Welcome to the RACER Mailbag. Questions for any of RACER’s writers can be sent to mailbag@racer.com. We love hearing your comments and opinions, but letters that include a question are more likely to be published. Questions received after 3pm ET each Monday will be saved for the following week.
Q: Help me understand the unforgivable behavior of whomever makes the call to throw the yellows. First, they decide not to throw a yellow when VeeKay spun out because they had to leave the pits open, which I completely disagree with. If you didn’t pit before the yellow, so be it! You live with the consequences of racing incidents. So VeeKay loses two laps when he likely could have been started in the sand and start going. Ridiculous.
And then worse, and not the first race I’ve seen this, Ericsson spins out and is sitting in a very vulnerable position, and no yellow is thrown for many minutes. Someone’s going to die one of these days, Marshall.
Who makes these decisions? Why is the pit allowed to stay open while a yellow is delayed, resulting in risk to the drivers? Why is a yellow not consistently thrown the moment there is an incident? Why?
Jean K
MARSHALL PRUETT: Because every situation isn’t the same. IndyCar goes full-course yellow (FCY) instantly on ovals due to the high sustained speeds and nature of crashed things to slide down onto the racing line and get hit. It doesn’t always work as intended, as the WWTR crash involving Foster and Newgarden confirmed, but in general, if contact is seen, it’s FCY with haste. Great approach. Make no changes to it.
Road racing is different, and it doesn’t need to be treated in a blind, copycat manner where whatever’s done on ovals is applied to a radically different style of racing, and vice versa. That’s why I appreciate a nuanced approach to the officiating of multi-discipline racing.
For the sake of safety and physics, the instant oval FCY makes complete sense. In road racing, an absence of severity with whatever happened, coupled with an extremely low safety risk, is where race control can read the situation and make judgement calls on when to go FCY. That’s what VeeKay’s deal warranted.
VeeKay’s engine didn’t need restarting in the gravel trap to solve the problem. He needed to be pulled out of it by the AMR Safety Team because he was stuck and couldn’t move. He was losing a lap regardless, due to how deep he was and the time/effort to perform the recovery. Could the two laps have been cut to one? Of course. But the extended call to go FCY wasn’t the difference between staying on the lead lap and going a lap down.
Rinus was far away from the racing line and there was no reasonable threat posed by waiting for the leaders to get into the pits. He was in no immediate danger, and race control used its experience to accurately judge the situation. Cars get going quickly towards Turn 3, but aren’t outrageously fast, and he was far from the track.
The leaders were in the window to pit, and so they weren’t penalized for the timing of a caution that wasn’t an urgent matter to solve. If this was VeeKay spearing nose-first into the barriers, that’s an instant FCY. But this was nothing like that, so there was no need to overreact. I wouldn’t change a thing about how it was handled.
Can’t say the same about the Ericsson situation. That one is a head-scratcher. Giving Marcus time to try and fire his engine and drive away is perfectly reasonable. Waiting as long as they did to see if it would happen, which I timed at 1m31s from the moment the FOX broadcast cut to his car sitting sideways on the track to when the FCY went live, is a long time. Add a few seconds from when the spin started to when he was found by the cameras, and it’s closer to 1m35s. Palou was lapping between 1m11s-1m12s, so depending on where they were, some drivers passed Marcus twice before the FCY appeared.
Granted, there were local yellows waving with the SFR SCCA flaggers and the EM Marshaling System light panels blinking yellow into Turn 6 at the bottom of the hill and atop the hill, so there were warnings to all drivers of a problem ahead. That doesn’t explain away the long wait, but it’s not as if there was nothing being done to alert the other drivers to an issue prior to the FCY.
The leaders pitted between laps 69-72 and Ericsson’s issue led to the FCY on lap 78, so it had nothing to do with leaving the pits open for the leaders. I’d ask race control to do the same thing every time it has a VeeKay-like scenario on its hands.
I’d ask race control to take a more aggressive approach to a stalled car on the racing surface at one of the fastest points on the race track as it had with Ericsson sitting broadside to the field. He wasn’t on the racing line, or all that close to it, but he was on the pavement nonetheless, and that’s too close for comfort.
Q: With Practice 2 at Laguna Seca needing to canceled because of the low stratus marine layer, it makes me wonder: Does anyone at IndyCar consider weather when putting the schedule together?
