Alex Palou thought perhaps his radio wasn’t working.

It was the only reason he could muster why the three cars ahead and two immediately behind him were pitting on Lap 38 under caution and he was left out on-track.

Reality?

Barry Wanser, race strategist for Palou’s championships in two of the last three seasons, was about to help the 27-year-old win another race – “risky” strategy calls be damned.

“The team had to do a really risky strategy – too risky, in my opinion. Too risky, but it worked out, so I’m really happy,” Palou said Sunday, grinning ear-to-ear, after the 95-lap race around WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca. “Honestly, we just stayed out, and we were obviously putting ourselves in danger in case there was a yellow, and we’d just lose all the gap we would’ve been making.

“But … knew we had the car for P1. I was P4 at the time, and yeah, finishing P4 today wasn’t (going to be) a good race, so I understand what he did.”

The call at a track where Palou had podiumed in his first three career starts – including a season-ending victory in 2022, his first of that year – came just moments after Dale Coyne Racing’s Luca Ghiotto lost control and slid into the tire barriers in Turn 4, bringing out the first of five cautions on the day.

Earlier in the race, Palou lost the lead two turns after taking the green flag to fellow front-row starter Kyle Kirkwood, who hugged the outside line in the Turn 2 ‘Andretti Hairpin’ and then sped off into clean air on Lap 1. Then, Palou dropped two more spots by virtue of staying out a couple laps longer than the rest of his lead-pack competitors and allowing them to get clean air with their fresh tires and leapfrog him in the sequence.

Just 35 laps after leading the field to green, Palou trailed then-race-leader Alexander Rossi by more than 8 seconds and was the only car in the top-10 choosing to run the slower, more durable primary tires for his second stint.

And then, Wanser had a call to make. Only roughly halfway into a traditional stint, the field had to decided whether to top off on fuel and take fresh tires, forcing them to perform a sizable fuel-save to the end – running nearly 60 laps with a single pitstop – or keep running status quo, allowing them to run hard to the end with two more stops to make.

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And so when Palou looked ahead and saw Rossi, Colton Herta and Kyle Kirkwood, along with Scott McLaughlin and Scott Dixon immediately behind him peel off and head for pitlane, the CGR driver questioned the radio silence.

“I just didn’t hear anything. Like, there was no communication. Sometimes, we agree that if everybody in front of you goes to pitlane, you follow,” Palou explained. “That could be an instruction, and there was no instruction, so I stayed out.”

Palou admitted post-race, he wasn’t sure Wanser and company had made the correct call. Notably, strategy wizard Mike Hull, the strategist on Ganassi teammate Dixon’s timing stand, had opted to call the six-time champion in.

“At the beginning, obviously I was like, ‘Oh, man, I’m the only one here.’ Obviously, it wasn’t the preferred strategy, and I doubted a little in the beginning,” Palou said. “At the same time, I knew that they know a lot more of the numbers. They had trust in me on going fast, and I have a lot of faith.

“As a driver, you always doubt everything, so just in case it goes wrong, I can say, ‘I knew it!’ So when I saw everybody coming in, I said, ‘Are we sure this is a good one?’ And if it didn’t go well, I could say, ‘Told you.’ And if it went well, I could say, ‘Yeah, you did a good job!’”

In essence, Palou was now in a position where he’d have to run 23 seconds or so faster than Rossi, Herta, Kirkwood and company over the closing 55 laps to make up for pitting once more under green than they would be. For the driver who won by more than 30 seconds at the track in 2022, the task seemed feasible – particularly against a heavy fuel-save – but Palou would need a calm race around him the rest of the way to be able to pull it off.

