back foot coming into the weekend at Mid-Ohio, bringing with him a six place grid penalty for an engine change made after the Iowa Speedway test.

Rasmussen qualified well on Saturday, coming in tenth after making it to the Fast 12 and out-qualifying his more experienced teammate. But with the penalty considered, Rasmussen started the race from 16th on the grid.

That in and of itself wasn’t a bad result for the ECR driver, but an issue with his car during the race prevented it from being fueled properly, and he ran out of fuel on Lap 31 and was forced to retire from the race.

Rasmussen’s two top ten finishes this year have been a sixth place in the Indianapolis 500 and a maiden podium at Gateway, but at Mid-Ohio he lost out on what could have been a great result without the outside factors at play.

All photos in this article were taken by DIVEBOMB Photographer, Dominic Loyer. You can find Dominic's work on Instagram (@dominicloyer_photography)