Practice 1 Highlights | 2026 INDYCAR at St. Louis

From the tight and twisting confines of the streets of Detroit to St. Louis and Gateway, it is great to be back on a short oval. It is great to have your company once again for a weekend that never fails to excite. It is great to be back here in the Gateway City as we remind ourselves what makes this place unique. James, two different ends of the racetrack. One kind of fast and flowy. The other a little bit tighter and a little bit more banked. A lot like Phoenix, just a bigger version. Exactly right. We come out of Indy where all four corners geometrically are the same as much as they race different. Here they couldn't be more different. Big max speed, almost 200 miles an hour last year heading into the 11-degree banking of one and two. Much tighter radius. Then you go down this back straight. Slight banking on the back straight, famous for that pyre before the start into three and four. Yeah, the moms go off there as 9% banking through turns three and four. Every driver trying to stay flat there in qualifying and that will be a big item on the agenda here, Will, as drivers try to balance these valuable practice moments between where they want to qualify and how they want their cars to feel in the race. Tight little pit lane here and Christian Rasmussen already finding a couple of issues. Trying to get it turned in but actually completely misses his spot. Not been the best start to the season for Christian Rasmussen. Finds him almost bottom of the driver standings arriving here. So let's talk about what the game plan is here for this practice session, keeping in mind making the best use of the ten sets of Firestone tires that you have throughout the weekend. So it's sort of like backlogging things. You want to have at least six sets for the race coming up tomorrow night. Some teams were going to start this session, especially those with veteran drivers, going straight out on a qualifying sim. Remember there is a night practice tonight that is going to be much more similar conditions to what we're racing with tomorrow. So really the focus here is ultimate speed, getting the car set up for qualifying. That said, everyone still is going to probably get, like Scott Dixon told me, we'll at least do a half a full run at some point. Some other teams were saying, yeah, we want to make sure we ease into things. We're still going to do a run to begin. And then we'll have two more sets of Firestones to do qualifying sims on before we're done with this session. So generally three sets are available for this session. James, I just highlighted Romain Grosjean driving with his broken hand, but now the car not working as well. So when he went out for his install lap and came in, they were losing power. So the team looking at that right now, they think it might be a fueling issue, but they're not sure yet in diagnosing that. And this is why we practice. You want to get this stuff sorted, get it figured out. As we take a look, we talked about how Grosjean was injured in Detroit. These are some of the other injuries, the walking wounded of the Indy car series right now. Of course, new garden with that near head on crash into the wall at the Indy 500. Rossi's Monday practice crash has both a foot and a hand injury. And then all the way back to St. Pete, Mick Schumacher has an injury to his left wrist. He's going to get through the season and probably have a dress later in the year. Amazingly, we've got all four corners covered there. Left foot, right hand, right foot, left hand as well. So these guys raving through it. Tough part of the season to have an injury like that. Not really any time off to properly recovering on the engine. No, we've made some few a few changes this weekend from last year's race. One of them is on the engines. The boost level has come down from 150 to 130. And so it's a slightly lower horsepower. And then there's also been some aerodynamic adjustments to the car. What they've tried to do is move some of the down force around. Let's explain how we're doing that here with the Dallara cutaway car. One of the things they have is these yellow highlighted pieces in the center of the tunnels of the diffuser. Those are called strakes. That's floor down force. It's clean down force. It doesn't have a lot of effect on the wake of the car behind. So if you have those strakes on, you get more down force generated from the floor. When you take them off, you lose a bit of down force. So what Indy car has done is they've removed those strakes but then allowed the teams to run more rear wing angle to try to balance out the amount of down force. But they've done it with what they call dirty down force. And what that means is it creates a much bigger wake behind the car, which does create a bigger tow, a bigger draft effect for the car following. So the idea behind this is with the cars now running in that second lane a lot more comfortably, you've got clean air through the corners, but when we pull on to the straight, you're going to have a car punching a bigger hole and the draft effect is going to be a little bit bigger, which in theory is going to lead to some more action and more passing. And Vrena's VK is into the wall. And that is the strawberry fields rear wing. Looks like a fairly square hit. You don't see the rear tires. I think it's just rear wing. Yeah, we can see it. Are you okay? Yeah, I'm fine. Yep. And there's a big amount of debris, very much offline as a result of that. How much of that, though, is paint, is dirt caught from underneath the barrier as it pushes back? How much of that is actually carbon fiber? As you see the twitch, the spin, the impact and the carbon fiber shards all over the track. We talk a lot about this racetrack. Why don't we ride on board with Stingray Rod and see what it feels like? Yeah, you'll notice when we come to the ovals, the headrests are set up a little bit differently as Stingray dives into pit lane. You can see there's a gap here between his helmet and the headrest. And on this side, it's a big foam block to kind of offset your head a little bit and give your neck a break, give your head something to lean up against in the corners. So different drivers have different preferences on thickness and density of that added pad as you see it here on Marcus Erickson's car. Nothing there on the left side to the normal headrest. Some drivers kind of like to be square, they like to be center. Some guys like to have it kind of angled to the left so mid-corner it's a little bit more upright. What did you like? I'll tell you what I didn't like was how hard I always found it to relax the left side of my neck and trust the headrest. I always found that the left side of my neck was still in tension, trying and failing to hold your head up. And I would almost relax into the headrest out of total failure of the left side neck metal. It's just one of those very unorthodox things to allow your neck to release and just your head to flop over and trust the headrest. On board with Kyle Kirkwood. Defending race winner. Indeed he is. Second in the driver's championship. This feels like a qual sim. It sounds like a qual sim as Kirkwood holds it wide open through turns three and four. Working the hybrid system here. Quite a bit of steering angle mid-corner when we went to this on board shot. Watch that right hand get all the way up, kind of fighting maybe just a little bit under steer. It's amazing. All the way down to third gear in the middle of one and two. These drivers, they're working hard up to six on the straights. Can he keep it pinned again through three and four? Remember, reduced down force but also slightly reduced power this year. T5 on that last lap. Heard a softer front bar call from Brian Hrda. You saw his right hand go down, made an adjustment to that front bar. Minimum speed, 151 miles an hour minimum. Hrda has probably seen what we're seeing here with the on board is just that under steer as Kirkwood completes that qual sim run. You can keep adding adjustments in the cockpit but the risk is you tip it over too much which is what we saw at arenas VK with his crash. That's the challenge here is balancing both ends of the racetrack because they're two completely different corner formats. The checkered flag comes out. Patoa, warden, McLaren leap to the top of 172.696 is the best of the day and the best of the session. Saving the best for last was award in the McLaren squad. The way I see it, guys, as soon as Hunter Ray left us and got down to the pit box, everything turned around for him. So I guess it's money well spent on that new sporting director. Patoa ward may not have had a podium this year but his run of consistency is really quite astonishing. He has been in the top five in six races this year. It's just the road courses where he's fallen off in every other race. He got five podiums here in seven starts in St. Louis. Not rare to see him up top. No. Loves this place. Lone Chevy in the top five there with a group of Hondas. That's impressive.