The Race IndyCar Podcast’s mid-season top 10 – which has drawn the ire of Marcus Ericsson and Jenson Button in the past – has taken on a twist for this year.
We’ve moved to a top 11 in honour of Alex Palou being the most obvious number 1 in any rankings ever, therefore giving another driver the chance to shine in our order. A top 10 without Palou in a way, if you like.
It may or may not surprise you to know that podcast co-hosts Jack Benyon, American Editor at The Race, and Indianapolis 500 regular JR Hildebrand only agreed on two drivers in their respective rankings which are then averaged across the two to get a final order.
Here are the drivers the pair disagreed on most, and why:
Pato O’Ward (6th)
JB: 8th JR: 4th
Difference: four places
The driver who is currently fifth in the championship might be in a fairly obvious position of sixth on our list given his spot in the standings. But how he got there was far from straightforward as our hosts positioned Pato O’Ward four places apart.
It’s no surprise that O’Ward’s three indiscretions this year prove the key talking point here. He crashed into Scott Dixon and later took himself out at Long Beach, crashed at the Indy 500 trying to pass Marcus Ericsson and crashed in Detroit.
Hildebrand says that doesn’t factor in much for him because “we’re used to seeing that occasionally happening” in the past.
In continuation of the defence, Hildebrand adds: “He’s still more often than not the fastest qualifier on his team, he had a win taken away from him at St Pete, which I think is easy to forget.
“While he’s not had the greatest of seasons thus far, both in points standings and just in terms of outright pace, he is the highest performing guy at Arrow McLaren.
“That altogether made me feel like, if he’s the best guy on this team, that deserves to be recognised and elevated up.”
Benyon agreed that O’Ward has been the fastest driver on the team, adding O’Ward is “the only person who is in the same postcode as Alex Palou in terms of pure performance”.
But that presents its own problem for Benyon.
“I also think he’s getting a bit of a free pass because of Alex Palou,” he adds.
“This year, if you take Palou out, Dixon is leading the championship and O’Ward is 17 points behind having thrown three races away by himself.”
That many of O’Ward’s recent years were troubled by team mechanical or execution issues meant he needed to capitalise this season when all that was going smoothly, Benyon adds.
Hildebrand’s ranking
1 Palou 2 Newgarden 3 Dixon 4 O’Ward 5 Ericsson 6 Rossi 7 Lundgaard 8 McLaughlin 9 Kirkwood 10 Herta
11 Power
Scott McLaughlin (7th)
JB: 6th JR: 8th
Difference: two places
Neither co-host was ready to throw hands over the driver sixth in the standings as McLaughlin is more a victim of a congested rankings midfield than intense debate from the duo.
Benyon went into the most detail, stating that if you expected McLaughlin to fight for a championship this year you would be disappointed, but he adds that his reaction to any difficult results has been impressive.
“He has been able to turn around some of those difficult results quite quickly, which was one of the things that we kicked him for last season,” says Benyon.
“In the mid-season, that period, it was a tricky one for Scott. It felt like it went on for a period of races where he was struggling and he couldn’t come out of it.
“The reaction to his adversity this year, he’s almost immediately turned it around, or at least been in the window to.”
Josef Newgarden (3rd)
JB: 4th JR: 2nd
Difference: two places
Benyon admitted putting two-time winner and Indy 500 champion Newgarden in fourth in his rankings was a “what are you doing with your life?” moment, so even he recognised where his rankings could be flawed.
“We haven’t seen the Josef Newgarden we’re used to seeing, and I think a lot of that is Penske’s team-wide struggle to match what Ganassi have brought to the table this year, so I don’t want to hate on Josef for that,” adds Benyon.
“Being eighth on road courses and 11th on street courses is just so not what I would expect from a Josef Newgarden season.
“I know a lot of that is not his fault. I just found it so hard to draw a line between these three drivers [in second to fourth].”
Benyon’s ranking
1 Palou 2 Dixon 3 Ericsson 4 Newgarden 5 Rossi 6 McLaughlin 7 Lundgaard 8 O’Ward 9 Power 10 Herta
11 Kirkwood
Hildebrand’s ranking has been heavily weighted towards praising or penalising drivers based on how well they’ve done in comparison to their team-mates, which was one of the reasons why Newgarden jumped above Palou’s team-mates Dixon and Ericsson in his order.
“For me it’s quite simple, he has two wins, he won the Indy 500 in arguably what was not the best car there, you still have to look at Ganassi having a stranglehold on what’s required to run at the front or if there was a Chevy team you thought had their chips pushed into the middle of the table it was Arrow McLaren,” Hildebrand argues.
“So the fact Josef won that race, he went out and won that race. It didn’t get handed to him. Same thing at Texas. He goes out and gets these wins.”
Marcus Ericsson (4th)
JB: 3rd JR: 5th
Difference: two places
The aforementioned weighting of performance versus team-mates by Hildebrand was one of the reasons Ericsson fell back to fourth in our standings.
Both hosts wondered if our rankings would have been different without Ericsson’s crash on the first lap of the last race at Mid-Ohio that moved him from second to fourth in the actual championship standings and agreed it played a part.
“He’s one of the guys that has not shied away from – on air – saying ‘we need to improve our road and street qualifying’, and then he’s gone and actually done it,” Hildebrand highlights as one of the reasons to like Ericsson’s season.
“It’s easy to say but very difficult to pinpoint something like that, pinpoint and problem-solve that, figure out what that means. That in particular is something I’ve been impressed with from Marcus this season.”
