Alex Palou Leads Honda Contingent at Road America
Road America
・Alex Palou finishes fourth at NTT INDYCAR SERIES XPEL Grand Prix of Road America
・Kyle Kirkwood scores second-consecutive top-five finish
・All three Andretti Global cars score top-10 results
It was Alex Palou leading the Honda field in the NTT INDYCAR SERIES XPEL Grand Prix at Road America, bringing his #10 Chip Ganassi Racing Honda home fourth in today's race.
Palou started seventh and avoided damage in a chaotic first corner—and first quarter of the race—to advance through the field to the fourth position.
Finishing fifth was Andretti Global's Kyle Kirkwood. This is Kirkwood's second top-five finish, scored at consecutive weekends. He moves up to a tie for fifth in the points with the result.
Kirkwood's Andretti Global teammate Colton Herta finished sixth after an adventurous day. The Californian driver was spun on lap one, turn one, followed by a secondary off on the subsequent restart. That sent the #26 Honda to the rear of the field, but the Andretti Global team utilized an alternate strategy to finish sixth at the line.
Fast Fact:
Honda Indy car drivers have scored nine victories at Road America, most recently in 2023, which was won by Alex Palou, in his Chip Ganassi Racing Honda, en route to his second NTT INDYCAR SERIES championship in the last three years.
Next
After a string of five consecutive May-June weekends, the NTT INDYCAR SERIES now takes next weekend off before heading west to central California for the June 21-23 Firestone Grand Prix of Monterey at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca.
It was a good solid day for the #10 DHL Honda. We made up some positions, but it was just a shame we didn't have the ultimate car speed today. Overall, a good result, and we've gained some points in the championship as well.
A decent day. Of course, you always want to win, especially when you lead some laps here, but top five is always a good result, and that's what we got here today. The Honda had great fuel economy, we just couldn't make the tires last to actually use all the fuel. But as I said, a decent day, and we're still fifth in the points, so we'll go on to Laguna Seca happy with the finish.
I'm not happy with sixth place with the car that we had and the pace that we had. We had a little bit of damage from the incidents and that did make it harder to get back up there. But, because of our strategy, we were able to go so much longer on fuel and get so much more clean air that it just kind of worked in our favor. It's disappointing for everybody on a weekend that I feel like we could have won. It's disappointing for our team, and for Honda, that we aren't at least on the podium.
We had a great qualifying this weekend at Road America, 1-2-3-4 for Honda showed a lot of promise and we hoped to continue that all the way to the checkered flag. Unfortunately, racing is racing and we can't predict how these events will pan out. As always, thank you to our men and women at HRC for all their hard work and to all of our Honda teams for the effort they put in this weekend. We will certainly be pushing for more at Laguna Seca.
