IndyCar GP of Portland Sunday Press Conference

Drivers:

1st – Alex Palou, Ganassi Honda

2nd – Alexander Rossi, Andretti Honda

3rd – Scott Dixon, Ganassi Honda

Press Conference

THE MODERATOR: We welcome in the champion of the 2021 Grand Prix of Portland, Alex Palou, who led 29 laps, picking up his third career win and a 35-point championship swing right now as he leads Pato O’Ward by 25, who finished 14th today. Two races remaining. Any retort for your friend Scott Dixon?

ALEX PALOU: Sometimes I’m a little bit annoying, but that’s a good thing, right? I need to take advantage of the opportunity I have sharing a team with a six-car INDYCAR champion, and he’s open with it, so I just take advantage of it.

I think part of making the fuel work today, it’s partly because of him. So yeah, being able to learn a lot from him this year. I still learn every session from him, and he’s pushing me this year a lot. It’s a good thing. We have good rivalry on track, and I think that makes the team super strong.

THE MODERATOR: Whenever we come to Portland, everyone talks about Turn 1 and 2, especially at the start. Take us back to that. What were you thinking when you saw what happened happen to you guys?

ALEX PALOU: I didn’t see any replays, so I don’t really know what happened there. I know Scott was on the inside. I got hit at some point. (Audio disruption) on the inside, so I couldn’t really go there, so I knew I had to go through the chicane. I made it through the chicane, and I said, okay, I only lost like five positions, which is a lot, but I said, at least I’m not out.

And then INDYCAR decided that that was not penalizing enough, and they put me in the back, which I don’t know what they want me to do at that point. Do they prefer me to like completely stop the car and make that corner, making the race unsafe? So I’ll ask Kyle; I think it was not right. It’s true that they gave us the option of doing that strategy that gave us the win today, but still, I think it didn’t really make sense.

Some INDYCAR doing INDYCAR things, and hopefully (audio disruption)

Q. At what point in the race did you feel that the race fell right back into your favor?

ALEX PALOU: I think when they were taking a long time to penalize us. It was counting laps, and I was like, okay, this is a good thing. I know we can make the fuel mileage to make it in two only stops. And at that moment, I said, even if we were P5, I knew they were going to penalize us, but I knew that we had another option, that was to — we knew we had a really fast car. Even if we were on the same strategy as everybody, maybe we were not able to win, but I think today we were able to be in the top five, top six without a different strategy.

You never know. Like at the end with that yellow, that put a lot of people on the same strategy as us. I said, oh, man, maybe that’s not good for us. And then that last yellow, that made us restart on blacks while everybody was on reds didn’t really help us.

But anyway, we made it.

Q. Pato wasn’t on the same strategy; you knew you were either going to gain big or lose big?

ALEX PALOU: Yeah, that’s the issue. Today worked out but some other days it didn’t work out. But it worked out today. You always want to be on the same strategy as your competitors because you don’t want like big things to happen. I prefer to win or lose on the same strategy.

I knew that Newgarden and Dixon were on the same kind of strategy, so I was happy with that, and I knew that Pato was P1 at the moment. Yeah, we were a bit lucky today being unlucky.

 

Q. When it came to the race today, especially after what happened in the first four corners, at any point were you thinking about the championship or what your rival was doing? We know some drivers start thinking about points where some focus on going out there just trying to get the best results?

ALEX PALOU: Yeah, you always and you never think about the championship. Yeah, I knew I had to be in front of Pato, Dixon and Newgarden to be happy tonight. But I needed to win, so I was fighting really hard with Rossi. He was like pushing me a lot, and I knew that those — I don’t know what’s the difference, eight points or five points between P1 and P2, they were really valuable, so I was fighting. I was not thinking at all the championship, and I think that gave us the win today, otherwise Rossi would have passed us.

We think about the race, and I think until the last pit stop at Long Beach, we’re not going to think about what do I really need to do to win this championship.

Q. Long Beach and Laguna Seca, how are you feeling about those since you haven’t raced at those tracks, either?

ALEX PALOU: Yeah, so Laguna Seca next week, it’s going to be good for us. We tested there. I feel strong there. It’s a road course. I think we’ve been fighting for all the road course races this year, so feeling pretty strong about that.

Long Beach, that’s going to be interesting and exciting, but nothing I can do about it. Never been there, all my competitors been there and won races there, so it’s a bit scary, but hopefully I can do a good job at Laguna so I can be a bit more comfortable at Long Beach.

