The 2025 IndyCar season is underway. The teams arrived on Thursday and hit the track for practice on Friday. The weekend culminated Sunday with the running of the 21st Firestone Grand Prix presented by RP Funding.
Mother Nature provided 3 remarkable days of bright blue skies and temperatures in the mid-70s. It was perfect for the teams and the fans. In fact, when final attendance numbers are announced, it wouldn’t be surprising to see record crowds for each day.
St. Petersburg continues to grow like crazy and is a perfect place for this type of event. On several occasions, I heard people say that they’ve lived in the area for a few to several years and had never been to any of the race activities. The downtown region is active with nightlife, many great restaurants, and wonderful art venues. It’s a vibrant and clean area with good local transportation.
The track is a 1.8 mile temporary circuit built using several streets along the water of Tampa Bay. It takes the city 2 weeks to put up all the barriers and fencing. The location is beautiful with the circuit traveling along the shores of the bay, around the Salvador Dali art museum and several parks. High rise condos and luxury yachts in the many marinas provide picturesque backgrounds.
This year television coverage for the IndyCar series will be provided by Fox Sports and from early indications, it will be a huge upgrade from NBC! Fox aired all the practice sessions live along with the qualifying on Saturday. Their pre-race activities on Sunday were interesting, fun, and informative. Credit must be given to the marketing department at Fox because their television commercials are creative and entertaining. Also, there will be no extra streaming subscriptions like Peacock required to watch any of the races! In addition, Fox retained several excellent announcers from NBC and brought over some long-time people from the NASCAR series. The exposure for IndyCar this year will be the best ever and should really boost interest in the series.
Friday practice results were led by 3 drivers from Andretti Global. Kyle Kirkwood, a Florida native turned in the fastest lap of the day with teammates Colton Herta fourth and Marcus Ericsson sixth. Alex Palou and Scott McLaughlin were second and third quickest. Qualifying results on Saturday were led by Scott McLaughlin winning the pole position and Colton Herta joining him on the front row to start the race on Sunday.
Race day brought some drama with tire strategy. Firestone supplies 2 different types of tires. One is a softer compound that provides a better grip to start but wears much quicker and loses grip. The other tire has a harder compound that doesn’t degrade as fast. All teams are required to use at least 1 set of each compound for a minimum of 2 laps. It certainly created some interesting tactics. The track always provides some tight racing, especially at the start of the race with all the cars bunched so tightly. This year was no different as 3 cars were eliminated in a first lap crash in turn 3. Among those involved in the accident was Will Power who appeared to run into the back of the car driven by Nolan Siegel causing him to spin.
Once the race settled in, pit strategy surrounding tires and fuel took center stage. Some missteps during pit stops hurt several teams. Scott McLaughlin led the most laps of the race, but late pit stops put Alex Palou in front and he held on for the victory over his teammate Scott Dixon and Josef Newgarden. The most amazing highlight of the day was that Scott Dixon had no radio communications for most of the race and was still able to finish second.
It was a great start to the 2025 season. Expect to see lots of action and surprises over the next 6 months. Once again, hats off to Fox for delivering a wonderful broadcast during the weekend.
Images from Friday’s practice will appear in the IndyCar gallery.
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