Marcus Ericsson hadn’t won an NTT INDYCAR SERIES race since the 2023 season opener at St. Petersburg. On Sunday, at IndyCar’s brand-new street circuit through Markham, Ontario, he snapped that 63-race drought by running down a rival who now owns a far less enviable record: finishing second more times than anyone else in the field.
Ericsson’s Andretti Global Honda hunted down Dale Coyne Racing’s Romain Grosjean in the closing stages of the 90-lap race for his fifth career INDYCAR victory, settling an old Formula 1 score the two spent five seasons contesting between 2014 and 2018. Grosjean, who hasn’t won a race of any kind since a GP2 event in Hungary back in 2011, led 28 laps and turned in his best INDYCAR finish since Barber Motorsports Park in 2023 — and still came away with nothing but points. It’s the sixth time he’s finished runner-up without reaching the top step. Will Power completed the podium in third, Alex Palou came home fourth, and Arrow McLaren’s Pato O’Ward rounded out the top five.
The gamble that set up the pass
The winning move wasn’t just raw closing speed. While the leaders cycled through pit stops under a string of cautions, Ericsson’s crew held him out for an extra lap or two on his final stop, trading track position for a fresher set of tires and a cleaner fuel window. He rejoined the race seventh with roughly 20 laps to go and immediately started slicing through cars he had no business catching that quickly. “We were the fastest car all day,” Ericsson said afterward, and for those closing laps, nobody on pit lane had much of an argument.
Getting to Grosjean meant going through his own teammate first. Ericsson made contact with Will Power at the Turn 5 hairpin while passing for third, a bump Ericsson called unfortunate and Power didn’t publicly contest afterward. On a street course with one obvious passing zone, that’s the price of a strategy that only pays off if you’re willing to use the entire width of the corner — and then some.
Pole to the wall, in one afternoon
Nobody had a rougher reversal of fortune than Louis Foster. The Rahal Letterman Lanigan driver won his second career pole and built a lead of almost three seconds over the first 32 laps, only to get shuffled back to 12th when a caution fell at the worst possible moment relative to his pit window. He clawed back to fourth and was closing on Ericsson when he clipped the outside wall entering Turn 3 on Lap 43 and ricocheted almost head-on into the concrete barrier on the opposite side. He wasn’t injured, but the car — and his shot at a real points day — was finished on the spot. We broke down that pole-to-22nd swing in full separately.
The same stretch of track claimed Andretti’s Kyle Kirkwood a short time later. He was running third behind his own teammates before an equally violent impact ended his race in 21st. Two cars, one corner, same result — which tells you plenty about how unforgiving Markham’s new pavement is once a driver commits to a line that isn’t quite right.
Why this result reshapes the championship math
Kirkwood entered the weekend as the only driver realistically positioned to pressure Alex Palou for the title, and his Markham crash did real damage to that case. Palou, meanwhile, quietly drove around a season-worst qualifying result — his first start outside the top 10 in 30 races — to finish fourth anyway. The result stretches his championship lead to 133 points over Kirkwood, with Team Penske’s David Malukas third and 137 back. With four races left on the calendar, that cushion isn’t just comfortable, it’s close to mathematically decisive: Palou would need multiple finishes outside the top 10 combined with a near-perfect run from Kirkwood for this to swing, and nothing about a season with six wins and eleven top-five finishes in fourteen starts suggests that’s coming.
A new circuit’s first data point
Markham’s debut also doubled as a live stress test for a brand-new 12-turn, 2.1-mile street course, and it behaved exactly the way first-year street circuits tend to: chaotically. The Turn 5 hairpin became the day’s flashpoint, collecting a Lap 20 pileup that started when rookie Dennis Hauger clipped Christian Rasmussen and Pato O’Ward, and later a heavier hit when Nolan Siegel drove too deep into the braking zone and collected Josef Newgarden — a move officials penalized as avoidable contact. None of that is unusual for a track with zero prior INDYCAR data. Without practice-honed reference points for braking markers or how much grip fresh asphalt gives up over a run, drivers are effectively setting their own limits in real time, and Markham made clear exactly where several of them still are.
The series doesn’t get much time to unpack any of it. Next weekend brings the Freedom 250 Grand Prix of Washington, D.C., the first INDYCAR race ever run through the nation’s capital and one of only four events left for anyone to make a dent in Palou’s lead. After Markham, that list of realistic contenders looks shorter than it did a week ago.
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