The final oval of the 2022 IndyCar Series season featured a two-hour rain delay that turned it from a sunset race to a full-on night event, some significant swings in the seven-way championship fight and very nearly a shock victory for a rookie underdog.
Here’s our pick of the winners and losers from Gateway.
WINNERS
DAVID MALUKAS AND DALE COYNE RACING
After getting plenty of international attention while running Romain Grosjean for the first year of his IndyCar adventure in 2021, Dale Coyne Racing has had a much quieter 2022 with fewer highlights.
Grosjean’s replacement Takuma Sato appeared such an ideal Coyne signing (double Indianapolis 500 winner, Formula 1 veteran, a man who could win Long Beach in an AJ Foyt car but also far too inconsistent to ever win a title) it seemed surprising he’d never driven for the team before. But a seventh place was as good as it had got prior to Gateway.
And Sato’s rookie team-mate David Malukas was earning plenty of respect in the paddock – but Coyne wanted to see a bit more aggression from him, and a possible Nashville podium had been lost to a collision with fellow rookie and 2021 Indy Lights nemesis Kyle Kirkwood.
At Gateway, though, Coyne had so much to celebrate.
Sheer pace: Sato was the only man who could run with the title contenders in the opening stints, and Malukas was the fastest person in the field as he tore from fifth to a very close second after the rain delay.
Great tactics: Going off-sequence with a very aggressive undercut at the third stops not only gave Coyne a spell running 1-2 with rain due but also gained its cars genuine ground – from seventh and 11th in the first part of the race to fifth and sixth going into the final shootout once everyone had made their last stops.
Supreme racecraft: Malukas outduelled drivers of the calibre of Pato O’Ward and Scott McLaughlin to earn a second place that will transform his standing in the paddock.
The slight disappointments? Had Malukas had faith in the high line on worn tyres a bit sooner in the final laps, he might’ve cleared McLaughlin quicker and had a better crack at beating Josef Newgarden to the win. And Sato’s car didn’t have as good a balance in the night conditions.
A radio glitch meant the Japanese pitted one lap too late under the Jack Harvey crash yellow and fell behind Newgarden and McLaughlin, having been comfortably ahead – though he probably wouldn’t have had the pace to resist them in the night segment anyway. And he did some pretty needless wheel-banging with Will Power late on.
But really, no one at Coyne need have any regrets. This was the night IndyCar’s greatest underdog team reminded the world what it could do.
JOSEF NEWGARDEN
Five wins for Josef Newgarden in 2022 is now three more than anybody else has achieved.
The lack of consistency that’s so frustrated him this year means that’s still not enough to lead the championship, but he’s now within three points of standings-leading Penske team-mate Power and can take plenty of momentum into the deciding Portland and Laguna Seca races.
Newgarden stayed cool when he needed to at Gateway and executed the critical phase of the race brilliantly with a rapid race-deciding pass on McLaughlin after the last restart.
McLaughlin himself is in something of a winner/loser no man’s land this week. Another near-victory and podium finish is a great achievement for someone still only in his second year of IndyCar. But given he was leading when the rain came and ended up with only third place, this has to feel like one that got away, and it leaves his title hopes feeling remote with a 54-point deficit to overcome in the last two races.
INDYCAR OVAL RACING
IndyCar’s still trying to nail the exact alchemy that gets its oval races back to being the wheel-to-wheel spectacle they should be without turning into pack-racing terror, but Gateway 2022 felt like progress.
The tedious stretches of the race were more due to fuel conservation and looming weather concerns making everyone hang cagily back than overtaking necessarily being difficult.
Drivers were generally positive about the impact of the additional Friday night practice mileage in which nine cars were tasked with running a high line to rubber the track in there and increase racing options, though many still wanted more to be done on that front.
Considering Gateway wasn’t always the most thrilling of ovals for side-by-side antics even in the CART days, a race with this many bold passes among the lead group (and no clashes) can be considered a decent step for IndyCar oval action.
JIMMIE JOHNSON
Being absolutely honest, Jimmie Johnson might have snuck into this section just to bulk out a slender winners’ list.
Because you could actually make a case for him being in the losers’ section. The ovals were supposed to be the events where the struggling NASCAR convert showed IndyCar what he could do (and Texas and Iowa had been). But he was solidly last for the first part of the Gateway race.
