Winners and losers from a 'proper' Detroit IndyCar street race
Strategic variety, chaos, drama - oh, and a rare DNF (through no fault of his own) for the runaway points leader. The Detroit IndyCar race had a lot going on - and plenty of winners and losers
Winners and losers from a 'proper' Detroit IndyCar street race
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Whatever you think about the really, really short Detroit street circuit, it creates what many would call 'proper' IndyCar street racing. For proper, read: strategic, chaotic, dramatic and fun (for the fans at least).

In part because the pitlane is so short, there's the possibility of well-timed cautions making all sorts of strategies viable and that's one of the reasons this race had five drivers who started 15th or worse inside the top 10 at the finish.

Let's recap some of the wild stories from a race which even the biggest critic would have to call unpredictable - even if Kyle Kirkwood did his best to make victory a foregone conclusion.

Alex Palou's points lead is down from 112 to 90, after he was wiped out by David Malukas.

While that might still be almost two race wins' worth, Detroit at least showed that the driver who won five of the first six races (and finished second in the other) is not invincible.

An excellent race on strategy allowed Pato O'Ward, Palou's closest rival, to move up from 18th to seventh and add some crucial points, even though he could have eaten into that lead a lot more with a better qualifying.

Kirkwood is back up to third with his second race win but will be lamenting the loss of points from the Indianapolis 500, where his sixth at the flag became 32nd post-race and 28 points became five. Without that, he'd be second and 79 points behind Palou.

But still, Kirkwood is the only other winner in the field besides Palou this year and is clearly operating at a very high level. He touched the wall in qualifying, which he felt robbed him of a certain pole, and his speed in the race did nothing to make you doubt he was head and shoulders above anyone on race day.

Christian Lundgaard might not be happy with eighth from fourth on the grid, but it kept him in striking distance of best of the rest behind Palou as well.

He's fourth, 16 points behind McLaren team-mate OWard.

Nolan Siegel is a loser here as he was punted out by Scott McLaughlin, one day after a spark plug issue robbed him of being able to qualify.

Siegel hasn't exactly lit the IndyCar season up this year, but he's also suffered some horrendous misfortune too.

Scott McLaughlin had managed to stop and get back out under the first caution as first among those on the strategy that won the race. So he should have been fighting for victory - but clipping Siegel resulted in a drivethrough. It did look like Siegel braked very early, but McLaughlin was overcommitted too.

Misjudged last week, misjudged this week, at least you get a weekend off to square that away. I came looking for your team principal to have a chat but I couldn’t find him. Oh wait…… https://t.co/aV8019jGdV

And Kanaan is in here for his X 'beef' (see the above post), which was unbecoming of an IndyCar team boss. It all felt very 'children's playground' to me.

McLaughlin wasn't innocent in it all with his devious hashtag and mocking, but McLaren's driver and team boss didn't need to add fuel to the fire. Certainly not in this manner.

After seven races, a ninth in Detroit is Josef Newgarden's second-best finish of the year, incredibly.

After an Indy 500 where he was in victory contention less than halfway through having started 32nd, only for a mechanical issue to end his day, a solid weekend and points on the board would've been seen as a success in Detroit. That's what he got, but it was far from straightforward.

Newgarden qualified 24th after smashing the wall, but was one of the few drivers to pull off a two-stopper and late cautions helped him eke out his soft-tyre stint to seal the result.

'Settling' for a ninth and being 13th in the championship is not what we expect of Newgarden, but after his start to the year even just an acceptable result has to be a great reset for morale.

Of course, Honda is a winner, but it has been at every race this year - so we've majored on Chevrolet for this one!

In its own backyard, at a race it sponsors, Chevrolet suffered its third consecutive loss on this street circuit layout to Honda.

In this engine rules era, which started in 2012, Chevrolet has never previously failed to win any of the first seven races.

Two trademark Kirkwood/Andretti street wins and Alex Palou dominance shows that this isn't all Chevrolet's fault and its teams need to step it up just as much.

After a woeful start to a season that he said he and his team could be title contenders in, Santino Ferrucci has put two top-five results together for the third time in his seven-year IndyCar career and topped that with a career-best finish of second.

It might have come in a fortunate way - Kyffin Simpson is also included here - by pitting just before the penultimate yellow flag, which allowed them to stay out while others pitted to get the lead on track position, but they still had to put themselves in that position in the first place.

For Ferrucci and Foyt, this could act as a reset after a few mistakes and reliability issues, with Ferrucci back into the top 10 of the drivers' standings having been 15th before the Indy 500.

Third was a career-best finish for Simpson, too, in a second IndyCar campaign marked by steady improvement.

He still has work to do to warrant a seat in this field on merit, especially at Ganassi, but he's also one of the youngest in the field and is doing a lot of the learning others would have been doing in junior formulae as an IndyCar driver. Two top-10 finishes, two top-10 starts in different races, and some flashes of speed show he is making good progress, all while under pretty high expectations. Impressive.

Before the Indy 500, Rinus VeeKay was 10th in the championship thanks to what had been an incredible start to the campaign with a Dale Coyne team which struggled last year.

But he's now 16th after a loss of power forced a retirement in a Detroit race that he started sixth.

For a smaller team, and a driver surely wanting to establish himself at one further up the grid again, every result counts. Given the qualifying performance, this one will be tough to swallow.

A sickening crash, seemingly caused by the failure of a bolt in the suspension of the #45 Rahal Lertterman Lanigan car, sent Louis Foster spearing into the outside wall and then the totally innocent Felix Rosenqvist was collected in the shunt.

Labelling them winners might seem strange, then, but that kind of unusual and unpredictable crash can cause incredibly serious injury. The fact neither driver suffered anything worse than bangs and scrapes is miraculous, although IndyCar deserves its dues for the safety of the cars.

For IndyCar rookie Foster, his average qualifying position is just over 13 and he led laps for the first time in IndyCar on an off-sequence strategy, and was shaping up for a potential top-10 finish. His speed has deserved more than the number of points he has put on the board this year.

For Rosenqvist, he was on his way to pulling off a miraculous comeback after he spun and crashed on his own early in the race at Turn 9, but was 13th when he was taken out. He whacked his knee but appears to be OK.

He had only one finish outside of the top 10 this year before the accident, but fell from fourth to sixth in the points as a result.

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