I’m a meteorologist who got his graduate school meteorology education in Monterey. Anyone living or who has lived in that area knows that the marine layer stratus is a daily occurrence there in the summer, which makes spring and fall the best times to schedule a race at Laguna Seca. The Practice 2 cancellation should surprise no one.
Was this date picked knowingly, but hoping it would somehow work out? Or was this a gap in the due diligence process?
Steve, Ann Arbor, MI
MP: Great question for which I have no answer. But I can tell you that during the hour-plus of walking up and down pit lane, I stopped with every friend, former rival, or teammate from my CART and Indy Lights days and either said, or had said to me, “So nobody setting the schedule has been to Laguna Seca before 2025?” or some variation of the theme. Having sat on the same pit lane or under a tent countless times in the 1990s while waiting for the same marine layer to burn off, we just shook their heads as the same old wait for 10:30am to arrive with clear skies took place.
Look for the permanent shift to a late morning Saturday practice session followed quickly by qualifying and a late afternoon ‘morning’ warmup to become the standard plan.

If you’re familiar with Monterey weather, you saw this coming. Chris Owens/IMS
Q: I know we are all aware of and in awe of the ever-evolving genius which is Alex Palou, and the fact that he is not only among one of the greatest drivers of the modern era, but also on pace to become one of the greatest of all time. I have no doubt that one day we will be talking about him in the same regards as Foyt, Mario and Dixon. But the real question, and I know I speak for all of us when I ask this, is how will he compare to all-time legend, Mark Plourde, when things are all said and done?
Alan Bandi, Sarver, PA
MP: I’ve met most of my heroes – Mario Andretti, Al Holbert, Dan Gurney, and so on – but I’ve never met the amazing Mark Plourde. A life incomplete. But I do still have my “Plourde” shirt I bought years ago as a tribute to the greatest Champ Car driver of all time.
Q: Last Sunday, during the last stages from Laguna Seca, the FOX crew mentioned that Palou could equal or even surpass the record of most victories in a single season. On the broadcast, they mentioned that this record stands at 10 victories and it is held by Foyt and Unser Sr. However, as I recall, this record belongs to Ted Horn, who won 19 in 1946.
Did IndyCar stopped to recognize these victories – or the races – under the Big Car rules, or it was simply a mistake from the broadcast?
Pedro, Ouro Preto/MG, Brazil
MP: I asked my friend Scott Richards, an amazing statistician, to answer:
“This is one question I’ve been waiting for someone to bring up! There has long been a debate over whether the 1946 AAA season consisted of six races or 77. From what I understand, AAA for one year chose to include 71 ‘Big Car’ races that were under 100 miles in length due to concerns over car counts. Some of these 71 races were incredibly short, including one race in Great Barrington, Massachusetts that totaled four miles!
“There’s been a strong debate from both sides of the argument on whether the 71 races should be counted since then, and technically the 1947 car numbers were assigned based on the 77-race points results. However, when IndyCar released its official record book back in 2011, it only recognized the six races that were over 100 miles long (Indianapolis, Langhorne, Atlanta-Lakewood, Indiana State Fairgrounds, Milwaukee, and Goshen). It’s certainly an interesting quandary and one few people seem to know about, but if FOX was going by what IndyCar now determines is the official record, then they were not wrong.”
Q: I have noticed an inconsistency in the clamor to remove oval races from the IndyCar schedule. In 2023 at Texas Motor Speedway there were around 20,000 fans in a speedway that holds 75,000+, and it was considered an alarming failure. Yet Toronto this year had around 18,500 fans in the stands, and it was nearly “sold out.”
The crowd at Toronto looked great on TV, therefore perception is reality. Street circuits have an inherent advantage – they can size their temporary grandstands to the expected ticket sales, permanent speedways cannot.
At Iowa there were 6,000 fans in attendance. Everyone saw the 18,000 empty seats on TV, and that is now a crisis. Yet how many fans were at Thermal Club? About 5,000? We aren’t talking about their low attendance, because no one saw any empty grandstands on TV at Thermal Club.
Hy-Vee, Big Machine Music and Bommarito have all consistently proven that with proper promotion fans will come out in strong numbers to see an oval race. So let’s compare apples to apples before letting the detractors declare “ovals are dead.”
