DETROIT – It took 12 months, but the IndyCar paddock’s expectations of a disjointed, chaotic crash-fest on the streets of Detroit were realized Sunday afternoon, as the series eyed riding a major wave of momentum coming off the most-watched Indianapolis 500 in three years.

Whether that wave was propelled forward into IndyCar’s visit to Road America in less than a week depends on who you ask.

For Penske Corp., who have long hosted the Detroit Grand Prix and who recently stewarded it from the roads of the Belle Isle state park – a location many drivers loved but which became a headache for its environmental impact – Year 2 of the downtown street race was a rousing success. The event's 73 hospitality chalets (five more than a year ago) sold out, grandstand tickets sold out before the weekend even began and crowds of now paying customers continuing to pour onto the parking decks that surround pitlane (after they were free viewing zones a year ago) point to an event on the rise, they say.

Add a new elevated Victory Podium befitting a Formula 1 grand prix, a concrete canyon of an amphitheater surrounding pitlane and the start-finish, chefs flipping steaks on the roof of parking garages, and hordes of sponsors crowding multi-level temporary suites, and if you’re Penske Corp. president Bud Denker and Detroit Grand Prix president Michael Montri, what more could you ask for?

“I thought it was a phenomenal weekend. We work a whole year to put on an event like this, and to see all those plans come through for the team is really gratifying,” Montri said during the event’s post-event recap media availability. “We had a very successful event in 2023 and learned a lot, and we went into this year with the goal of fine tuning a lot of those things.”

And that they did. The three-quarter-mile back-straight heading to Turn 3 had 700 feet of asphalt resurfaced leading into the braking zone, along with additional space in that corner’s runoff. Roughly 50 feet before the apex of Turn 9, along with 150 feet after, received the same treatment. Several corner apexes also saw the new use of Armco barriers rather than concrete blocks to mark the confines of the track, giving drivers an additional foot of space with which to run in several of the tightest spots.

The track also added several new video boards to help keep fans around the track informed. In the most high-profile, action-packed spot on the course – the Turn 3 hairpin that immediately follows the alternate start-finish line that served as the epicenter for four of Sunday’s eight cautions – were turned into a hospitality club rather than a simple grandstand to best monetize the interest.

As of Sunday morning, the track was up 10% year-over-year on ticket revenue alone – even while keeping half of the track’s viewing options open free-of-charge.

A much smoother track made way for a pole speed from Colton Herta nearly 1.5 seconds faster than that of a year ago from Alex Palou. In spite of a running 47 of the race’s 100 laps under caution (compared to 32 in Year 1), the race only included one additional caution period, compared to a year ago, while yielding 217 on-track passes vs. 189 in 2023. Sunday’s Detroit GP also only ran six minutes past the targeted two-hour mark, even while running just four full green flag laps from Lap 33-73 over a 50-minute span.

“For any new folks, they saw a lot of chaos, which was exciting for them, and I think we got a number of them because of the sheer number of people that were here and the fact (Sunday grandstands) were sold out,” Denker said.

Added Montri: “I would say for those that tuned in last weekend for the first time for the Indianapolis 500 and then tuned in for this today, they got an entertaining race on TV, and that’s what we’re looking for.”

'We put on a great show': Penske president Bud Denker happy with Year 1 of Detroit GP move

Pato O'Ward: 'I miss Belle Isle'

By no means, though, was that a uniform sentiment held among the paddock and those watching from home Sunday afternoon.

Longtime series veteran – and now Indy 500-only competitor – Ryan Hunter-Reay was the first among the IndyCar’s most respected voices to post what he titled a ‘Belle Isle appreciation post’ on X (formerly Twitter) just minutes after Scott Dixon took the checkered flag in what was yet another masterclass fuel-saving victory from the legend who now sits just nine victories short of A.J. Foyt’s all-time mark.

Pato O’Ward, who battled tooth-and-nail for 7^th Sunday, followed with ‘I miss Belle Isle’, capped with a teary-eyed emoji. In a succinct quote-tweet, Graham Rahal said, simply, “Me too.”

So as not to trigger the wrath of the race promotion team, which was livid a year ago during the race weekend at the utterance of any attacks towards the track’s legitimacy, Sunday’s runner-up Marcus Ericsson did his best to toe the company line when asked about the circuit Sunday.

From last year: IndyCar drivers sound off on 'too tight, too short' Detroit GP track

“I don’t know what word to use. Challenging? Let’s put it that way,” Ericsson said with a cheeky grin. “That’s a nice way to put it: challenging. It has some great characteristics with the bumps, and the walls are close. That is good.

“But it is very short and twisty for IndyCar. That’s for sure. It’s on the limit of what we can do. I wish we could have a couple more corners and a little bit longer lap. But it seems to create good drama like we saw last year. And they say the bumps and concrete and everything is the ‘full Michigan experience’, so that’s good.”

