NASCAR on TV this week
PREMA works on the cars of Robert Shwartzman and Callum Ilott at The Thermal Club in 2025.
(Photo: Chris Owens/Penske Entertainment)

Upon Further Review: A Baptism By Fire for PREMA at Thermal Club

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The Thermal Club INDYCAR Grand Prix wasn’t an ideal weekend for several teams in the NTT IndyCar Series.

Team Penske failed to get a single car out of the first round of qualifying, their best driver being Josef Newgarden in 17th place on the 27-car grid. The Tennessee native finished 13th. Scott McLaughlin, meanwhile, started 25th, was collected in an incident with Devlin DeFrancesco before the start of the race, had a hybrid overheating issue and ended up finishing last, having spent several laps on pit road.

Will Power qualified 21st but managed to drag his No. 12 Chevrolet up to sixth place by the end of the 65-lap race. That was Penske’s only bright spot of the whole weekend.

And then there’s PREMA and the situation involving Robert Shwartzman‘s car from Friday practice that started a hell of an ordeal for the new team in their second IndyCar race. Let’s look at PREMA and how their weekend unfolded.

After decades of tackling junior-level European single-seater racing, PREMA added IndyCar racing to its portfolio in 2025, signing Shwartzman and fellow alum Callum Ilott to the team.

The team had both cars finish in the top 20 at the season-opening race on the streets of St. Petersburg despite a radio issue hindering them earlier in the weekend. However, The Thermal Club threw a massive challenge at the IndyCar newcomers.

Shwartzman’s car stopped shortly after leaving the pit lane with a technical failure and some fire on its underside.

The fire was traced to an issue with the fuel cell and the damage was significant enough to force the team to use their backup car. The fire damaged the tub enough that repairs could not be made at the track. Heck, even the seatbelts melted inside the car due to the flame.

Shwartzman’s car was a brand new tub that will have to be looked at further back at the team’s base, but there was a daunting task in front of the Italian squad: build up an entire race car overnight with practice looming at 10 a.m. local time Saturday morning.

Howerver, the team got a small amount of overnight help from IndyCar and Indianapolis Motor Speedway President Doug Boles.

The team got Shwartzman back on track to complete an installation lap before calling their No. 83 Chevrolet back to pit road to complete more work on the car ahead of qualifying later that afternoon.

Shwartzman qualified last in the 27-car field. Thanks to some first-lap collisions, he was up to 17th at the end of the opening lap. After the first pit-stop sequence, he fell to 23rd, which became 22nd after McLaughlin went to pit road with his hybrid issue and that’s where the 2021 Formula 2 Championship runner-up finished.

Was it a really memorable race for the Israeli driver? Not particularly, other than being hit by Ilott on the first lap, requiring a front wing change on Ilott’s No. 90 Chevrolet.

For Ilott, that collision set him back far enough that in an all-green flag race he had no hope of advancing any further than being the last car running on the track. The 2020 Formula 2 Championship runner-up finished 26th, the last car running at the finish.

Let’s be honest, it wasn’t a great weekend for PREMA results-wise. A 22nd and 26th-place finish with a teammate collision isn’t exactly something to put on the bulletin board when they return to the shop.

However, when one looks at the weekend as a whole and takes into account that the team rebuilt an entire car overnight and the only major damage from a collision was a broken front wing assembly, that puts a whole different perspective on the weekend.

If Shwartzman’s tub can be repaired for further use later this season, then the team survived hell on Earth out in Thermal and responded well to adversity.

It’s too bad that not as many people saw the end result in proper context.

Christopher DeHarde has covered IndyCar racing and the Road to Indy for various outlets since 2014. In addition to open wheel racing, DeHarde has also covered IMSA and various short track racing events around Indiana. Originally from New Orleans, DeHarde moved to the Indianapolis area in 2017 to further pursue a career as a motorsports writer.