Tire deg the life of the party at Thermal Club

A disjointed Friday practice session made it hard for IndyCar Series teams to do long runs on Firestone’s black-banded primary tires and the softer red-banded alternate compound, but some of the fastest drivers at The Thermal Club were able to offer some interesting insights from the short bursts they completed.

“Oh, it’s still a cheese grater,” said Arrow McLaren’s Pato O’Ward. “We just need to look at the data, really. I think it was a bit different for each of our cars. The common denominator is that the deg (tire degradation) is going to be big. I would see it like an Iowa — like an old Iowa kind of thing, I would say — but road course.”

Most drivers completed short runs in the three- to five-lap range on the primaries, and maybe one or two hard laps on alternates to close the day. With Sunday’s 65-lap race expected to see a need for primary tires to last between 10-15 laps between pit stops, teams have a lot of knowledge to gain on how long the primaries can last before losing most of their grip.

“I think this track in general makes anything hard to drive, with the lack of overall grip and how Pato said — it ruins tires pretty quickly, so there’s a lot of deg,” said Andretti Global’s Colton Herta. “That makes it difficult to get a lap together. I think the overall performance of the tires, red and black, are a little bit better than what we saw in St. Pete, so that should be a little bit better in that sense. But it’s still going to be interesting, right? On the reds, you’re looking at one, maybe two laps in qualifying. It puts a lot of pressure on us to get it done on that one- or two-lap tire.”