SCOTT DIXON WINS INDY 500 POLE
New Zealander has fastest qualifying speed in 21 years.
They met behind the podium, the two Formula One guys threatening to take over at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and they gave each other a huge smile and an emphatic high-five.
Neither Alexander Rossi nor Fernando Alonso won the pole for the Indianapolis 500 — congratulations to you, pole winner Scott Dixon — but they came close, too close, because the truth is this: Apparently there’s not as much difference between F1 and the Verizon IndyCar Series as the open-wheel circuits would have us believe.
F1, as the saying goes, is all about the technology, all about the team. For years, Ferrari and more recently Mercedes have dominated F1 because Ferrari and Mercedes have had more money, better engineers, better cars. Are the drivers at Ferrari and Mercedes great? Well, sure. Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel is a proven genius behind the wheel, winning over the years for all manner of carmakers and winning four championships in a row.
After Vettel, Lewis Hamil- ton is the best driver in F1, winning three series titles since 2008, coming in second twice and never finishing below fifth. That’s great. Only a fool would suggest Hamilton isn’t a super driver. But also ... Mercedes. In F1, that’s the asterisk in the room.
Over here, in IndyCar? This is where the drivers are the thing. The cars are mostly uniform — there are only two engine manufacturers, Honda and Chevrolet, and they are nearly identical — so the drivers are the big thing. That’s what we’re supposed to believe.
But then something like this past weekend at IMS happens, and you wonder. Rossi finished third in qualifying Sunday, one year after winning the Indy 500 in just the second oval IndyCar race of his life. Alonso finished fifth in qualifying. Rossi and Alonso, as talented as they might be, are way too inexperienced on ovals to be as dominant as they’ve been here.
Unless the secret of IndyCar is the same as the secret of F1. Maybe it’s not so much the drivers here, either. Maybe the team is at least as important, if not more so.
Don’t tell that to Will Power, who won the IndyCar series title in 2014 and has finished second four times since 2010. Don’t tell that to 2016 series champion Simon Pagenaud, either. Or to 2015 Indy 500 champion Juan Pablo Montoya. Or to Helio Castroneves, who has won three Indy 500 titles and posted four series runner-up finishes.
Maybe they really are four of the best — perhaps the four very best — drivers in IndyCar.
Or maybe they just drive for Team Penske.
Penske is to IndyCar what Ferrari (or more recently, Mercedes) is to Formula One: dominant. But among all the other ownership groups in IndyCar, there are two other heavyweights — OK, light heavyweights — among team owners: Chip Ganassi Racing and Andretti Autosport.
Rossi and Alonso drive for Andretti. They have all that funding, all those engineers, all that experience, all that expertise. So maybe that’s why two of the least-experienced oval drivers out here — Alonso is absolutely the least-experienced oval driver, and Rossi is on the short list that
comes next — are outracing almost all comers.
This isn’t just my idea, understand. It’s not my idea at all. This is what I heard from drivers all weekend — drivers on teams not called Penske or Andretti, anyway.
Let me give you two examples. One, Butler graduate Ed Carpenter. He was another star of the weekend, posting the fastest time in Saturday’s qualifying and finishing second in Sunday’s Fast Nine.
When I asked Carpenter about this F1 near-takeover — if Rossi and Alonso, doing so well at IMS despite their inexperience at ovals, are just more naturally skilled than most drivers out here — Carpenter demurred.
“I think race car drivers are race car drivers, you know?” Carpenter said. “And Alexander and Fernando, they’ve gotten with a team that’s been one of the best here (at IMS) for a long time, and that’s important. You could put the best driver in the world on a bad team, and they’re not going to do anything here.”
So a great driver can’t overcome a mediocre team?
“This is not the NBA, where you can put LeBron (James) on any team and get to the conference finals or even the NBA Finals,” Carpenter said. “You do have to be on the right team. (Rossi and Alonso) are obviously elite drivers. Everybody in Formula One is elite, just like I think everybody in IndyCar is elite.”
So which circuit has more driving talent? Maybe we’ll never know. Maybe we’re asking the wrong question. Maybe the better question is: Which series demands more driving talent?
Forever and a day, that answer seemed to be IndyCar. But Graham Rahal was talking to me earlier in the weekend, before qualifying had begun, and al- ready was bristling at the idea that a great showing at IMS by Alonso would suggest F1 drivers are better than IndyCar drivers.
“The Andretti cars have been really good here the last few years,” Rahal said. “It’s not like (Alonso) is jumping in here with somebody that he’s not going to be competitive with. It’s the perfect situation.”
On the fastest day of Indy 500 qualifying in more than two decades, Alonso was faster than everybody but four others, one of whom was his Andretti teammate and F1 crossover, Rossi.
What does it all mean? We’ll see. There’s speed, and then there’s racing. The F1 guys, even if they are more accustomed to road courses, clearly have the speed on ovals. Can they race on them? Rossi showed he could last year. Alonso will get his chance Sunday.
Rossi has been giving his F1 friend plenty of insight over the past week, but he broke new ground with Alonso on Sunday as they were leaving the news conference podium.
“I’m really looking forward to Sunday,” Rossi said, meaning race day. “I’m really looking forward to watching Fernando go through that, because I think from 6 a.m. to noon before the race even starts ...”
Alonso cut him off. “Six?” he said.
“Yeah,” Rossi said. “It’s probably the coolest six hours of your life.”
As Rossi and Alonso rose to leave, someone called out: “We’ll see you early on race day, Fernando.”
Alonso smiled and shook his head. “I’m not sure,” he said.
It’s OK, Fernando. You drive for Andretti. You’ll be fine.