WEST ALLIS, Wis. — The IndyCar championship race took a wild turn at the Milwaukee Mile as points leader Alex Palou stalled on the pace laps Sunday.
IndyCar started the second race of a weekend doubleheader on the 1-mile oval under the yellow flag while Palou’s No. 10 Dallara-Honda was attended to and then towed to the pits.
After team members removed the engine cover to make repairs that got the engine running, Palou attempted to rejoin the race just before the green flag was scheduled to wave on Lap 6, but his car again stopped on the backstretch.
IndyCar then waved off the start, but pole-sitter Josef Newgarden was spun into the wall because of contact with Marcus Armstrong. Many cars seemed late in slowing down while Newgarden was decelerating.
After his car was returned to the paddock, Palou hopped out of his car and ran to his team’s timing stand for a debrief. He was told it would be “several minutes” before his car would be ready. Palou eventually rejoined the race on Lap 29 — that was 12 laps after the race finally went green for the first time after the cleanup from Newgarden’s wreck.
Championship contender Will Power took the lead on Lap 44 and briefly was the provisional points leader over Palou. But the Team Penske driver spun on a Lap 132 restart while running sixth, and he lost a lap while making a front wing change and fell to 14th.
He rallied for 10th but missed an opportunity to make a significant dent in the lead of Palou, who finished 19th, his second-worst finish in 16 races this season.
The Chip Ganassi Racing star leads Power by 33 points heading into the Sept. 15 season finale at Nashville Superspeedway.
“I’m a bit sad and disappointed today,” Palou told Henneberry. “We just couldn’t really do anything. We tried everything to try not to lose many laps. It was out of my control, the team’s control and (Honda’s) control.
“So it’s a sport. It is what it is. But we tried everything. We were getting happier and happier getting more points, one point, one point. It was not a great day but could have been a lot worse, could have been a lot better obviously but on to Nashville.”
After a fifth-place finish in Saturday’s Race 1, Palou had opened a 43-point lead over Power (who finished second Saturday) and had a shot at clinching his third championship in four seasons.
NBC Sports’ Dillon Welch reported that Palou’s car quickly refired after Ganassi replaced a 12-volt battery. Ganassi team manager Barry Wanzer originally had told Welch that the problem was related to hybrid components that IndyCar introduced in its engines nearly two months ago.
Scott Dixon, Palou’s Chip Ganassi Racing teammate, had a hybrid-related failure on the pace laps at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, which marked the July 7 midseason debut of the hybrid. After spending 20-plus laps in the paddock, Dixon’s car refired but completed only 40 of 80 laps before retiring in last place.
Dixon later said he radioed his crew twice about Palou’s problem “to make sure we weren’t doing the same thing (and) it wasn’t the same problem I had at Mid-Ohio.
“There’s a lot more parts now. It could be any kind of issue. Ours was similar to that. The hybrid can get into a funny kind of mode which will just kill the car, which is kind of the last thing it should do because it’s the only thing that can charge the actual battery. It could be something totally different. I think they’ve worked a lot of the kinks out from my problem.
“Yeah, just sad to see. I think Alex would have had a great race. I think he probably would have had it sewn up.”
Newgarden also crashed out of Saturday’s race at Milwaukee after a collision with Marcus Ericsson.
“I get clobbered on the start, obviously it’s not our day,” Newgarden told NBC Sports’ Georgia Henneberry. “We go yellow, I got run into, so someone didn’t get the message.”
Pato O’Ward, who won Saturday’s race at Milwaukee, also was the victim of a mechanical failure Sunday as his gearbox went out on the 88th lap.