Five lessons and questions from IndyCar's GP of Indianapolis

The 2020 NTT IndyCar Series’ second round, the GMR Grand Prix of Indianapolis on the IMS road course, generated several talking points. David Malsher-Lopez discusses the five principal topics.

David Malsher-Lopez Jul 8, 2020, 6:09 PM

Upd: Jul 16, 2020, 2:00 AM

Motorsport.com's Prime content

The best content from Motorsport.com Prime, our subscription service. Subscribe here to get access to all the features.

Photo by: Barry Cantrell / Motorsport Images

If the Texas Motor Speedway season-opener showed that the Ganassi cars were on a different level than the opposition, last Saturday’s GP of Indy suggested that the team’s five-time champion Scott Dixon was the differentiator. Yes, the timing of the caution period knocked polesitter Will Power out of contention and he had plenty of pace in reserve, which we didn’t get to see because initially he was going for a two-stop strategy. And it’s very interesting to consider what Graham Rahal might have achieved had he done the same as Power and switched to a three-stop strategy. After all, when the Rahal Letterman Lanigan team gets things right setup-wise, it tends to get them very right – see Barber Motorsports Park in 2019 or Detroit in 2017.

But Dixon’s form was so imperious in the second half of this latest race that public claims by any of his rivals that the #9 CGR-Honda was beatable would be greeted with skepticism.

Share Or Save This Story

Author David Malsher-Lopez

David Malsher-Lopez is Motorsport.com’s U.S. editor, covering the NTT IndyCar Series and IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship. Since completing journalism college in 1994, he has worked for Autosport, TRMG, Motor Sport, Autosport (again) and Racer, before joining Motorsport.com in 2015… where he has found himself enjoying a third spell writing for Autosport. Over the course of those 27 years, he has served as a journalist, sub-editor, features editor, deputy editor and editor. In 2015, he also wrote Will Power’s biography. David lives with his wife Sophia in California and when not writing about racing, he will be found reading about planes and classic cars, attending airshows, listening to a wide variety of music or watching cop shows from the ’70s. He intends to one day own a grand piano, an Airedale terrier and a vintage Pontiac. He doesn’t do Facebook and doesn’t understand Instagram but can be found @DavidMalsher on Twitter.