This year I think we struggled a bit on the first couple of races on street courses, but we got a podium at Detroit. We qualified P3 at Nashville. Yeah, we are fast on street courses, too.

Q. When is the last championship you won? Was it karting?

ALEX PALOU: Yes.

Q. So 2015-ish?

ALEX PALOU: I think so, around there.

Q. Now it’s six or so years later; what are you doing to mentally prepare yourself for this stretch run?

ALEX PALOU: I think that mentally, when things are going good, it’s super easy. Like you don’t need to overthink or do something different. Like everything is going good, right, so I don’t think it’s super hard.

As long as I continue performing on track, everything is going to take care of itself.

At the moment, I’m not struggling. Maybe I’ll struggle a bit at Long Beach, but at the same time Jimmie has been a really big help for me, I have to say. After the Indy Road Course, I sat with him, and he was telling me that he was on his NASCAR career he had moments like that and that he still won. He told me some tricks. He did the same after Gateway, and hopefully, we can get a championship home.

Q. What kind of tricks?

ALEX PALOU: I’m not going to tell you. You knew that. I mean, you had to try.

Q. I had to try. I’m curious at what point, and maybe you haven’t yet, but at what point did you start to think, I can win this championship?

ALEX PALOU: I mean, the thing is we — at Indy Road Course when I was running fourth, I was like, this is really good for me, this is really good for us, and then sudden MRI the engine blows up, but you keep on going. Gateway you start 21st, you are top 10 and you say, okay, we got it. Then you get a crash. Yeah, you never know, INDYCAR I think is so competitive and especially this year it’s super close where in one race we went from being 10 points back to 25 points ahead.

I think we are in the fight. Clearly we are in the fight. But I think until Long Beach we are not going to know really who’s what. I think that many people today after the first lap thought that Pato was going to win and that we were going to lose 40 points, and it was the opposite. That’s why INDYCAR is INDYCAR. Which is really good. I think that makes the racing super exciting and the championship super exciting until the end.

Q. How big is this win for you? Not so many champions have had only two wins, but now you have a third win, so how big was it for you today?

ALEX PALOU: It was massive. I don’t think that much about the three wins or two wins. I think that’s important but not super. What I think is important is that even having a really bad start of the race, we were able to fight.

At some point we were behind Rossi and Dixon, so we overtook them even on the same strategy.

I’m really proud of the work we did today together with our guys at the No. 10 PNC Bank Honda car. And yeah, it’s good to have three wins this year.

Q. Out of the four tracks so far this year that you’ve never raced at, you’ve won two of them. How does that credit perhaps your abilities or perhaps the team’s ability to show up and race and win some races like this?

ALEX PALOU: Yeah, it’s a team. Like they gave us a really good car. Got my first pole in INDYCAR. Scott finished third, as well. So having two cars on the podium shows that we had a good car today.

I don’t know; I think we do a really good job at the simulator at HPD together with Honda, and we work really hard. Yeah, it’s working out, and it’s paying off on track, so we’ll keep on doing what we’re doing.

Q. What is your mindset going into the last two races now that you’re back in the lead for the points championship?

ALEX PALOU: Guerilla time, right? This just started. We need to try and take some advantage of Laguna. We know we have a good car there, and I say that because I tested there, that car. I know the track, and I know we can be strong there. So we’ll try and take it a session at a time and try and score really big points at Laguna. Hopefully we get another win, and then we’ll see what happens at Long Beach.

Q. Talk about your anxiety level when you found out you were getting moved towards the back of the field on the restart with 10 laps in, and did you think you had no chance at winning the race until the end?

ALEX PALOU: Yeah, I didn’t lose my — I don’t know how you say. But I never say, like oh, I cannot — especially with Barry there on the radio and the team. But I was just angry, and I wanted to sit down with INDYCAR and say, like please, can you explain what just happened? I wanted to understand. So I wanted to understand. I knew I couldn’t get to understand because Barry was like, okay, stop it, Alex, and I was like, okay, Barry, I’ll stop it.

Yeah, I don’t know, man. Like I don’t think on racing you can ever give up. 110 laps, INDYCAR, it was lap 10, and I couldn’t give up. If I give up, what can I expect from the guy at the pit stops? We never gave up. They did an amazing pit stops once again, and we won the race.

Q. Have you talked about where you’re having fried chicken tonight?

ALEX PALOU: Not yet, but I’m definitely having fried chicken. I don’t know where, but I’m flying tonight to Indy with the team, so I’ll need to buy lots of fried chicken for everybody.

