THERMAL, Calif. – After the final checkered flag had fallen to close Alex Palou’s dominant weekend at The Thermal Club’s $1 Million Challenge, IndyCar drivers and team owners remained mixed on the legitimacy and success of a lengthy test and race weekend that handed out a few sizable checks but paid no points.
Predictably, opinions were largely left split between those who achieved major paydays — $500,000 for Palou and CGR, $350,000 for runner-up Scott McLaughlin and Team Penske and $250,000 for Felix Rosenqvist and Meyer Shank Racing – and those shouldered with hefty repair bills and zero points for their troubles.
Opinions of a dozen paddock members IndyStar spoke with post-race on the track, format and IndyCar’s first non-points race since 2008 ranged from calling it a largely successful experiment, to something drivers and teams may consider boycotting if it’s brought back in 2025.
“For us, it didn’t go too well. I would’ve just as soon not participated in the race portion, but the testing was beneficial,” driver-owner Ed Carpenter told IndyStar. “We’ll see what the verdict is from the actual (TV) viewers on if it was impactful or not.
“Ideally, if it’s going to be a race, it needs to be an actual race. Points, all the cars, full distance, otherwise it feels a little gimmicky.”
But aren’t occasional gimmicks – Formula 1 sprint races, the NBA’s All-Star skills challenge and NASCAR’s All-Star race and revamped Clash, to name a few – precisely what several sports are finding helps attract new viewers and freshen up some, at times, boring competition?
“Then I think, at minimum, it needs to be more money for those who make the final round,” Carpenter continued. “And probably a bigger pot altogether. Look at (6th-place Linus Lundqvist and CGR); they got the same reward as us, and we got crashed out on Lap 1 of the heat.”
How he did it: Ganassi’s Alex Palou wins $500,000 in IndyCar’s $1 Million Challenge
An exhibition that began with carnage
The pair of $23,000 paydays ECR’s No. 20 and 21 Chevys took home will likely take only a decent bite out of the crash bill related to Rinus VeeKay’s machine being pile-drived by a skidding Romain Grosjean seconds after the green flag in Heat 1 – marking the biggest ‘wow’ moment in the 38 laps turned Sunday morning. Perhaps just as surprising was that six-time series champ Scott Dixon was the instigator, having misjudged how Grosjean would play the jam-packed entry into Turn 1 while the whole 14-car heat field had push-to-pass at their disposal.
Though the theory there would be no passing on the Club’s 3.067-mile permanent road course was disproven throughout the day, Grosjean wasn’t at all surprised the first of 646 turns on the day led to chaos. It did, though, only inflame his frustrations that racing action airing on an NBC network TV window didn’t have any points on the line.
“Who’s going to pay for the damage?” he questioned, emphatically. “We didn’t do anything wrong, and we got absolutely destroyed.
“We come here with no points on the line and do nothing wrong, and the car is completely smashed. I don’t know, but that’s not what I signed up for.”
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‘Not eventful, not exciting’
With the days of VeeKay and Grosjean over in a blink, and Dixon’s all-but ended after a drive-thru penalty for avoidable contact, the highlights of the rest of IndyCar’s exhibition included mild-mannered highlight moments centered around the three Arrow McLaren teammates dueling for a single advancing spot in Heat 2, Alexander Rossi’s wheel-banging with Josef Newgarden in the main event and Colton Herta’s launch from the back-half of the grid over the closing 10 laps with strategic – but legal – gaming of the system in preserving his tires by running the first half of the final just fast enough to simply not get lapped.
Herta…
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