“…The only thing they fear is you.”
Welcome to Part 2 of the DRR Doubleheader for the weekend, and for the first time ever on Motorsport101, it’s a review of an IndyCar Grand Prix at The Thermal Club. Last year, I didn’t even bother with it because the whole exhibition event was laced with influencers, B2B marketing, and a facility that wasn’t fit for the full grid, so I essentially let the invasive thoughts win and I just didn’t want to review it.
In 2025, it’s now a full Championship race, we have a working pit exit and the full grid’s racing at once, so I’m sure that’ll fix all the problems with this place, right? Right?
Why Do I Hear Boss Music?
This was very much looking like a procession for the first two-thirds of the race. McLaren celebrated a front-row lockout in qualifying with Pato O’Ward beating out Christian Lundgaard, with Alex Palou settling for third. And this ended up being a straight dogfight between the three of them, with O’Ward ripping a huge early lead with the sticker reds, with Palou and Lundgaard on similar starts fighting each other for second.
Pato led 51 laps of this race, deep into the final stint. But Palou saved his ace in the hole for the final stint – With Pato having to use a second pair of sticker blacks (the harder compound), Palou had a pair of sticker reds at the end, and well… safe to say he took advantage of the offset.
Palou came out of the pits nine seconds behind Pato O’Ward and still had to clear Lundgaard in a tight (and tremendous by the way), battle out of the pits. Palou was leading six laps later.
By the end of the race, he was ahead by 10 seconds. It was a final stint of the absolute Gods. He took what Pato did early on and doubled the raw pace advantage. McLaren’s tactical gamble and playing conservatively blew up in their face and it cost them the win, on top of Alex Palou driving out of his goddamn mind when it mattered most. A truly astonishing performance, and yet more evidence (if it were needed), that Palou might be the best race car driver on the planet today.
And the news gets worse for the field – I teased going into 2025 that this might be the most competitive top-end of the field that IndyCar has ever had. And between everyone else in the field being unable to string two great wekeends together, Palou already has a 39-point lead after just two races. And given how consistent the man at the front is, that might already be the title. I’d never normally say this after March, but – when was the last time Palou was outscored by 40 over a season? 2022?! Terrifying and the worst case scenario for everyone else in the field.
Yet More Fox Problems
*sighs*… This isn’t good enough, FOX. I’ve already said this season, that the broadcaster earned a heap of goodwill from fans on the way in for their largely excellent promo ads and Superbowl crossover content to help promote the series. But the actual broadcasts so far have been poor, and this was somehow worse than last week.
They replaced the cartoon faces for the driver profiles. The series gave it the big one on social media before the weekend, sharing more upcoming graphics for future races, even poking fun at the fact their original set leaked. But that makes it all the more frustrating that they’re still making basic mistakes.
As an International fan, I do understand that we’re not going to get everything due to certain restrictions. But there is no reason why we can’t have practice sessions where the action is synced to the commentary we’re getting. Hearing Will Buxton talking about Robert Schwartzman while we’ve been watching three minutes of Pato O’Ward on board is incredibly jarring.
And just when I thought we were over the timing tower problems in Qualifying, we got them again in the race, when for the first five laps, we didn’t have timed gaps between cars in the fields and transponders regularly out of sync. As I said with FOX before, it’s not like this is the first time you’ve ever run a Motorsport series, you’re covering NASCAR right now too, and these are basic mistakes.
And the new commentary booth is still struggling. Buxton is still largely fine, but Townsend Bell straight-up lying on the broadcast about how reliable the IndyCar hybrid has been since its inception is insulting to the audience who have been watching for more than the last two races. I’m never a fan of a broadcaster who talks down to their audie-
…Soundcheck, soundcheck, 1, 2, 3… is this post still on?
But yeah, no one knew how the cow got on the roof of the Thermal Club.
Oh, and did I mention Alex Palou drove sick this weekend? Yeah, he wasn’t 100%. Must have been the Thermal Club cheeseboards.
Devlin DeFrancesco and Scott McLaughlin almost came to blows after Devlin picked up a Drive Through Penalty for spinning McLaughlin around… on the formation lap. And Devlin was out there giving it the big one like he wasn’t blatantly in the wrong. Embarrassing. (And forgive me for posting a link from the Nazi site.)
“You’re so fucking stupid, you dumb c**t” – Scotty Mac 🤌 (Bonus points for appropriate use of Italian hand gestures)
So, anyone who used blockers to assist their aero during the race had overheating hybrid issues. The worst was for McLaughlin, who ended up six laps down and finishing stone dead last, a huge blow to his title campaign already. The last time an IndyCar driver won the first two rounds of a season was Scott Dixon in 2020, and he’d go on to win the title.
Some shoutouts for under-the-radar drives on the day – Will Power salvaging an all-time horrible Penske weekend by going from 21st to 6th. He was the meat in a really strong Meyer Shank sandwich with Felix Rosenqvist in fifth and Marcus Armstrong seventh. Good day for ECR as well with Alex Rossi ninth and Christian Rasmussen twelfth.
Since last night, there’s a possibility that Thermal’s coming back for 2026, with club and IndyCar organisers agreeing to meetings after the race. According to Racer.com, there’s a possibility they’ll change the layout again too to cut down the first half of the lap and bring some faster elements of the track they haven’t used yet. Will it bring the lap time down thought? I’m personally not sure on this one – This was a LONG race at 65 laps, and 116 minutes. And that was a super-lucky race as it ran caution-free, first of its kind in IndyCar in nearly five years. I think reducing the lap count and opening up the possibility of a one-stopper would be more intriguing to me.
The Verdict: 4/10 (Ungood) – Hard to score this one. There was a bit of scuffling in the back and this was more of a tactical race than one dished out on the track, but when you lose 10 laps of a race due to a breaker in the production truck going out, there’s not an awful lot of good I can do about that, in a broadcast that wasn’t in a good place to begin with. Beyond that, you could enjoy the fact that a chunk of this race is genuinely lost media. People dig that shit. Bonus half point for the tremendous Palou/Lundgaard fight in the final stint. See you in Long Beach.