Kevin P., Los Angeles, CA
MP: Texas was lucky to have 5,000 people for the last race. Iowa sure wasn’t 6,000 and Thermal was barely over 2,000. Ovals aren’t dead in IndyCar. But let’s also not ignore reality by skewing comparisons. I’ve been to Iowa when Hy-Vee wasn’t involved, and there were no big concerts, and it had healthy crowds. Same for Texas in its earliest editions. And WWTR/Gateway when it was loaded with fans.
For those of us who’ve been to these races for many years, often under different names like the CART IndyCar Series or Champ Car of the Indy Racing League, the ability exists to compare and contrast to today. Iowa was depressing. WWTR was pretty good, but not as good as it has been.
Milwaukee is the “ovals are dead” canary in the coal mine. If it’s as good or better than last year on its return, everyone can exhale. And if it’s down, that will certainly feed the notion that too many IndyCar ovals are attracting too few fans.
Q: Theo Pourchaire recently indicated that he’s working with Simon Pagenaud to try to open doors for him in the U.S. Have you heard about rumors about him in 2026, whether in IndyCar or even IMSA? In 2026, for me the only chance for him will be that Malukas goes to Penske to replace Power, and he will create a good opportunity for Pourchaire in the Foyt team.
Given his activities in the WEC this year, one might also think that he could continue in the WEC in 2026, and doing a few more races in IMSA could open doors for him in IndyCar in 2027.
I would love for Pourchaire to really get his chance in IndyCar. When you see that he dominated drivers like Lawson, Lundgaard, Armstrong and that he was almost on par with Piastri, I think that IndyCar cannot leave such a driver on the sidelines.
Yannick
MP: I haven’t heard from any teams that have him in P1 on their to-hire list. He’s on some lists, but not as the most coveted driver. An F2 champ is a hard thing to ignore, but his lack of oval experience is the real issue. Few teams are willing to wait two or three years for road racers to become threats on ovals, which makes a Linus Lundqvist or a Rinus VeeKay more appealing candidates. I need to check in with Simon to see if any IMSA opportunities are in the works. Hated losing him, and hope he finds a way back.

Hopefully there are a few still-to-be-written North American chapters in the Theo Pourchaire story. Joe Skibinski/IMS
Q: I was wondering what your opinion is on the Porsche Penske team considering only doing the Endurance Cup, or every dropping IMSA as a whole? Also with Ford coming in to the LMDh scene, could we see Penske move to being Ford’s factory team for IMSA and WEC, especially since Penske runs Ford in NASCAR?
Jack
MP: I don’t have an opinion since Porsche has repeatedly stated in recent weeks and months that it’s in for more full-time action in GTP. I know other teams are angling to replace Penske whenever the relationship ends, and yes, Ford+Penske has been rumored for a while now in Hypercar.
Q: In Germany there are some rumors circling around that PREMA will leave IndyCar at the end of the season because of costs, as Iron Lynx is not keen on paying for the program any more.
What’s your information about that?
Frank Lehmann
MP: There were heavy rumors in May that the team bankrolled by Deborah Mayer was closing its doors after the Indy 500. And then PREMA showed up to Detroit, and WWTR, and so on. From within the paddock where they compete, I’ve heard nothing to suggest the team is going away.
Q: The crowd at Laguna Seca looked bigger than I’ve ever seen on TV. How was it in person?
Kyle
MP: First time since IndyCar returned where I wasn’t concerned for the race’s future. It wasn’t half of a CART-era explosion of humanity, but it was busy and energetic and youthful. The amount of fans in Pato/McLaren gear was amazing, and the volume of young women – often repping Pato in some way with a hat, shirt, bracelet, or similar – was also hard to miss. It felt damn good to be at one of my local tracks for an IndyCar race and not feel sad for the track and series with a small turnout.
Q: Once again, a Palou masterclass. He was as fast on blacks as everyone else was on reds. On reds, he was untouchable. I know it is a bit boring, but just wow. I appreciate extreme excellence when I see it.
Now my comment/question on broadcast. I found it amazing that the broadcast completely missed the on-track pass Lungaard made on Herta. Maybe it was about 20 laps later when they caught it and showed it.
I wrote to the booth team and I know they have to cover for the production folks, but it seems like the production truck folks need someone who really knows racing and watching timing and scoring with them so they know what to look for. I know they are looking at 50 screens and they also decide what we see and what the booth sees, but it was a big miss in my opinion. An IndyCar intern could help them with this.
I saw it on the app because I was watching the gap Herta had come down, and it was for second place – not some midfield scrap.