He earns his elevation to ‘winner’ consideration for the progress he made during the night as he found his feet at a track where he hadn’t tested and was initially fighting his “instincts” as the IndyCar understeered in traffic at times when his NASCAR decades left him expecting to lose the rear.
Johnson deployed some classic NASCAR-style reluctance to be lapped unless he absolutely had to be, and vaulted up the midfield because he hadn’t made his last pitstop when the race was red-flagged.
He cleared that stop with minimal position loss under the yellow prior to the restart, then overtook Simon Pagenaud, Felix Rosenqvist and Helio Castroneves to earn 14th – which is still a better IndyCar finish than he’s managed on a road or street course.
LOSERS
Ganassi
There wasn’t too much wrong with Ganassi’s main cars at Gateway, they were just fractionally slower than Penske, Coyne or McLaren and none of them were put onto the strategy that Newgarden and McLaughlin used to scorch through the field after the mid-race yellow for Harvey’s wall brush.
But that resulted in muted seventh, eighth and ninth places for Marcus Ericsson (who’d finally achieved his first IndyCar front row start and shadowed Power for the lead early on), Scott Dixon and Alex Palou.
Pitting for fuel top-ups and fresh tyres under the yellow before the post-rain restart looked like a neat tactic, but there wasn’t the same level of fuel-saving disparity by that time as when Newgarden and McLaughlin had been able to exploit their lack of fuel worries to storm past rivals, and the stops left the Ganassi trio with backmarkers to clear at the restart too.
Dixon’s still within 24 points of the championship lead, with Ericsson only three further back (Palou is a longer shot, trailing Power by 43).
It’s still very winnable for at least two of them, but Gateway felt like a night when the overall 2022 fight edged more Penske’s way.
WILL POWER
After an outstanding pole lap that equalled Mario Andretti’s all-time IndyCar record of 67, Power commanded the first half of an event regarded as a ‘track position’ race that it’s possible to control from the front given the relative difficulty of overtaking.
But Power’s pace declined as the evening went on. He was particularly frustrated when team-mates Newgarden and McLaughlin made the stops under yellow that launched their charge to the front – Power saying that if he’d known how much more dramatically he’d need to fuel-save in comparison, he’d have demanded to pit then too.
While he’s still the championship leader with two rounds to go and has been brilliant this season, a reduced three-point lead over Newgarden is a very tense position to be in with two races left.
PATO O’WARD
Plenty to be glad about for Pato O’Ward and Arrow McLaren SP at Gateway: some classic O’Ward car control and breathtaking passing moves (particularly on long-time leader Power), and in fourth place the highest finish of any of the cars that stuck to what you might call the ‘straightforward’ strategy rather than going off-sequence as the eventual podium trio did.
But after that brilliant move on Power, to be left standing by Newgarden and McLaughlin while having to save fuel because he was still on the normal strategy must’ve been frustrating for O’Ward.
As he took the lead, it looked like he might repeat his 2021 trick of using Gateway to revitalise his title chances. Instead he’s still seventh, with a daunting deficit of 58 points and only two races to do something about it.
ANDRETTI AUTOSPORT
Just an off-the-pace day for the third of IndyCar’s traditional big three.
No cars in the top 10 at the finish (Colton Herta was top Andretti racer in 11th) said it all.
There were a few positives to take.
Devlin DeFrancesco had the strongest race of his rookie season so far as he held his own in eighth for a long spell before fading to 12th.
Grosjean achieved some amazing fuel mileage and might’ve been able to make something happen had he started ninth rather than the 18th place he was dumped to by an engine change penalty. Weather timing just didn’t work out for his strategy, though, and after a brief period in the lead he finished 13th.
Alexander Rossi was a top-10 factor at first too, before running out of fuel just before a pitstop.
The stat that’s probably most telling: there’s a seven-driver title fight still going on, featuring drivers from three different teams. But after Gateway, none of the Andretti drivers even have a mathematical long-shot chance of the championship.
FELIX ROSENQVIST
Third-fastest in opening practice… and then a crash in qualifying leaves him last on the grid.
An astounding charge in which he went from 26th to 13th in just two laps by basically driving around the outside of everyone… and then a “stagnant” race from there.
Had he qualified where he should have, Rosenqvist could’ve been up with McLaren team-mate O’Ward fighting for the podium. Instead he had a night of fruitless extreme fuel-saving trying to make an alternative strategy work and couldn’t even hang on to the ground his early charge earned, eventually finishing 16th.
