THE MODERATOR: Chip Ganassi celebrates its 139th win in the storied history of the race team. Impressive showing for Alex. Your thoughts on another win, three out of four races in 2025.
BARRY WANSER: Yeah, I mean, I couldn't ask for a better start to a season than what we had so far. We literally take it session by session, race by race, do the best we can.
The team is obviously performing really strong, especially on the 10 car side. We're able to perform when it matters the most. It's getting the pole, really hard getting the pole position here. When you advance to the Firestone Fast Six, it's the fastest six cars you're battling. With six cars on track, there's no excuses of getting blocked and held up. You have to get it done. It's really hard to do that.
A good start to the weekend. Obviously we talk about tires a lot. The tires certainly played out a little bit of strategy. Actually pleasantly surprised to see how strong the harder primary tires were. They thought they were going to be a bit of a deficit, didn't want to be on them longer, longer runs on the softer reds. They hung in there, made it a pretty easy three-stop race.
THE MODERATOR: As we head to Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course, you're up 60 points in the championship. Can you dream of something like that when the season began, having that kind of points lead heading into IMS?
BARRY WANSER: Everything we do is building momentum for Indy. Our two goals are to win the Indianapolis 500 and the drivers championship. Everything is about momentum. Momentum and confidence is certainly important. We certainly have it. It doesn't guarantee anything except that we know we can do it. We just need to each week get it done.
THE MODERATOR: Questions, please.
Q. After one his championships the past two years, you told the best is yet to come with Alex. Is that what we're seeing this year?
BARRY WANSER: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, admittedly he'll say he's learning every time he's in the car. So there's a lot more to learn. He's getting stronger.
You can't take away from how strong the team is performing. Engineering, the setups, the pit stops. The entire team is performing well, which obviously enables him to do what we need him to do the most, and that's perform on track.
He gives us all the options with speed, fuel saving. Whatever we need, he can do it. That helps us with all of the strategies.
Q. CGR has had so many talented drivers over the years. What do you see in him over the last two years that makes him so special behind the wheel?
BARRY WANSER: We've been very fortunate to have some pretty amazing drivers. Certainly the drivers I've worked with on the 10 car I can truly compare when you listen to all of the feedback and do all the races with him. I compare him to certainly Dan Wheldon and Dario Franchitti. Dan, with his precision. Dario, with his thoroughness, on-track performance, especially road course and street courses second to none. I used to say second to none, but Alex is working hard to take over that.
Q. What can you say about the drive from Scott, starting deep, still advancing to almost a top-10 finish?
BARRY WANSER: You can never count out Scott Dixon. Six championships, many wins. Obviously had a different qualifying session. Didn't advance. But I think if I heard right he was the biggest mover of the race. That's pretty hard to do to make up that many positions in an all-green race. That is true performance on track and in the pits.
Q. As you've been working through the weekends lately, setting up the car, do you look at the data and think to yourself you're nailing the setup or is it really Palou that's masking any small issues you have on the track?
BARRY WANSER: I don't look at data. I'm not an engineer. I kind of manage the process and let engineering do their work.
But I can tell you there's a lot of data that's reviewed, a lot of video. My takeaways are right from the first practice session on whether the car unloaded well and what changes we're making, if we're making minor changes, testing a few items. It's a good start to the weekend. If we're literally sometimes having to throw the kitchen sink at it, make big changes before we get into qualifying.
Again, we have a great group of engineers that are just constantly looking at the data, comparing along with all of the drivers.
Q. A technical question. It's very obvious Alex is very dominant. When the other two drivers on your team are struggling, can you copy Alex's setup and make them identical?
BARRY WANSER: Absolutely. We compare all the cars all the time. When you have a three-car team, we're able to spread out some of the testing items amongst the cars. Based on feedback, all the cars will adapt to a positive change made on the other cars.
You saw Kiffin last year was the truest form of a rookie for a long time in INDYCAR. He finished 10th at Long Beach. He qualified 10th here. Again, with the level of drivers that are in INDYCAR right now, the teams, to qualify 10th in your second year, it's pretty impressive.
He didn't have the best race. Not sure what happened, why he dropped back. You could see the performance for the 9 car was there, too. He unfortunately started at the back.
Q. Obviously with the Indianapolis 500 coming up, with the momentum that you have, with the oval, what do you think you're going to have to do differently adapting to the oval?
BARRY WANSER: I'm not sure it's adapting. It's carrying on when what we've been doing. The adapting is really for the car changes, how it's built, especially for the Speedway.
But we take steps very similar to what we do everything else. The only difference is at Indy we get longer practice sessions, right? We run every day longer, six hours track is available. There's a lot more we can do each day leading up to qualifying weekend. We also have additional practice on Monday after qualifying.
At that point that's the first practice session where you know all of the cars are working on race setups. All the cars you're running around, you might necessarily know their fuel or tire level, but you know everyone is working on race setups and race downforce.
One of the challenging things during the week leading up to qualifying, work on stuff early. The cars just get rebuilt for Carb Day, then we get through that, hopefully have a great day on Sunday.
Q. Alex said on TV after the race that he's getting a little lonely out there winning this race by 13 seconds, having won three of the first four races. What do you see in him that continues to push and drive the last couple years when he's on this pretty unprecedented stretch?
BARRY WANSER: I think his patience and his ability to absorb all of the information. When things come along that challenge the drivers, like the use of the hybrid system with the deployment and re-gen, he mastered that pretty easily. It's things like that where he adapts to the car, adapts to the needs, get the most out of the car all the time.
The track here, 2.3 mile length, it's worth about 2/10ths of a lap if you use it correctly, get the most out of it. He gets it every lap. It's things like that.
Again, he makes it look easy, but it's definitely not easy. There's so much to it with the build of the cars, the engineering of the cars and the pit stops.
THE MODERATOR: Congratulations, Barry.
FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports