Thrilling first victory for Rosenqvist in finale
ELKHART LAKE – Felix Rosenqvist scored his first IndyCar victory Sunday, taking advantage of traffic and better tires to deny Pato O’Ward the same honor.
First with patience and then with aggression, the 28-year-old Swedish driver chased down O’Ward after the final pit stop and made his move on the second-last lap, crossing over through Road America’s tight, left-hand Turn 5 and Turn 6.
“Pato, when he caught the lapped traffic, it just tipped over for him and we started gaining so much,” said Rosenqvist, who scored two secondplace finishes as a rookie last season.
“You’re never too confident, but when I saw the gap to Pato decrease the last four or five laps, I had only one thing in my mind, and I think my crew had one thing in mind, and that was winning the
race.”
O’Ward, helpless to defend, finished 2.8699 seconds behind in the second half of the REV Group Grand Prix after leading 43 of 55 laps from the pole.
“As everyone saw, he passed me and he left me,” O’Ward said. “It wasn’t like I could keep up.”
Alexander Rossi, the 2019 Road America winner who’d had a miserable first three races of the season, scored his first podium finish, 8.615 seconds. Marcus Ericcson, Rosenqvuist’s countryman and teammate, was fourth and Colton Herta fifth.
Rosenqvist kept Chip Ganassi Racing unbeaten after Scott Dixon had won the first three races of the season. The fivetime champion Dixon finished 12th.
Although the race started with chaos, the final 49 laps finished under the green flag, setting up a variety of strategies that kept it interesting even as O’Ward build a lead of 9-plus seconds.
His Chevrolet was on the grippier but less durable alternate tires, which proved no match for Rosenqvist’s Honda on the primaries. O’Ward also had to deal with lapped cars in the final stint with Dalton Kellett ahead and the Conor
Daly, who pressured O’Ward and then passed him with four laps to go.
“Today we executed and we gave absolutely everything we had in us to try and win that race,” said O’Ward, who started the day by winning his first pole in qualifying less than 21⁄2 hours before the race.
“We knew we had the pace, but we kind of took a shot in the dark for the long stints. We made some changes hoping it would help but it hurt us in rear-tire life and those Ganassi cars were so, so fast over the course of the stint, especially over the last five laps.” Mayhem reigned on the opening lap. First, a tangle in the back of the field on the delayed start sent bodywork flying. Then Ryan Hunter-Reay went spinning off the left side of the track in Turn 1 after contact from Will Power behind him. And finally Graham Rahal crashed off Turn 3 after being hit on the right side by Power and then Rosenqvist.
After caution-less races in 2018 and ’19, Saturday’s had three yellow flags consuming seven laps, a trend that carried over.
This weekend marked the return of fans to IndyCar races, after the first two were run in a bubble to mitigate the spread of coronavirus at the start of a season already delayed by the pandemic.
Although Road America does not share attendance figures, management was outwardly happy with the turnout for two sunny, temperate days.
On Saturday, Dixon became the first driver in modern history to win the first three races of the season, following victories at Texas Motor Speedway and on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course. A.J. Foyt won the first three in 1964 and Al Unser in 1971 in USAC, and Sebastien Bourdais won the first four of the 2006 Champ Car season. All of them went on to win the championship that season.
Road America is the first of three doubleheader weekends on a schedule shuffled in reaction to restrictions and concerns about the cononavirus pandemic. The track initially was scheduled to host the series last month but changed dates to create the best possibility to have fans onsite, and the second race was added.
IndyCar moves to its second doubleheader Friday and Saturday at Iowa Speedway, a short oval.