'It's gnarly, bro': IndyCar drivers ready to tackle Detroit's bumps, double-sided pitlane

DETROIT – Four hours before IndyCar turned its first laps in downtown Detroit in more than 30 years, Alex Palou was telling a scrum of reporters Sunday’s 100-lap race around the 1.7-mile street course could be a bit of a snoozer.

“It’s all first and second-gear corners. At the moment, it looks like a boring track,” Palou said Friday morning. “But let’s see once we’re out and we drive it. Maybe the bumps make it a little more exciting.”

And after 90 minutes of practice that afternoon, the course proved to be anything but, with it’s near-constant jarring bumps, 0.9-mile straightaway down Jefferson Avenue, double-sided pitlane and runoffs that got seemingly constant use during drivers’ introduction to the track.

“It’s a challenging track, I can tell you that,” said Pato O’Ward, who won back in 2021 on the Detroit Grand Prix’s old track on Belle Isle. “Belle Isle I’d say is easier. There’s a lot more fast corners on Belle Isle, fricking fast corners to be on a street course — and with a lot of bumps. I’m a very big fan of Belle Isle, and I was very sad to see it leave the calendar, but we’ve got a different track — a new track.

“And it’s going to be a great event.”

Here’s what we learned about the downtown Detroit street course after Friday’s practice and what you can expect to be pivotal come Sunday’s race:

Detroit's calling card: A double-sided pitlane

As the paddock recovered from the post-Indianapolis 500 hangover and collectively shifted its focus to the next event on the calendar, all anyone wanted to talk about was Detroit’s split pitlane. Something not seen across the series’ calendar in years, race organizers Bud Denker (Penske Corp. president), Michael Montri (Detroit GP president) and company opted to split the field’s 27 entries in half and place them on either end of a pitlane to complex with four lanes in the center and teams’ pit boxes on either side.

As evidenced by the 1.7-mile course, one of the shortest on the current calendar, space is a precious commodity in downtown Detroit, and race organizers didn’t have a proper spot to drop a normal-sized pitlane without further shrinking the tight course or messing with the track layout the promoter had wanted near the heart of downtown Detroit altogether.

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But it brought with it a list of initial concerns: would one side have an inherent advantage, given how pit exit jogs left before the eventual right-turn blend back onto the track? How would the field slim down from four lanes to one without carnage during every pit cycle? And where do you put the pit speed limiter line?

Though Sunday’s race, with all 27 cars on-track at once, moving with far more urgency, could prove differently, the track’s initial lightning rod doesn’t seem nearly as troublesome when talking to drivers. After a series of discussions, officials decided before this week to place the pit-speed limiter line (where drivers can “get off the button” and pick up speed) after they will have already funneled into a single-file line to head back on-track. It doesn’t mean we won’t still have some slower-speed incidents as four drivers attempt to put their car on the same piece of real estate, but it won’t be an all-out drag race.

“We’re still going to have to figure out who’s going first there, and I think there’s going to be some situations where people don’t want to lift, but that’s what IndyCar is,” Felix Rosenqvist said. “We battle it out on-track, and I think that’s pretty cool.”

Perhaps the most difficult part of pitlane exit now, several drivers believe — and as was evidenced during Friday’s practice — is the actual blend back on-track with cars tearing down the front straight heading for Turn 1. Those exiting pitlane are on a diagonal similar to a highway on-ramp, and for the first part, the two sides are separated by a wall. The end of the blend comes with just an orange-painted line on-track that drivers already on-course are not allowed to cross over without risk of penalty, some of which race control was already doling out Friday.

Crossing over the painted line would make for a more direct racing line to Turn 1, but crossing it risks a blind run-in with those exiting pitlane.

“It’s pretty easy to see a car coming out (of the pits), to be honest, but you can’t really see the car that’s already out on-track,” Kyle Kirkwood said. “So you’re very reliant on that car that’s on-track to give way for you and just stay out of the way.”

Where can drivers make passes Sunday?

With a course nearly entirely full of 90-degree turns, minus one chicane and one hairpin, drivers had initially eyed the end of the long straightaway down Jefferson Avenue (between Turns 2 and 3) to be Detroit’s lone reliable passing zone.

Even that, drivers said after practice, is going to be tricky.

“When you first go on the track walk, it seems like this is pretty wide-open, and it’ll be pretty easy (passing) here,” Kirkwood said. “But once you’re doing 180, 190 mph down into there, it doesn’t feel as wide. It kind of tunnels in, and it’s strange, because it’s such a long braking zone. It’s the only place on the calendar that we brake at the 500 (feet) board. It’s such a long braking zone that you kind of lose feel of how close you’re getting to the corner.

“And it’s so bumpy heading down into there that, like, you’re playing with the brake pedal so you don’t lock up, or you have the car jump on you in the middle of the brake zone. It’s awkward. People are going to be hesitant because of that to want to make passes happen (there).”

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And as Palou explained, unless you can slip into a driver’s draft and execute the pass before the braking zone, a long, fast straight heading into a tight hairpin makes for a relatively simple defense for the leading car.

“With a 180-degree corner, you just have to go on the inside, and that’s it,” Palou said. “There’s going to be passes for sure, but they’re going to be risky.”

Different than some other street courses on the calendar, drivers said the track’s barriers are virtually all marked by concrete walls instead of curbs, so moves like the one like O’Ward pulled on Scott Dixon at Long Beach this year, where he drove straight over the apex curb of a 90-degree turn and hip-checked the Ganassi driver out of the way, there just isn’t that kind of room to work with.

“I don’t really see a lot of opportunities without creating carnage,” Kirkwood said. “You can pass into (Turn 1), and then maybe 8 or 5, but you’re not going to be able to go double-file through there. I think the outside guy is going to go into the wall in a few places where people are going to try to pass.”

'The car is always doing something weird'

If you turn into Saturday’s series of Peacock broadcasts or Sunday’s race, be prepared to hear variations of the word “bump” almost constantly.

Ask Palou, and he’ll tell you of Detroit, “There’s too much bumps for everybody, and with the tight turns.”

As Kirkwood and O’Ward described the course after practice, none of them are nearly as fierce as those of coming off the Korean Veterans Memorial Bridge in Nashville, but where none of them are nearly as jarring, they’re far more constant throughout.

“It’s low-grip bumpy, where the car is always doing weird things all the way through the corners,” Kirkwood said.

Added Rosenqvist: “The car is always doing something weird. It’s dancing around, bouncing around, and at the same time, you’re trying to keep it off the wall. It’s busy from a driver’s standpoint, and it’s probably going to catch people out in the race.”