St. Petersburg 'like they added an extra corner' with the addition of hybrid
03/01/2025 07:17 AM
Friday's opening practice session on the streets of St. Petersburg featured two spins and a crash. The Meyer Shank Racing duo of Felix Rosenqvist and Marcus Armstrong were fortunate to complete full rotations without hitting anything, but Team Penske's Scott McLaughlin wasn't as fortunate.
The contact was relatively minor with broken left-front suspension and bodywork damage from a meeting with the outside wall at Turn 3, and as the Shank drivers and Juncos Hollinger Racing's Conor Daly explain, IndyCar's first visit to St. Pete with its cars in hybrid configuration – carrying the 100-plus pounds of energy recovery system weight behind the turbocharged engines – has made navigating Turn 3 more of a knife-edge affair.
"I think it’s just the mechanical weight shift," Daly told RACER. "I think that’s really challenging the car, challenging the chassis, challenging the suspension. People are fighting the cars, and I think right now, in this era of IndyCar, with the added weight, I mean, you’re challenging these cars mechanically in a different way. I think that leaves everyone on a new playing field, I would say, which is kind of exciting for the fans and for everyone involved. I don’t think it’s anything different on the track, but it’s a wild ride through there."
After composing himself following the harrowing spin, Rosenqvist echoed Daly's comments and added more insights to the topic.
"I feel like it’s always a bit on edge in Practice 1, because the track is green, and I feel a lot of drivers, including me, obviously, know that it’s supposed to be flat, so you just go flat without thinking about it, and then it’s like, 'Oh shit,' but yeah, you can feel the weight," he said.
"It’s definitely not easier or nicer, and you know weight is not a good thing on a race car. And yeah, normally in the race, you just go flat, but now you probably have to lift. It's more of a challenge. It’s like they added an extra corner to the track. You just have to be alert in a different way. It was kind of a no brainer in the past years, but now, don’t fall asleep here. You gotta be ready for some shit to happen here."
MSR teammate Armstrong is concerned about race day when drivers charge out of the pits full of fuel, on cold tires, and feed directly into Turns 2 and 3 at speed.
"I had a bit of a wild one," he said. "You want the car to be low, right, because the lower you are, the lower the center gravity and the more downforce you have. But we always leave a margin on street circuits, naturally, because it can turn pretty ugly if we are too low. And from my point of view, we took an appropriate amount of margin on ride heights today, and for whatever reason, Turn 3 was just very sketchy right from the first lap on primary tires.
"And I was committing to it hard because, in my mind, it shouldn’t really be a corner, so no need to make it one. And then eventually, on my last lap on alternate tires, I just hit the plank, hit the deck super hard, and lost the rear. In my opinion, it is track-related when it comes to that corner, and we’re doing our best to be appropriately high on ride height, but it seems that only that corner is an issue.
"Right now, we're hustling through there with lower fuel loads and tire pressures that are optimized for qualifying. But in the warmup and the race, I think we’ll see a couple of moments where the cars are filled with fuel, new tires are on, they aren't up to full inflation until they're hot, and you'll be at the lowest right height, so it could be sketchy later in the weekend."
