The mountain in front of Scott Dixon must’ve looked as tall as Kilimanjaro.
After failing to nail his fastest lap in qualifying for Sunday’s (May 4) Children’s of Alabama Indy Grand Prix at Barber Motorsports Park, Dixon had a mountain to climb if he was going to have a decent finish at a track where he’s never won in NTT IndyCar Series competition.
Hell, no driver had ever won at Barber starting worse than ninth. Dixon started 26th, and Barber was designed for motorcycles, not cars. Passing is typically difficult near the back of the pack, so Dixon had to pull a rabbit out of his hat over the course of 90 laps.
But his job was made even more difficult by the state of modern IndyCar road course racing with only one full-course yellow in the first three races of the year before Barber. On his Off Track with Hinch and Rossi podcast, Alexander Rossi explained why IndyCar racing has changed in 2025.
“The [softer compound] Alternate tire is so poor that it ends up not actually being a factor,” Rossi said. “Because you can’t run a stint of any significant length on the Alternates, so it ends up being a fuel save, tire save kind of two-stop [strategy] anyway. It’s a pseudo, fake three-stop and quite frankly, that’s why, aside from Will [Power]‘s quite honestly rare mistake at the start in St. Pete, that’s why there’s been no yellows.
“It’s because no one is driving at 100% anymore. Everyone is driving around at 85%, 90%, trying to conserve tires, but also hit a fuel number because the Alternate tire doesn’t last long enough for you to be able to do anything.
“And this version of IndyCar sucks. It’s not interesting. I’m sorry. It’s not fun to drive, it’s not enjoyable to race. I’m not saying that there can’t be good shows, I’m not saying that the race on Sunday [in Long Beach] was bad, but the fact of the matter is, there are no yellows because no one is trying and it’s wild to me.”
The softer compound tires aren’t lasting nearly as long because Firestone is producing the tires they are asked to produce, and the hybrid engine components added during the 2024 season increased the cars’ weight by about 100 pounds.
Despite the technical changes for 2025, Barber Motorsports Park was a different beast of a race. The alternate tires, which IndyCar mandates the use of for at least two laps, actually lasted for a full stint. However, there were no caution periods during Sunday’s race, so everyone who had figured there would be no caution periods was on the same three-stop strategy, barring any pit lane miscues.
So now what? Everyone’s got the formula figured out. Nobody’s driving at full capacity because the hybrid component makes the cars way different to drive than what they were before the hybrid.
I guess it all comes down to the pit stop sequences.
IndyCar mandates that each driver uses both the harder Primary compound tires and the softer Alternate compound tires for at least two laps during the race, unless wet weather intervenes.
Every team comes to the same conclusion on which compound is preferred. The convergence goes away regarding when to use that non-preferred tire compound. Dixon and his crew went with the consensus that 12 other drivers went with: use the non-preferred primary compound tires at the start, get them out of the way and then run the rest of the race on new alternate compound tires that went unused thanks to Dixon not advancing in qualifying.
But how was Dixon going to advance using pit stop sequences? Leapfrogging.
By running laps much faster than drivers who pitted in front of him, the 2008 Indianapolis 500 winner would leave the pits ahead of several drivers ahead of him who were now slower thanks to having more fuel.
That would require Dixon to save his tires between pit sequences and turn fast laps while other drivers were pitting.
In the first pit stop sequence, Dixon moved from 26th to 21st place. Starting at lap 11, Dixon’s lap times became much faster as drivers began to pit. After turning lap 10 at a time of 1:11.3321. Dixon dropped his lap times by several tenths of a second, turning a lap of 1:10.3773 seconds on the last lap before his first pit stop.
Moving into the next stint of the race, Dixon moved up to 15th. The pattern was exactly the same. When Marcus Ericsson pitted after running in front of Dixon, the six-time IndyCar champion dropped his lap times instantly, going two tenths of a second faster on lap 36 before going a half-second faster on each of the next two laps.
Dixon went from 15th to 12th in the final pit stop sequence but his ability to switch on the pace was instantaneous ahead of his final pit stop. His final pit stop was at the end of lap 66, but his previous two laps were nearly a full second faster than what he was running midway through the stint.
Try as he might, though, Dixon was stuck behind Kyle Kirkwood, who was doing a masterful job defending on his primary compound tires that his team chose to use for the final stint of the race.
Scott Dixon started 26th and finished 12th while his teammate was celebrating. Not too much more he could have done to get much further up in the field without cautions.#IndyCar #IndyBHM pic.twitter.com/VpW46oRNhI
— Christopher DeHarde (@CDeHarde) May 4, 2025
“It was okay, these green to checkers [races] are kind of boring,” Dixon told Frontstretch. “As far as strategy-wise, you can’t really do too much. I think we did as much as we could to pass 14 cars or so. I think on a track like this, where everybody’s running a pretty similar pace, it’s pretty tough.
“A caution would’ve been nice to pack everything up a little bit and get a bit exciting, but what is that, three in a row now race-wise for green to checkered and kudos to Palou, three out of four races is definitely pretty stout!”
Now if only he could figure out some way to slow that Alex Palou guy down…
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.