By Austin Lawton, Staff Writer
Christian Lundgaard survived early incidents and chaos during the early stages of Saturday’s Sonsio Grand Prix at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course to claim his second career IndyCar victory.
Lundgaard made his series debut at the 2.439-mile circuit for Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing in 2021 and won for the first time since Toronto of 2023 and is now a winner with Arrow McLaren, breaking a 47-race drought.
“It feels awesome right now, and I’m sure I will probably realize tomorrow what really happened today,” Lundgaard said. “It really wasn’t what I expected waking up this morning. Obviously with qualifying getting pushed to this morning and racing the same day, it’s not really a traditional IndyCar weekend. Obviously this is a two-day weekend already, and everything just kind of felt very fast. We made a lot of good progress from P1 to P2. I thought we were going to be a little better in qualifying than we were. So keeping my head cool after obviously the lap 1 incidents with everything that happened there. Obviously you go into turn 1 wanting to make position, not lose positions. I felt so bad for Pato, because we had such a good plan planned for how we were going to attack the race between the two of us.
“We had two cars in the front, and we knew the 10 car was going to be strong. Obviously having one car left up there, but also losing positions kind of hurt a little bit. For me it was just take my race as it was from there. Then the strategy didn’t work out for them.”
Lundgaard’s pass for the win would come in Turn 4 on Lap 68. Chasing down David Malukas, who was on cold tires, Lundgaard would have a look into Turn 1, but would stay side-by-side with the Team Penske driver heading into the Turn 4 chicane. Both drivers would keep it clean with Lundgaard leaving the corner with the advantage and Malukas applauded the move after the race.
“I could see he was trying to set up for the undercut. We ended up having some little issue, and he managed to stick around the outside. Probably could have been maybe a little bit more, you know — a little bit more aggressive, but I thought it was some fair racing. Yeah, I mean, it was a proper move. It was very good.”
Malukas would go on to finish second and lead the most laps of the race with 27 to claim his second podium of the season. Graham Rahal would also claim his second podium of the season, finishing third.
A chaotic start with a pileup on Lap One would see Alex Palou lead the first 23 laps, building a gap to Kyle Kirkwood and Malukas. A Lap 22 caution for Alexander Rossi’s No.20 Chevrolet stopped on the front straight would cause confusion throughout the field and catch Palou and the No.10 crew out on strategy.
IndyCar race control deemed the stopped car of Rossi as a local yellow, eventually calling a full course yellow when Rossi would climb out of the car.
“Well. It’s pretty annoying to have failures on the car because of a product that we didn’t ask for, that doesn’t improve the racing, so that’s frustrating,” Rossi told FOX Sports’ Georgia Henneberry. “Second of all, the fact that it took that long to throw a full course yellow when a car is on the front straight and people are going by at 170mph also seems insane when they don’t let us drive in the wet yesterday. So, I don’t really know where the priorities lie, so I’m pretty frustrated.”
Lundgaard, Malukas and Rahal would benefit from the third and final caution of the race on Lap 28 to have their strategy play into their hands, with Palou and Kirkwood mired back in traffic.
Josef Newgarden and Palou would close out the top five in fourth and fifth, respectively. It was a career day for rookie Dennis Hauger of Dale Coyne Racing. The 2025 Indy NXT by Firestone champion drove from 24th to finish eighth, showing the potential of his DCR Honda.
“I was just trying to avoid the Lap One incident and stay clean,” Hauger said post-race. “It’s what got us in the top eight and I was just focused on getting the cars ahead.”
SEE: Sonsio Grand Prix Results
Besides dealing with hectic strategy, the added element of Push-to-Pass being available on restarts, albeit very instrumental in drivers knowing when to press the button, as Malukas dealt with during the race.
“I think it’s fine,” Malukas said. “To me, I mean, I think maybe it makes for some interesting racing. This is a special characteristic because when tires are cold and you are going through the last corner, you are getting so much wheel spin. It is very difficult to keep the car underneath you and try to time it. I think it did add some character. Some people were better than others. I was awful at it. I could not figure it out, but I think, I mean, it is what it is. It’s fun; it’s interesting. I think it adds to more racing.”