Q. Rossi mentioned that the Andretti camp didn’t test here at Portland; how vital was it to get the test to put yourself at an advantage going into the final few races, especially here, given that you’d never raced before?

ALEX PALOU: Yeah, for sure that made our life easier. Especially only having one practice with the schedules we have nowadays with COVID, it’s pretty hard for a guy that doesn’t know a track to learn it in one practice..

But yeah, that test gave us the pole and the win I would say today. At some point we were on blacks, the last 10 we were on blacks and everybody was on reds, and we were still a tiny bit faster than Rossi. Yeah, we were really strong, and that’s because of the test we did for sure.

 

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THE MODERATOR: Another Grand Prix of Portland is in the books here at historic Portland International Raceway. We say congratulations to Alexander Rossi, second-place finish today, best finish of the season for Alex as he celebrates the 25th career of his podium, and Scott Dixon with his fourth podium finish of the season, 126th career podium. Dixie now fourth in points, 49 points out of first place and his teammate Alex Palou.

We’ll begin with Scott Dixon, another big finish. Congratulations to the PNC Bank Grow Up Great folks, and PNC Bank, a double showing for you. Tell us about your race.

SCOTT DIXON: Yeah, that was cool. Obviously big congrats to Alex and the 10 car side. Definitely started a little strange and shook the field.

Just starting with the start, I filled that gap because I figured Rahal or somebody was going to try and scoot down the inside of us. I bailed out of it and then got hit from behind, I think it was Felix, and that caused a bit of an interesting moment for all of us on the start there.

Then race control, it was just the craziest thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been in racing a little while. I don’t know what they were thinking or how that came about, but put all of us at the back the field. Be interesting to go talk to them later and see how they came up with that scenario.

But yeah, thankfully I guess that maybe made our day, all of us up here, the result that we ended up with. Thankful that it turned out the way it did.

We had a few interesting kind of pit stops and exchanges and kind of lost some track position in a couple of situations on a restart with Josef there where he didn’t go and then a bad first pit exchange.

So yeah, all in all, third, still pretty good. 49 points is a little ways out of the fight with two to go, but still mathematically in it, and we’ll give it all we have.

THE MODERATOR: When you fell that far back with scoring on the restart, did you think, our race is over, let’s just try to salvage some points or did you think with some strategy we can get it back up front?

SCOTT DIXON: Yeah, you know, with especially how long that caution was, we knew that it was going to fall into a two-stopper, so we knew we still had kind of a chance. How that was going play out, we didn’t really know. But it’s frustrating. You kind of want that easy race as far as knowing what you need to do and not having such a strange occurrence at the start to kind of flip it.

But yeah, in the end it worked out well. Set us on the other strategy and it paid off.

THE MODERATOR: Second-place finish for Alexander Rossi and the NAPA Auto Parts Auto Nation Andretti Autosport Honda. Tell us about your race today, Alex.

ALEXANDER ROSSI: Yeah, I mean, I’m glad it all came back to us because we all would have looked pretty silly, I guess. I thought it was pretty low grip in Turn 1 when Felix, I guess — when Scott and Alex and them kind of slid through, I didn’t really have anywhere to go, and I thought if we got back to the styrofoam chicane, that was acceptable. But it was self-penalizing because we all went from like first, second, third to sixth, seventh, eighth, and then they’re like, oh, you’re going to 24th. It was like, okay, cool.

But fortunately it all came around, and as Scott said, it put us on the two-stop, which is ultimately the strategy to be on.

The pace of the car was good all weekend. I think we gave it everything we could there on that last stint, and the red tires had a window of time where they were a little bit better, and then it was just tough with dirty air, and Alex didn’t make a mistake. It’s always going to be hard to just go and drive around the pole sitter, but ultimately it was a good day for the team, good in pit lane, great calls, so yeah, started second, finished second.

Q. Even though you said as long as you’re mathematically in it you still go for it, but with two races, 49 back, that’s almost a full race’s worth of points. How do you go for it?

SCOTT DIXON: I don’t know, try and win. It’s definitely been a trying season for us, but ultimately if it comes down to we need to help Alex, that’s fine, too. I think for us it’s about keeping the championship at home and at the team.

So yeah, it’s just the way it rolls sometimes. But yeah, we’ll — obviously we’ve seen it. We saw it at St. Louis how quickly it can flip. We’ve seen how quickly it can flip this weekend. Unless you’re out, you’re not out. We’ve won championships on a tiebreaker. It’s all possible.

Q. Alex, with just the two races to go, they’re strong tracks for you, especially the finale in Long Beach. What does it mean for this team to get a podium to start off the West Coast Swing?

