IndyCar: A Different Fast Friday at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway

Good afternoon from the “Racing Capital of the World”, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.  Fast Friday, presented by Turtle Wax, did not live up to its name today.  With temperatures in the mid-80s for most of the practice time, drivers did not put extensive time into running because the weather for qualifying tomorrow will be around 15 degrees cooler than today.

Kyffin Simpson had an incident almost an hour into the session this afternoon.  The car got briefly airborne, but Simpson climbed out and is  OK.

At 3:15 pm, the track temperature was measured at 138 degrees Fahrenheit.  That is the highest temperature reading at the track in May since Firestone started to record track temperatures in 2015.

At 4:29, Arrow McLaren’s Kyle Larson got loose, ran below the white line in Turn 3, and spun.  The American made front-end contact and skidded down the track to make rear contact in Turn 4.  Larson has been checked and cleared to drive.

Larson came back out at 5:30 in a backup car to try and get some precious practice time.  The weather dramatically changed, as clouds covered the track and the wind was almost gone.

A handful of drivers waited to make another run until the last 30 minutes.   The series points leader, Alex Palou, and teammate Scott Dixon went out for a qualifying simulation.   Dixon has five career poles for the Indy 500 and set the second fastest lap of the day in his No. 9 PNC Bank Honda.

The hybrid has kept some drivers busy in the cockpit.  The new Cosworth steering wheel has multiple buttons on both sides.  You can see the drivers take their hands off the wheel to make adjustments.

Autoracing1 spoke with Chip Ganassi’s Scott Dixon about working the hybrid for qualifying and the race.

“You can use the hybrid wherever you like.  In race running, there’s a lot of regen, to keep up the energy level, that you can use per lap.”

“There was a debate whether it actually be just limited to just enough energy to deploy once a lap, because it is twice a lap now.  The problem is that once you pick up everybody’s speed, the gaps get bigger because the tire can’t fix the speed.”

“But now, with the addition of the hybrid, there’s so many sequences that are going on, even the way that you have to prep the hybrid before you go out and qualifying that you’re doing on your warm up lap, the weight jacket to three or four extra settings, and that’s still not even about set up or changing the weight we needed, you know, bars and all that kind of stuff. So it would be interesting this year to see, you know, maybe some people miss some of the sequences .”

Fast Friday for 2025 is in the books now.  It was truly not the typical day, with very few laps run in the heat.  Rain fell as the qualifying draw was ending this evening.

We will see what tomorrow brings.

Lucille Dust reporting live from Indianapolis