What worried him – and for good reason, given the IndyCar field’s habit of letting cautions breed more cautions – was that he’d begin building a gap for 5-10 laps, only to see another crash, wiping away a 10-15-second gap and forcing him and others to make their second of three stops under yellow while Rossi, Herta, Kirkwood an others stayed out. Not only would the caution laps help those fuel saving making it to the end and able to run a bit more aggressively, but Palou would now be stuck in the mid-pack around 14th, needing to make more than a dozen passes to get back to the lead at a track where executing even just a couple in quick succession is extremely rare.

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Palou’s hopes of a win would’ve been dashed. After all, though he had a faster car in that opening stage, Palou couldn’t manage to pass back eventual 5th-place finisher Kirkwood to retake the lead before everyone’s opening round of stops.

“Normally, I have no say (in whether to stop or not) because I don’t know the numbers for fuel,” Palou said. “I knew we were going to pull a gap, but imagine we’re eight seconds ahead, and then there’s a caution. We’re done. (But) I think as a driver, you cannot really doubt all the time what they’re doing – especially with the past Barry and everybody have calling (my) strategies. They’ve been (right) 99.9% of the time. It’s been amazing.”

Though an immediate caution came just a couple turns after the green flag to begin Lap 41 – for Arrow McLaren rookie Nolan Siegel’s spin and stall coming through Turn 2 – the race returned back to green for a good while kicking off Lap 43, and it was there Palou made quick work of pulling a gap to the early stoppers who were still outside the top-10.

By Lap 46, Palou held a 10.9-second gap to Herta, who hopped Rossi and Kirkwood in the pits on the trio’s second stop. By virtue of running roughly 1.5 seconds per lap faster over the bulk of that stint, Palou’s gap to Herta grew to 17.9 seconds on Lap 51 and 20.1 seconds on Lap 53. Just before he made his second of three stops on the day on Lap 55, Palou had created a 21.7-second cushion. When he blended into the field, Herta and Rossi cycled out ahead of Palou, but only by less than four seconds, still with 40 laps to go.

By that point, barring a weird sequence of events, Palou largely had the race won. He passed Rossi on Lap 62 and overtook Herta for the lead on Lap 64 and by Lap 67 had gapped the eventual race runner-up by nearly 6 seconds. After both strategy groups pitted for the final time between Laps 67 and 70, Palou blended out with an 11-second cushion to Herta.

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“I think either way, we probably maximized our strategy. We pulled a good gap on everybody else, besides (Palou),” Herta said post-race. “I was happy when we made that decision in the race and ran to the end with it. It’s still unclear (to me) if that was the right call or not. Either way, it was going to be right there, You’re going to finish 1^st or 2^nd.

“I think it’s up to the strategists to know you and know your personality, whether you’re a guy that’s able to save fuel and go fast. Obviously, (strategist and Andretti Global COO Rob Edwards) thought that we could do that, so that’s the decision he made. There’s a lot of factors that going into making that decision, and it’s hard for us (drivers) to know exactly what the right decision is in the car because we don’t have all the data on the screens. That’s why they’re obviously so important to us.”

Herta, Rossi and company would see a glimpse of hope on Lap 75, with Marcus Armstrong stalled in Turn 4, bringing out the first of what would be three late cautions, erasing Palou’s cushion to his challengers. Herta didn’t have anything for Palou on the first one, but after Jack Harvey blew an engine on Lap 83, bringing out the second yellow in quick succession, the Andretti Global driver nearly hung on for a pass.

Whether he would’ve been able to make it stick and fuel save to the end, we’ll never know, because after a Lap 87 caution for a crash between Kyffin Simpson and Graham Rahal and the ensuing restart at the end of Lap 91, Palou would manage to drive away, winning by nearly 2 seconds, relatively unchallenged.

“I think we were quicker when we weren’t saving fuel,” said Rossi, who like Herta, said he couldn’t be certain what, in hindsight, would’ve been the optimal strategy call until he has a chance to dive into the data with his team this week. “But (Palou) was strong all day. We knew he was the car to beat and going to be hard to beat.”

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Alex Palou rolls rice with 'too risky' strategy call to win Laguna Seca