Lundgaard scores debut IndyCar victory at Toronto

Christian Lundgaard turned his second NTT IndyCar Series pole position into his first IndyCar win by nearly 12 seconds.

The Danish racer led 54 of 85 laps around the 11-turn, 1.786-mile (2.87km) street circuit surrounding Exhibition Place to beat Alex Palou and Colton Herta to the podium.

“I’m pretty drained from energy right now,” Lundgaard said.

“I said it before the race, we had a car that was fast enough to win and we pulled it off and I think we did it by 10 seconds. This team, they do deserve this because if we look at where we were earlier this season and even last year at this point, we were nowhere near this, so I’m just extremely happy for everybody right now.”

The race went to a full course yellow shortly after the start of the race after a chain reaction collision involving Jack Harvey, Ryan Hunter-Reay and Tom Blomqvist resulted in an accident that involved Benjamin Pedersen, Santino Ferrucci, Sting Ray Robb, Alexander Rossi and Graham Rahal.

Harvey, Blomqvist, Hunter-Reay and Pedersen were eliminated on the spot and the full course yellow stayed out for nine laps.

Lundgaard led at the restart until his first pit stop on Lap 19 that gave Scott McLaughlin the lead. McLaughlin led until his Lap 35 pit stop that handed the lead to Marcus Ericsson.

Ericsson pitted one lap later, elevating Scott Dixon to the lead who pitted one lap later with Will Power and Palou, giving the lead back to Lundgaard.

The race’s second full course yellow came out on Lap 41 when Romain Grosjean hit the Turn 10 wall. The Swiss-born Frenchman was running 12th at the time and said the steering wheel came free from his hands.

The race resumed on Lap 46 but not for very long as Kyle Kirkwood got into the rear of Helio Castroneves’s car. Castroneves tried to spin the car around to resume but could not do so and the No. 06 machine was finished.

The majority of the field hit pit road under this full course yellow extension, moving McLaughlin to the front of the field over Dixon and Rinus VeeKay.

McLaughlin made his final pit stop on Lap 62, handing the lead to Dixon who pitted one lap later, handing Lundgaard a lead he would not lose.

Palou finished second with a significant front wing drama. After receiving contact in the Castroneves spin, the right front part of Palou’s wing started to flap around as the crack in the nose of the car started to grow across the car, giving doubt as to whether the wing would stay on the car.

The wing stayed on and Palou finished ahead of Herta, Dixon and Newgarden to round out the top five.

“We had a really fast car and got in the accident there with the 27 and Helio,” Palou said. “So yeah, I don’t how we made it with this wing. The car was still handling okay and then we just had to save a ton of fuel, a ton of tires, but we made it. So yeah, glad we finished P2 today.”

Palou’s runner-up position comes after four wins in the last five races, including three in a row. His championship lead is now 117 points over Dixon.

For Lundgaard, this victory was a validation of all of the changes Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing have made this season. After all of the drama surrounding their Indianapolis 500 qualifying effort, the team made large changes to their technical department to help move the team forward.

After Rahal qualified second and Lundgaard qualified fifth at Mid-Ohio in early July, many thought the team had all they needed to go back to victory lane. It just took two more weeks to make that happen.

“We were knocking on the door at Mid-Ohio with Graham’s qualifying and Christian’s for that matter, but this weekend it wasn’t easy,” team co-owner Bobby Rahal said.

“We didn’t start out really super great, but we kind of kept working at it and Christian was hooked up. I think he just kind of was like on a mission this weekend and you saw that in the race. I mean he just drove away from everybody and the crew did a great job, the strategy in the #45 pit was the right strategy and Christian just didn’t put a foot wrong.”

The NTT IndyCar Series’ next event is the only double header of 2023, the Hy-Vee IndyCar Race Weekend at Iowa Speedway, July 21-23.