I have seen others here comment on the FOX broadcast and I know they are rookies in this sphere, but it seems like some stuff not getting better.
Jeff Smith, State College, PA
MP: Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Q: Seems Mike Hull and CGR had the right strategy at Laguna Seca. The race was scratchy enough to keep our interest, even though the outcome seemed inevitable.
Palou is Tiger-esque right now. Him or the field? On TV it looked like a good crowd too – was it? (That’s my requisite question.)
Congrats to Will Power for finishing first-in-team. As an ill-informed fan reading everything between the lines, I have come to the conclusion that he won’t be with Team Penske next year. Three reasons.
First, there hasn’t been a substantial enough difference in performance between him and Malukas.
Second, if he stays, next year wouldn’t be a contract year. Rather, it would be a year of non-stop hoopla with everyone at every event celebrating his successes with Penske. Hell, some track owner might get confused and bestow a new Harley upon him. It would be awkward, it would get tiresome and I doubt he or the team really wants that.
And third, if he leaves after this season, he stands a better chance of landing a good multi-year deal somewhere. I hope there’s more poles and wins in his future, but my enduring memories will be his Indy and title wins, and the days when he and Cindric did great things together. Actually the double-birds are right up there too. That was an all-timer and it’s impossible to recall it without smiling. Good on ya, mate.
Chris in Colorado
MP: So the best move is to drop Penske’s most consistent performer. Makes sense to me.
Q: Someone had raised a question in last week’s Mailbag that mentioned the Alex Palou-McLaren contract saga from a couple of seasons ago. I imagine it had to be a contentious relationship between Palou and Chip Ganassi during that time. With Palou being on a tear this season, what’s the relationship between Ganassi and Palou been like since that debacle?
Brandon Karsten
MP: Strong. It was contentious; Alex sued Chip. At the time, Chip told me he barely knew Palou, which struck me as odd since Palou had just won a championship for the team, but yes, if you look back at that 2021-22 period, you didn’t see the interpersonal relationship on display like you do today with the hugs and visible connection between the two. Ganassi is known to be backing Palou in the McLaren court deal, which says a lot about how far they’ve come.

Water under the bridge. Chris Owens/IMS
Q: Wow! I know IndyCar fans want more ovals, but hardly anyone showed up at Iowa, a track we might lose. Yet Road America, Mid-Ohio, the Indy road course, Laguna Seca and Barber, everyone shows up. I’m wondering if Watkins Glen, Mosport Park in Canada and New Jersey Motorsports Park will be added to the schedule next year?
Alistair, Springfield, MO
MP: I love the first two suggestions; NJMP is the last place to send IndyCar.
Q: With all the livery changes throughout the season, does each team have their own dedicated people that can wrap and re-wrap the cars? Or do they send them to a third-party that does that? Seems like it’s a constant thing. I can’t imagine every team has just tons of bodywork pieces standing by with new sponsor designs, but maybe they do?
Rich
MP: There’s 11 teams so no answer fits all. Bigger teams have their own graphics department and do their own; others bring in vendors. Wrapping spare bodywork is an option, but not the tub itself.
Q: I was watching the Toronto race and I noticed O’Ward was trailing Kyffin Simpson. They were going to Turn 1 on lap 45 and Simpson went around the curb. Pato cut the curb and just went on the inside of Turn 1 and didn’t even go around the curb. I was wondering if that was legal, because it seems like everybody else should just keep cutting turn one and not go around the curb. Check out the video – there’s an overhead from a helicopter that shows it.
Mark
MP: Yes, it’s legal.
Q: Is PREMA still actively exploring buying charters from existing entries?
Jim
MP: Are they going back to the same people who said no the first time? I don’t know, but no charter teams are going to sell their charters without selling the team, and none are for sale.
Q: OK Great Guru of IndyCar, explain CGR’s strategy at Toronto in a way us mere mortals can understand.
Red
MP: Made no sense to me the moment I saw them pick primaries when it was clear the popular call would be to get the alternates off as quickly as possible, which five out of the six drivers in the top six chose to do.
This was a case of having a giant points lead and having the creative freedom to try a risky strategy and know you could survive if it went sideways. If Palou’s lead was 50 points instead of 129, there’s no way an unnecessary risk gets taken.
Q: Going off my last Mailbag question suggesting that IndyCar allow for teams to field MotoGP-esque “wild card” entries at select races… what if IndyCar stole another idea, this time from NASCAR?