David Malukas continued to knock on the door of his first career IndyCar Series victory, but the door remained shut on Sunday afternoon at Road America.
The 24-year-old Chicago native secured a hard-fought second-place finish in the XPEL Grand Prix, piloting his #12 Team Penske Chevrolet through a chaotic race on the 4.014-mile, 14-turn natural terrain road course.
"It was obviously a chaotic run, but thankfully, we were on the right side of the chaos,” Malukas said, referencing the five cautions in the 55-lap race.
“Overall, though, I just need to study myself. I need to look into why I'm losing pace in these races. It's a little bit of a repeat of Indy GP (in early May at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course). Other than that, a really strong, really strong strategy from the guys, and big thank you, Team Penske Verizon, Chevrolet, all these guys. It's because of them of why I'm here, so thank you.
“It was definitely very different with these cooler temps, but, we still had it roughly in the window from the warm up, and, these guys, they can see the weather, they know where the weather's gonna be, so they got the car in the right place."
After race leader Marcus Armstrong suffered a mechanical issue - which allowed Christian Lundgaard to get by - brought out a late-race caution, it set up a dramatic one-lap shootout to the checkered flag. Malukas, on the harder primary tires, attempted to stay on the gearbox of Lundgaard’s #7 Arrow McLaren Chevrolet, equipped with the softer alternate compound, but was unable to en route to securing the runner-up result, his third over the last five races.
"That was the one that's not really any chance there," Malukas said. "You're going against alternates versus primary tires. It's not really going to be a competition. You come out of Turn 14, he's going forward, I'm going sideways. That's kind of the result of that. If it was same tires, you can maybe make an opportunity, yeah... That's just a tire difference there."
The result now gives Malukas four podiums on the year. With 10 of 18 rounds in the books, he sits second in the IndyCar Series championship standings, 60 points behind leader Alex Palou (374-314).
“Yeah, I mean, it's definitely slowly starting to build there,” Malukas said, of the frustration of getting his first IndyCar win. “It's always just a battle of trying to keep that kind of contained. At the end of the day we're still in a championship fight, still good amount of races to go. We really never know what happens.
“You're still on that edge of I want to make some risks to go for the win, at the same time I need to keep it contained because I don't want to make something stupid and get out of some good points.
“That's the challenge of this year, balancing between those two forms of racing.”
