At Phoenix, a rare reset for IndyCar’s field as Alex Palou stays the target

AVONDALE, Ariz. (AP) — The IndyCar season started exactly how it ended, with Alex Palou on top of the standings, and the rest of the field scratching their heads on how to catch the four-time series champion.

“Every time I’m on the podium, second or third, he’s first. It’s pretty annoying,” McLaren driver Christian Lundgaard said after finishing third in last week's opener in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Their next shot at catching Palou comes Saturday at Phoenix Raceway, where IndyCar is the undercard of a doubleheader weekend with NASCAR. The back-to-back races to start the season is an anomaly for IndyCar, which typically has a large gap between St. Pete and its second event of each year.

And even though IndyCar has raced at Phoenix before, it's last trip to the short oval in the desert was in 2018 and only five of 25 drivers entered have ever raced here before. Josef Newgarden won IndyCar's last race in Phoenix in 2018, and Scott Dixon won two years before that.

Besides them, only Will Power, Graham Rahal and Alexander Rossi have competed at Phoenix previously. In theory that makes the track a neutral playing field for the drivers hoping this is where they can catch Palou.

IndyCar held an open test at Phoenix last month to give all the drivers at least a chance to turn laps on the 1-mile dogleg, and most hope its enough come Saturday.

“It doesn't hurt with a little bit of experience, but it's been a while for the others, so we'll see,” Marcus Ericsson said. “I think everyone got a lot of laps here in the test and everyone is kind of on an equal playing field because of that, so I don't think it's going to be a huge advantage.”

The three rookies in the field could have it the hardest: Dennis Hauger and Caio Collet have raced on ovals in IndyCar's feeder system, but Mick Schumacher will be making his oval debut. Collet crashed during the Phoenix test.

“It’s not new for everyone. I think Dixon was driving around here before I was born probably, or at least when I was born,” said 22-year-old Hauger, who is 23 years younger than six-time IndyCar champion Dixon.

“For the majority of the grid, it’s new. I think maybe that levels it out.”

The biggest question mark will be Schumacher, who failed to complete even a single lap in his IndyCar debut last week because he was a casualty of two drivers colliding ahead of him. He had hoped the race at St. Pete would give him some seat time and opportunity to work with his Rahal Letterman Lanigan crew, but the son of seven-time Formula 1 champion Michael Schumacher was reduced to a spectator after the lap 1 crash.

He watched the rest of the IndyCar opener from the pit stand, then spent some time ahead of Phoenix on the simulator trying to understand oval racing.

“It's important to learn, it was my first event, so I needed to analyze everything,” Schumacher said. “So it was important to go back to the pit stand and see what the engineers were talking about, what we would have done differently in certain scenarios, to pretend we did the race and take away key elements of it.”

Everyone will likely be chasing Palou no matter what as his opening race of the year showed he has not slowed a bit. The Spaniard has won four of the five last championships, and last year had eight victories that included the Indianapolis 500 and a third consecutive IndyCar title.

At St. Pete, he led 59 of 100 laps, won by a race-record 12.4-seconds and on Saturday will be seeking his 21st career victory.

Phoenix will mark his 100th career start in IndyCar since he showed up in 2020 as an unknown coming from a Japanese series. He's been unstoppable since moving to Chip Ganassi Racing in 2021 and doesn't plan to let up anytime soon.

“It's just how racing goes, and we have to do a better job,” rival Romain Grosjean said. “It's possible we all have the same cars and he's just using it a better way than we are. Combination of the team, the name, the driver, they're doing amazing. I wish I was a small mouse to see what they have going on.”

Palou insists it hasn't been as easy as he has made it look and Phoenix will be a fair test to see if the competition has caught him at all.

“I tend not to have much expectations,” he said. “I’m pushing. I’m giving everything I have. I like to be in the car. I like to be strapped in, and I like to drive the race. We take it one step at a time. We need to focus on Phoenix.”

AP auto racing: https://apnews.com/hub/auto-racing

Will Power watches the IndyCar race on pit lane after hitting the wall in his debut for Andretti Global on Sunday, March 1, 2026 in St. Petersburg, Fla. (AP Photo/Jenna Fryer)

Mick Schumacher is pictured at the IndyCar race Sunday, March 1, 2026, in St. Petersburg, Fla., after he was involved in a crash on the first lap of the season-opening race. (AP Photo/Jenna Fryer)

FILE - Romain Grosjean walks to driver introductions before an IndyCar auto race, Sunday, July 14, 2024, at Iowa Speedway in Newton, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall, File)

FILE - Alex Palou celebrates after winning the IndyCar championship Sunday, Aug. 31, 2025, at Nashville Superspeedway in Lebanon, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV, File)

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Elon Musk continued to defend his actions in the months leading up to his 2022 purchase of Twitter in court Thursday as he faces a class action lawsuit claiming he misled investors and caused them to lose millions of dollars.

The civil trial in San Francisco centers on a class-action lawsuit filed just before Musk took control of Twitter, a social media service he renamed X, in October 2022, six months after agreeing to buy the embattled company for $44 billion, or $54.20 per share.

The case, which represents Twitter shareholders who sold the stock between May 13 and Oct. 4, 2022, revolves around allegations that Musk violated federal securities laws while taking a series of calculated steps to drive down the company’s stock price in an attempt to either blow up the deal or wrangle a lower sales price.

This includes Musk’s claims about the number of bots on Twitter. Taking the stand for the second day, Musk continued to double down on his assertion that Twitter had a much higher number of fake and spam accounts than the 5% it disclosed in regulatory filings.

The problem of bots and fake accounts on Twitter wasn’t new at the time Musk negotiated the deal. The company had paid $809.5 million in 2021 to settle claims it was overstating its growth rate and monthly user figures. Twitter also disclosed its bot estimates to the Securities and Exchange Commission for years, while also cautioning that its estimate might be too low.

But Musk said the number was much higher, at least 20%, according to some analysts. Saying the bot number was at least this high was like “saying the grass is green or the sky is blue,” Musk said.

Musk was only on the stand briefly, followed by expert witnesses and Twitter's former CEO, Ned Segal. Much of the testimony Thursday centered on the 5% spam accounts number. Asked if Twitter ever filed false filings to the SEC that misstated its spam numbers, Segal said it did not. He mentioned that the company once restated finances after it became aware of a mistake in its calculation of daily users. In 2017, Twitter said it had been overstating its monthly user numbers by mistake because it was including users of a third-party app it should not have.

Asked about the 5% spam account rate, Segal said the number was actually closer to 1%. On Wednesday, Musk said Twitter “lied” about the number of bot accounts on its platform, and that the actual number was much higher.

Elon Musk, left, arrives for a Twitter shareholder trial at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Wednesday, March 4, 2026, in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)

Elon Musk, right, arrives for a Twitter shareholder trial at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco, on Wednesday, March 4, 2026. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)

Elon Musk, center, arrives for a Twitter shareholder trial at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Wednesday, March 4, 2026, in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)