ALEXANDER ROSSI: Yeah, it’s nice to get a result finally. I thought we obviously had a podium going into St. Louis, and I gave that up. It was good to rebound here in Portland.

We didn’t test here like Ganassi did, so I think to get two cars in the Fast Six against them was pretty good, and we tested at Laguna, and we feel pretty happy with the package we have there. We were strong last year, obviously Colton won, or the last — 2019.

So yeah, we’ve got two good shots at it. I think we came out of the summer break with some solutions and identified some issues, and I think that’s been a positive and kind of carried forward, and yeah, we’ll do everything we can. We’ve got nothing to lose in these last two, so we’ll try our best to take some points away from those guys and see what we can get.

Q. Now that you’ve both got a podium finish, we’ve got the West Coast Swing coming up, how much does this change your approach for the next two races?

ALEXANDER ROSSI: I think every — it’s the same every race. You’re just trying to win, and then depending on what happens in the beginning or the middle, you adapt from there. For Alex and Scott, they have a championship to look at, and they’re probably counting points a little bit, whereas for me we’re just trying to get results.

At the end of the day everyone is here to try and win, and that doesn’t change kind of at any point throughout the whole weekend.

Q. Scott, did you suffer any damage to the car?

SCOTT DIXON: I think we just had a cut tire. I know the steering was a little off kilter. I think Felix just kind of hit us right in the left rear, but nothing that really hindered us throughout the race, so definitely lucky in that situation.

Q. Given what happened to you today, what do you take away from today’s race that you look forward now to Laguna which comes up in a week’s time?

SCOTT DIXON: Well, I don’t know how to answer that. Yeah, it was one of those days where you were kind of down and out, and then it flipped. So I don’t know. I think we definitely found some setup things from Friday morning to the afternoon. Hopefully we can apply that to maybe Laguna. Obviously Long Beach is very different. But good momentum for the team. I think that’s key.

A lot of us have had good speed this weekend, which hopefully that transfers to next week and the weekend after, and ultimately trying to keep a championship at Ganassi.

Q. Alex, when you had that peak moment chasing down Palou, you went off, dropped a couple tires. Was that maybe the moment that may have cost you that opportunity?

ALEXANDER ROSSI: No. I mean, we kind of closed within the half second window, and it was just some dirty air, and we had some understeer in that corner in particular. Yeah, from there we lost eight-tenths and kind of came back at it, but ultimately unless the guy in front of you makes a mistake, we were even on Push-to-Pass and using it at the same time.

That’s just the way it goes. We were trying everything to put him under pressure and see if we could get him to lock up front, but ultimately he’s the championship leader for a reason and drove a great race, and you’ve just got to accept second sometimes.

Q. The fact Ganassi tested her, you guys didn’t; what kind of difference does that make at an event like this?

ALEXANDER ROSSI: Well, I think when you have a two-day event for really no reason and you only have one practice session and an hour and a half between practice and qualifying, it makes it hard for the guys that didn’t test here. Like I said, for us to get two cars in the Fast Six, we were really happy with that. And yeah, hopefully the advantage kind of comes back to us in Laguna and we can have a little bit of upper hand coming out of the box there. But ultimately I think the team has been doing a good job as of late, and we’ve just got to keep pushing forward.

Q. Alex, what’s the first thing you said to yourself after what happened in the first turn today?

ALEXANDER ROSSI: That sounds about right. Yeah, I mean, I was upset because, yeah, we started second and were I think eighth at that point. And then I was really upset when they were like, no, you’re 23. I mean, whatever, it’s clearly — there was some reasoning behind it.

But yeah, it all worked out in the end. The guys that started one, two, three finished one, two, three, so you can’t complain about too much, I guess.

Q. Scott, what is it about Alex that makes him so good even though he’s standing there and it’s going to be hard for you to be frank and honest about it? He says he’s not afraid to ask any of his teammates a thousand questions. Is he almost like the team’s little brother?

SCOTT DIXON: He’s just an amazing person. Look at him, he’s always smiling. I always tell him he’s too nice. He’s got to be more of a — what Jenna said, jerk. I used a different word.

But no, he’s obviously very adaptive. He’s done a tremendous job in junior categories.

But yeah, he’s a bit annoying sometimes when he’s asking a lot of questions, but I think that’s a good thing. As you can see with just adverse situations like today, he didn’t lose it, and still made it happen when it counted. Definitely done a massive job this year, and what him and the 10 car guys have been doing has been very special.

Yeah, he’s just a nice person, man. Too nice.