Friday’s opening practice session on the streets of St. Petersburg featured two spins and a crash. The Meyer Shank Racing duo of Felix Rosenqvist and Marcus Armstrong were fortunate to complete full rotations without hitting anything, but Team Penske’s Scott McLaughlin wasn’t as fortunate.
The contact was relatively minor with broken left-front suspension and bodywork damage from a meeting with the outside wall at Turn 3, and as the Shank drivers and Juncos Hollinger Racing’s Conor Daly explain, IndyCar’s first visit to St. Pete with its cars in hybrid configuration – carrying the 100-plus pounds of energy recovery system weight behind the turbocharged engines – has made navigating Turn 3 more of a knife-edge affair.
“I think it’s just the mechanical weight shift,” Daly told RACER. “I think that’s really challenging the car, challenging the chassis, challenging the suspension. People are fighting the cars, and I think right now, in this era of IndyCar, with the added weight, I mean, you’re challenging these cars mechanically in a different way. I think that leaves everyone on a new playing field, I would say, which is kind of exciting for the fans and for everyone involved. I don’t think it’s anything different on the track, but it’s a wild ride through there.”
After composing himself following the harrowing spin, Rosenqvist echoed Daly’s comments and added more insights to the topic.
“I feel like it’s always a bit on edge in Practice 1, because the track is green, and I feel a lot of drivers, including me, obviously, know that it’s supposed to be flat, so you just go flat without thinking about it, and then it’s like, ‘Oh shit,’ but yeah, you can feel the weight,” he said.
“It’s definitely not easier or nicer, and you know weight is not a good thing on a race car. And yeah, normally in the race, you just go flat, but now you probably have to lift. It’s more of a challenge. It’s like they added an extra corner to the track. You just have to be alert in a different way. It was kind of a no brainer in the past years, but now, don’t fall asleep here. You gotta be ready for some shit to happen here.”