IndyCar: Palou amazed at how much faster an F1 car is vs. his IndyCar
After driving an overweight 12-year old antiquated IndyCar for a couple of years, 2021 IndyCar champion Alex Palou admits he was shocked by the performance of McLaren’s Formula 1 car, after running U.S. Grand Prix’s opening practice at Circuit of The Americas.
“It’s fast, it’s insane!” he beamed afterward. “Obviously, I was lucky to test before this with the 2021 car, so that already gave me the feeling of an F1 car. But then here, obviously, you have the traffic, you don’t want to impede anybody else. And you have a car that is not yours.
“So… I was trying to take care of the car, obviously not trying to get in trouble with people that are going to race this weekend. So yeah, this track, I think it’s pretty awesome for an F1 car, especially sector one superfast. And it was beautiful to drive.”
Palou admitted that “the car was capable of so much that I just overshot it in some places, which, I think, is good. It’s better to overshoot, and then back it off if you only have an hour. And I knew we only had a set of tires, so I had to do everything in two laps. I couldn’t wait a lot, so that’s probably why.
“What would I improve? I think just more laps and getting obviously another set of tires at the end would have helped. But our program today was not to go fast, it was to get data for the team at the beginning, which we did… And then we focused on myself.”
“I trusted the car 100 percent, but the car was capable of doing more than I thought it was… so I started pushing more. It’s true that on the slow corners I was quite strong, but I think it’s easy, obviously, to get more confidence there.
“And then yeah, the last two corners I lacked a little bit, especially the second to last one. But the car could do a lot more than I thought and yeah, it was not confidence. It was that I couldn’t believe how fast I could go with the car.”
“I’m not really afraid of getting hurt, but afraid of crashing a car that has to go out now in 15 minutes, and it’s not mine! And you only have like, I don’t know, five good laps or three good laps with the tires.”
Palou denied feeling disappointed that he couldn’t put in a “performance run” on soft tires toward the end of the session.
“One hundred percent, I was happy,” he said. “That was the plan. And I completely understand the target of the session was not to shine, to be like, ‘Hey, this is the time that we can post’.
“It was more to save some tires for Daniel Ricciardo, because that’s going to help him now. He lost an hour, so that’s going to help him and that’s going to help the team.
“So yeah, I obviously push the engineers to come on, give me another tires. Like, you’re not paying for it, so just give me another one! But obviously, I understand everything behind [the decision] so I would do the same if I was in their position.”