Music City Grand Prix Recap: Alex Palou prevails over Team Penske in postponed race

Well, after a long wait, we got through the Music City Grand Prix, and Alex Pillow, somewhat close to winning this race last year, finishing second, won it this time around for his fifth win of the season here in the IndyCar season. Here at National Super Speedway, I'm Zion Brown for IndyStarTV, and let's just go through it. Once again, Alex Pillow, back to victory lane. His championship lead now is up to 83 points, David Maloukas is now second as he was able to leapfrog over Kyle Kirkwood in today's race, as far as the championship race goes. But once again, it feels like Alex Pillow is back in command of this championship race that, for a second, maybe looked like Kyle Kirkwood or David Maloukas, and maybe even Christian Lundgaard would have a chance to catch up to him. It's not over. We still do have six races to go, however, and this is a larger lead now for Alex Pillow after today's race. I'll get to the entire saga of yesterday near the end of this video, so I'll talk about the Fox World Cup lead-in that wasn't, delays that turned into the postponement, and everything in between, the timing of everything and all of that. First, though, let's talk about the race. It wasn't a two-lane race like we thought it would be, and we've had some great oval races this year. I would argue that every oval race we've had this year has been exciting up until this point, and there were exciting moments in this race, mainly made by David Maloukas. If you ask me who kind of had the most exciting moments and was able to produce the most exciting moments, it would be Maloukas, but they just weren't able to use two lanes in this race like we thought they would. It wasn't as exciting here this year as it was the past two years since Eddie Carr returned to National Super Speedway, which, you know, we'll see where the future goes. Scott Borchetta, who's kind of in charge of this race, wanted to get back to the streets of Nashville, downtown. The new Nissan Stadium is being built. We'll see where that goes, but that's a story for another day. Only on the restarts were drivers really able to use both lanes if they were to pass. Outside of that, it just got too marbly, marbled up too much, and turned into a one-lane race, and we saw that at the end, where once Alex Blow was able to hold off Joseph Newgarden on the last restart, when it was Dennis Halgren who spun out, once Paul O'Hill and Newgarden were off there, Newgarden, who we know to be so great on ovals, who we know is able to make passes like that, just had no chance, really, it felt like, to make those passes. And especially once Blow got around lap traffic, I think, on the second or third to last lap, it was a wrap at that point. And like I said, drivers, I talked to Joseph Newgarden, Kyle Kirkwood, it was just too marbled up on the green, and there was nothing to do as far as it came to that. Maybe a lap count would have made a difference, but again, I'll get to that in a moment. Joining Alex Blow on the podium was, of course, Joseph Newgarden, P2, and David Maloukis, P3. So, a nice day for Team Penske's Kyle McLaughlin, had himself a solid top-five finish as well, but they weren't able to be in victory lane as it was Alex Blow, but commendable, of course, from Joseph Newgarden and David Maloukis, both battling injuries, Joseph Newgarden battling an injury that he's had now nearly two months to get accustomed to, whereas David Maloukis just got this injury two days ago, as far as his bruised right knee goes. Maloukis actually took, I want to say nearly an hour, maybe more than an hour, actually, I believe, to get to the presser because he had to go back to IndyCar Medical, way back behind me, and get some IVs. It was just a, get some fluid, get some IVs, it was just a long day for him. And he kind of admitted that, had he had to race yesterday, I've got the exact quote, he said, yesterday was survival, today was game on. So he basically admitted, you know, starting from 25th, had he had to race yesterday, he would have gotten through it or whatever, but he does not feel like this podium finish would have happened, essentially. So, he talked about how during the delay yesterday, he went back into his motorhome, fell asleep on purpose, kind of hoping that by him falling asleep, that we would get postponed to Monday. Well, congratulations to David Maloukis, probably the only person at this track who wanted that to happen, but it happened. He got his wish, and it ends up in a podium finish. And what really could have been a win for David Maloukis, got cut out by a bad yellow when he was, you know, trying to keep the lead and go on this kind of alternate strategy where he ended up having one less pit stop than everybody else today. But still, a great effort by Maloukis, proving once again that he's quite the all-around driver, right? If you look at what he's done this year throughout street courses, road courses, and Obels, I believe he now has a podium on each of those type of courses, but still chasing that first win of his season, of his Team Penske career, and of his IndyCar career. And we'll see, hopefully these few weeks off will help him out as far as the injury goes, and that it won't affect him too much going forward this year, especially on the more physical road and street courses, we've got Portland coming up. We'll see how that affects David Maloukis, but we got to see that he was in the race car, he finished the entirety of the race today, and, you know, he was in fairly good spirits even after the race ended. Another shout-out as far as the on-track position goes, or where they finished on-track, Mick Schumacher, best finish of his IndyCar career, finishing P8. Mick Schumacher talked to us on Saturday after qualifying, and made it abundantly clear, he wants to remain in IndyCar. Whether that'll be the case, who knows? There's a lot of reports about if RLL wants him back, maybe he wants to go back to RLL, and if RLL will be in a position to decide if he comes back. I don't know anything for certain on either end, on any of the two or three ends that have to come together there, but it's clear Mick Schumacher wants to stay in IndyCar, and those of you who are paying attention, he has now been the highest-finishing rookie on the last three Oval races, which that was the part of IndyCar that we thought he was going to be the worst on, in comparison to Kyle Collette and Dennis Hauger. He's been the best on the Ovals. Sometimes it hasn't been Kyle Collette's fault, necessarily, or Dennis Hauger's fault, right? Dennis Hauger didn't get to start the race at