Will Power (10th)
JB: 9th JR: 11th
Difference: two places
Will Power is seventh in the IndyCar championship and is only 10th in our rankings, as although Kyle Kirkwood was also voted 9th and 11th by the duo, Kirkwood has got the nod based on his victory at Long Beach.
“Will’s coming off a championship season where we saw his absolute best form in this part of his career and we haven’t seen that for almost any of this year,” declared Hildebrand.
Benyon adds: “The surprising part is that last year felt like a breakthrough in terms of his mindset, the way he was performing, how that team welded together over the course of that season.
“And then, for the following year, for him to clearly be the third best driver of that team after that year is disappointing from a momentum standpoint where you’re expecting, alright, Will’s done this once, surely he’ll be able to replicate this mindset and do something similar and that hasn’t been the case.”
Kyle Kirkwood (9th)
JB: 11th JR: 9th
Difference: two places
Kirkwood has been frustrating in many ways because at his best he’s been Andretti’s fastest of its three lead drivers, but at his worst, he’s been a repeat of a messy and inconsistent 2022 rookie year punctuated by errors.
“I’ve been so impressed, his peaks have been phenomenal, to be the person finding and extracting that pace in a team that has Colton Herta in it – and Romain Grosjean – is impressive,” says Benyon.
“The disappointing thing is we’ve seen some of that consistency from Foyt last year creep in with some errors, he’s been in positions to score much better results and hasn’t been able to get that over the line.”
Who were the remaining drivers in our list?
Colton Herta (11th)
JB: 10th
JR: 10th
Ninth in the real standings, ranked 10 by both of our co-hosts and 11th in the podcast rankings overall, Herta’s lack of delivering on his potential – whether that’s team or driver based – is why he’s at the low end of the order here.
“We’ve seen some misfortune on his side, particularly in the last couple of races, Road America and Mid-Ohio where things have gone against him. But even without those two races going wrong it’s not been a particularly stand-out season from a driver we expect a lot from,” says Benyon.
Hildebrand adds: “I think he’s inside in the top 10 drivers in the series in a given car on a given weekend, he’s got incredible pace and he’s shown he has a handle on a lot of things you need to go fast.
“We’ve seen him go through some turmoil and that’s maybe exposed where maybe we’ve come to expect too much from him in terms of being so dominantly fast that a lot of little things don’t matter.
“This year a lot of those little things have cropped up.
“We’ve seen there is room for him to grow, but on the flip side we’ve come to expect him to be a totally legitimate championship contender and that he’s going to be the best guy at Andretti which is the other part of me knocking him a position or two in the rankings.
“Frankly I think Kyle Kirkwood’s had Colton’s number most of the time, on road and street circuits at least.”
The joint rankings
1 Palou 2 Dixon 3 Newgarden 4 Ericsson 5 Rossi 6 O’Ward 7 McLaughlin 8 Lundgaard 9 Power 10 Kirkwood
11 Herta
Christian Lundgaard
JB: 7th
JR: 7th
Lundgaard really impressed our hosting team for being the fourth best driver on road courses this year and putting his Rahal Letterman Lanigan car in the top 10 in points at the mid-season mark.
“When you think about where this team is at, you could make a strong argument Christian could be in the top five in these rankings if you weighted where the teams are,” says Hildebrand.
“A guy in a Williams that’s finishing inside the top five in F1 races or something. He’s definitely the one on this team extracting the maximum, he’s often the only one that can find qualifying pace in it.”
Benyon liked the Williams example and added that “Christian has 13 top cars to go up against before he’s even thought about any of his contemporary mid-table teams.
“Ganassi, Penske, Andretti, McLaren, to have an average finish of 10th and be the fourth best driver on road courses is a pretty special thing to be able to do.”
Alexander Rossi (5th)
JB: 5th JR: 6th
Difference: one place
Rossi is perhaps one of the drivers on the list who could be seen as being too high for his relative results, but his performance in a new team and against his post-aeroscreen slump has been highly rated by the hosting duo.
“I had Pato a notch ahead of Alex in my rankings because it was hard to ignore the pure performance he’s showcased,” Hildebrand says.
“On the flip side, I think it’s fair to have Alexander as high as he is, higher than where he is in the championship standings, because, OK, we maybe haven’t seen the same level of pure performance, but we’ve seen a masterful level of execution, and going and getting what’s there without pressing, going for more than what’s there.
“A veteran move that even the veterans don’t always do. Essentially mistake free in a new environment.”
Scott Dixon (2nd)
JB: 2nd
JR: 3rd
Benyon’s low ranking of Newgarden and high positioning of Dixon is one of the reasons Dixon sits number two in the order.
Again Hildebrand has penalised Dixon slightly because Newgarden has been the best in his team whereas Dixon hasn’t but adds “maybe over the course of the rest of the season he can reel Alex in a little. That’s definitely possible.”
“A pretty ‘Dixon season’, when your team-mate hasn’t won four races, this would probably usually be enough to lead the championship!” adds Benyon.
“Road America was the big one for me, he qualified 22nd and turned that into fourth. It feels like any time you give him adversity this year he turns it into good things when you give him the opportunity.”
Alex Palou (1st)
JB: 1st
JR: 1st
Ahead in most major measurable categories, and after what feels like seven or eight episodes dissecting how good he has been, it was no surprise the hosting duo didn’t have much to add on Palou’s season so far other than describing it as “ridiculous”.
Keyword: The drivers we couldn’t agree on in mid-year IndyCar rankings