For better or worse, Denker reiterated again Sunday, the 1.645-mile street course, bordered by the Detroit River to the south, Detroit neighborhoods to the east – roads of which don’t offer proper runoff space, Denker said – and roadways around the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel to the north and west, is largely a finished product. The stretch on Jefferson Ave. that makes for roughly 40% of the track’s length, can’t be fully repaved, due to needing to keep ‘crowns’ at each of the nine intersection that hit the track’s straightaway to allow for proper drainage. Because of that, it remains perhaps the bumpiest section of track on the series’ calendar.

Combine that with a series and calendar-wide issue with Firestone tires that have largely proven too durable to start the year, with the manufacturer having planned its compounds for the season under the assumption that the hybrid system would’ve launched as-planned in March, delivering dozens of extra pounds up against the 2023 car, and drivers say a slippery tire and a track surface that isn’t billiard-table smooth can sometimes cause drivers to carry a fraction too much speed into the corner.

Sunday’s 3rd-place finisher Marcus Armstrong hypothesized that the circumstances could’ve been partially to blame for the ‘cautions breed’ cautions scenario fans and the paddock were dealt mid-race.

'Better than expected': IndyCar drivers evaluate Year 1 of Detroit street course

“I think a lot of the mistakes are caused by the fact that the tire isn’t working early in the run, especially when they’re cold. I know I’ve taken some margin, but if you brake where you think you should, occasionally you just drive straight through someone,” he said. “I’m sure that happened.

“I’m sure mistakes today also weren’t by the intention of the driver trying to lunge everyone, but because they didn’t have the grip to stop. But a lot of the moves today were very ambitious. Honestly, the braking distances are quite long, and I think that’s quite inviting. Perhaps it’s in need of a bit of a rethink.”

At the same time, Armstrong added that, overall, he enjoys the layout – even after spending the bulk of his early years on largely picture-perfect surfaces on the junior formula ladder system tailing F1 around the globe. “It’s fun over a lap,” he continued. “Over a race distance, it’s pretty touch-and-go with yellows. But I enjoy it.”

'We need to have a better standard'

As with the first couple years of the previous Music City Grand Prix around the outskirts of downtown Nashville, the theater of Sunday’s Detroit Grand Prix has and will continue to prove divisive. There remains a contingent of fans – to the chagrin of Denker and Montri – who see constant crashes, like the six between Lap 33-73, as entertaining action that breeds tension and unpredictability that green flag racing simply doesn’t offer.

It's largely why so many racing fans tune into NASCAR’s superspeedway races, in anticipation of ‘the big one.’

Others would argue crashes for the sake of crashing isn’t in IndyCar’s DNA – especially when they largely involved cars trying to poke their noses too far inside from too far back trundling somewhere around 60 mph through a hairpin.

Ericsson deemed a lot of the driving Sunday “reckless.”

“There’s obviously opportunities on restarts, but I don’t know if we need to look at how we steward these kinds of races,” he said. “I’m sure it was dramatic and fun to watch, but at some point, we also need to have a bit of a better standard. We’re one of the best racing series in the world, and we shouldn’t be driving on top of each other on every single restart.

“Obviously, I haven’t seen the race. I was just driving it, but I saw in my mirrors every time on the restarts guys going four or five-wide, and I was just praying not to get hit pretty much every restart.”

After an unfortunate early exit from last weekends 500 on Lap 1, Ericsson had the inopportune chance to watch the 500 live and noted, as so many have in the days since, how chaotic some of the driving was – especially in the first half of the race. The field was lucky, he said, not to have more than the six contact-related cautions the race saw in its first 150 laps.

“We’re some of the best drivers in the world here racing. We shouldn’t be having incidents like today,” Ericsson continued. “I think I’ve done my fair share, as well. I do make mistakes, too, so I’m not going to put the finger on everyone else, but I think as a series, we can definitely improve.”

'It was all over the place': Dixon wins IndyCar race in Detroit amid crashes galore

On the other end of the spectrum, Sunday’s race-winner shuddered at the idea that IndyCar’s on-track conduct might’ve been considered by some to be “embarrassing.”

“I think you do a survey, and most people go to races to watch crashes. I don’t,” Dixon clarified. “But I know when I watch some kind of NASCAR race, they have a similar kind of effect. It’s obviously exciting.

“I don’t know. I don’t see a lot of it. I’ll watch the race back and see what happened, but you’re in confined streets here. It’s tough, man.”

TV numbers to be released on Tuesday, of a cable race on USA Network following the 5.31 million who watched throughout last Sunday’s significantly-delayed down-to-the-wire Indy 500 broadcast on NBC, will ultimately help detail the bigger picture. For a series that barely surpassed 300,000 for its audience on USA for Long Beach in late-April, holding onto even 10% of that 500 audience might, unfortunately, come as a reluctant win.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: 8 cautions for 47 laps; was IndyCar's Detroit GP an 'entertaining race'?