Gateway. That same race, Kyle Collette led laps, was tracking for a top ten, maybe even a podium finish, and his engine failed. The results are the results, and the results are right now that of those three rookies, Mick Schumacher has been the best on Ovals, so salute to him. Even going back to Phoenix, where he qualified well, I believe he finished just one position below Dennis Hauger in that race, so he was pretty close to being four for four when it comes to Ovals and being the highest-finishing rookie, so Mick Schumacher really having a standout day, and so far, the day of his career, and he's much faster, frankly, than his RLL teammates, Louie Foster and Graham Rahall, the other day, Graham Rahall, I'm not even completely sure what happened, but he did not finish this race, so it's an awful, horrendous weekend for Graham Rahall, just couldn't get it going all weekend long, and that's been the story for him on Ovals. He was really good on road courses, alright on the street courses, and Ovals this year for Graham Rahall have just eluded him time and time again. Alright, let's talk about this scheduling fiasco. Everybody coming in this week, you can see the sweat dripping, right? Everybody coming in this week talked about, oh, this World Cup lead-in's going to be major for IndyCar, it's going to get so many eyeballs in on IndyCar. I think what a lot of people didn't notice, or know about, fan-wise, and maybe people like me in the media should have done a better job of getting it through, is that we had a rolling start time for this race on Sunday, meaning this race here at National Super Speedway was not going to end until the World Cup was over, and until the trophy presentation had finished for the World Cup. Period. I mean, that was the situation. I think most people at the track realized it, we were all down there, near the exit of Pitt Lane, watching on the one big screen they have here at National Super Speedway, all kind of anxiously waiting to see when the World Cup would actually end, and while we were down there, a cloud cover came over everybody, and then lightning came. And so a lot of people were like, oh, why did they show so much of the trophy ceremony for the World Cup final? We couldn't have raced it. We were under a lightning delay regardless, it would have been right around the green flag start time anyway, so we got through the lightning delay, started to rain a little bit, it rained enough to have to dry the track off, we looked to be maybe in the clear, and then the rain just got heavier, it came back and got heavier when we were maybe half an hour away from starting to tow some of the cars back on here and maybe try to get this thing going. I say all that to say, this blew up in IndyCar space, it went completely south on IndyCar and Fox, and while I can commend them for trying, man, this was, it turned into, you know, maybe the best case scenario of gaining thousands, millions, et cetera, so many fans, and it turned into the worst case scenario where your diehard fans, many of which couldn't watch today's race because they were at work at 3 o'clock on a Monday, and the fans that were here in attendance also couldn't come back. There was still a decent amount of fans here, but not as many as there should have been. The pit lane, the paddock access was denied for fans who came back today because everything was kind of rushed, right? The gates were only open for I think an hour maybe, maybe a little bit more than an hour before the green flag was waived. Everything just kind of fell on its face as it came to IndyCar, and it leads to so many questions about the way this was set up. I'm not saying it was set up poorly, but if you know you're going to have a rolling start time, if you know how weather could affect things and how weather could really ruin everybody's weekend in a sense, once again, unless you're David Maloukis, maybe have this race be somewhere else the race that you want to follow the World Cup. Nashville in July lends itself to a lot of rain, as we saw yesterday, as we even saw a little bit on Saturday after we finished track activities, but it's just been, it's something where I can't completely blame anybody, but all the eyes weren't dotted, I don't think all the T's were necessarily crossed to the point where they needed to be to get this done correctly. Going forward, I don't think this race will be back in July, I think they wanted to showcase an oval race because it's IndyCar and all of that, but what I will say to that is that Portland is in three weeks, which means, okay, maybe you do gain all those fans from the World Cup and whatnot, and that would have been great, obviously, like I said, best case scenario. Are those fans coming back in three weeks to watch Portland, or are they going to forget about that awesome IndyCar race they saw right after? I think if they wanted this to happen, maybe there should have been a race next week. There's not, there's the Brickyard next week, I know that has a lot of conflicts and everything, but it's happened before where the Brickyard and the IndyCar race have been on the same weekend and people have figured it out, but that's not what happened, we were going to get this big break anyway, IndyCar did not get the World Cup audience, and instead this will, by the guess, be their lowest rated race of the year to this point, so upsetting. And then there's the last part of it, I almost forgot to get to it. This race was increased by 75 laps to 300 laps going into this year, and then because of the heat index and the sweat you still see dripping down my face, I think the heat index reached 108, they reduced it down to 225 laps. Joseph Newgarden personally said he felt like they could have done 500 laps, obviously he was, you know, hyperbolic in that statement, 500 laps here is 600 something miles, but he basically said, look, he thought he was fine, his crew was fine, and he doesn't think it would have been a danger to do 300 laps, IndyCar felt differently, they reduced the race back to last year's lap count and total mileage, and Alex Blow ended up winning the race, but an upsetting, a disappointing weekend for so many around this paddock, whether you vote for Fox, IndyCar, a team, etc., and it feels like a wasted opportunity, and an opportunity where you also may have angered your fans that you already currently have now, so I don't know what the answer is, or was, or should have been, but this wasn't the best case scenario by any means, but I'll have more on Alex Blow's win and just the nature of this race, indystar.com slash sports slash motordash sports, but for now, I'm Zion Brown on IndyStar TV.