Christian Lundgaard, INDYCAR strategy and the 'Agony' of Botched Pit Stops

In Driver's Eye with James Hinchcliffe, the six-time INDYCAR winner will bring you inside the mind of a racer while breaking down the nuts and bolts of the sport for fans.

A lot of people in INDYCAR are walking around saying, "I told you so." 

Alex Palou and Chip Ganassi Racing returned to Barber Motorsports Park last weekend as the heavy favorites. And they duly delivered, putting on an absolute clinic and earning all available points — for starting on the pole, for leading a lap, for leading the most laps and, of course, for winning.

But let’s be honest: We’ve talked a lot about Palou, his team and their combined greatness. So, instead, I want to examine his closest competitor last weekend in Christian Lundgaard and the pain of seeing an opportunity to win… evaporate. 

At Barber, the Arrow McLaren driver was putting up a strong fight against reigning champ Palou for three quarters of the race — until a pivotal 17.8-second final pit stop eliminated his chance to even fight for the win. 

Let's break it down.

Lundgaard closed the gap behind Palou and was attempting a strategic move called the overcut.

The overcut is when you pit a lap or two later than your competitor. You stay out and use the speed and grip from your hot tires to run faster lap times than the other guy, who pitted before you and returns to the track on cold tires before they eventually get up to temperature and peak grip.

With the overcut, Lundgaard opened the gap enough that, with a flawless pit stop, he would have come out neck and neck with Palou, and the race for the win would have been on. But a flawless pit stop it was not…

There was a bobble in the pits that cost Lundgaard and his Arrow McLaren team something in the neighborhood of 10 seconds — all but eliminating themselves from contention and handing Palou enough breathing room to cruise to an "easy" win. (No win in INDYCAR is truly easy, but you know what I mean!) Lundgaard's No. 7 team finished comfortably in second.

The issue was with Lundgaard's right-rear tire, which, for one reason or another, was not secured to the car when it dropped off the air jacks. Lundgaard then started to pull away, but he had to stop. The car went back in the air, the tire was secured and then he was finally able to rejoin.

It's an awful feeling for a driver in the cockpit during a botched pit stop. You're helpless, stationary. There's nothing you can do.

A strong pit stop usually lasts about seven or eight seconds, and even that feels like an eternity from behind the wheel. 

When something goes wrong and you're stuck stationary for longer than the usual time, it's complete agony. When an unexpectedly long pit stop happens while you’re fighting for the win, it is almost unbearable. 

Seconds feel like hours. And you know all the hard work you and the team have done — not just on race day but also over the weekend, through practice and qualifying, in the weeks and months leading up to the season back at the shop, all of it — was for what feels like nothing.

[INDYCAR POWER RANKINGS: Alex Palou Is Back on Top]

There are 100 things that can go wrong during a pit stop, and teams record every stop, in practice and races, and pour over video to see what went wrong and how they can do better.

Sometimes, a crew member makes a mistake. Sometimes, the driver overshoots their marks and that slows everyone down. Sometimes, equipment fails. The key is always to prepare to the nth degree and then execute flawlessly on the day. 

That’s not what the No. 7 Arrow McLaren team managed. But that’s exactly what Palou's No. 10 team did.

Palou has become such a force in INDYCAR that you can almost see how much pressure everyone is under to beat him. In this case, as in many others over the last three years, the No. 10 team beat the field as much as the field beat themselves. 

Everyone else has to stop making Palou’s job easier for him. To take down a team running as well as Palou and his CGR crew are, you have to be perfect.

SOUND LIKE AN INDYCAR EXPERT

Let's talk about tires.

The Barber weekend was an interesting one in terms of teams' strategies for the Firestone tires. Firestone brings two types of tires to all the road and street courses: the hards and the softs.

There are the primary tires — nicknamed the hard ones — which have black sidewalls. Normally, they're a harder compound, which means they may be slower over a single lap, but they won't wear as much through a full tank of fuel, or stint. 

The alternate tire, or the softs, are denoted by the red sidewalls and are the opposite; more grip and faster lap time over a lap, but they tend to fall off faster and are often slower by the end of a cycle. 

You have to run one set of each at tracks like Barber and other road courses, so there is some interesting strategy at play.

The trick in INDYCAR racing is knowing which tires will be the preferred ones, and at Barber, many teams got it wrong. They came into the weekend thinking it would be a "soft" race, meaning the alternate would be preferred. 

But after the morning warm-up on Sunday, it became clear that it wasn’t that straightforward!

Some teams hadn’t saved enough hards — you only get five sets of each through practice, qualifying and race day itself at this type of track — to run the race the way they wanted. 

It was an interesting situation, proving that even when you have some of the smartest people on the planet on the case, the race track can still throw you a curveball!

1 FOR THE ROAD

As we put a bow on Barber, I want to throw an honorable mention shout-out to Graham Rahal. 

If you’ve been watching FOX Sports and INDYCAR's new digital docuseries, "All In" — go check it out if you haven’t already! — then you know what Rahal uses as his main motivation at this late stage in his career: his kids.

He wants his kids to be proud of him and to see him up on the podium, collecting trophies and spraying champagne. Well, it was a well-timed return to the rostrum for the Ohio native, who bagged his first top-3 finish since 2023. 

It was a gritty, hard-fought battle to the end, and no doubt something that his family, who unfortunately had to watch from home, will be super proud of.

MORE DRIVER'S EYE:

• Why INDYCAR at Barber Punishes Drivers and Tests Their Bravery