Things are about to get underway. It's all on Peacock today. Tomorrow's race is on regualar NBC.
A few incidents as drivers get back to it after being off a while: https://racer.com/2021/09/11/palou-leads-incident-filled-first-portland-indycar-practice/?fbclid=IwAR0w6p_i3aqacf6wZ_a6LEDXEKgQbSp97rdsbqWCpiP_oRMHY0RBiGirKUA
Palou takes pole followed by Rossi, Dixon, Rosenquist. https://racer.com/2021/09/11/palou-takes-portland-pole-as-key-title-rivals-miss-fast-six/?fbclid=IwAR1ID7H9Fe4t5yGrgtqXBmZxgX-fEmzJxu2wmFEquae1eU9Dd6FMnFZY76U
Considering how crazy the Portland track can be, it was relatively calm. I was pulling for Rossi but P2 behind Palou is quite good.
Seems like any time anyone on track makes a mistake, the Ganassi cars get penalized. Rossi can thank Newgarden for letting him by both him and Dixon.
I understand why the chicane is there, T1 doesn't have enough runoff room for Indycars that would be approaching at 180 mph, and there's no room to expand the runoff due to a creek and golf course just beyond the corner. but that chicane has always been a problem. reconfiguring it to a Watkins Glen style bus stop would probably help a lot, not sure why that's never been done.
23 of 27 finished, so only 4 retirements; amazingly Hinch was the only one taken out at the start. Helio and Grosjean went behind the wall for repairs, and came back out later. Grosjean proceeded to run into someone else
Well at least the two cars that STAYED within the track had speed to pull ahead of the others that took a detour!!!
The problem is that the cars come down the straight at as many as six-wide (!) and then have to funnel down to two to make it through the chicane. Maybe they need to put curbing on the straight to limit its effective width.
Monza is relatively narrow going into a similar chicane with similar results so I don’t think that’s the issue. give racers a high speed straight followed by a heavy braking zone and first gear chicane and this is the result. a bus stop would be a second/third gear corner, still create passing opportunities and less likely to result in “brake when you see god” nonsense