'I thought he wasn't going to go for it' – Ericsson disconsolate after Indy

Marcus Ericsson expects to be haunted by what-might-have-beens after a chance at a second Indy 500 win was lost to Alex Palou on Sunday.

The Andretti driver was leading and had a fuel and tire advantage heading into the final phase of the race, with two backmarkers ahead and Palou just behind. He left the door open on the inside at Turn 1 with 13 laps to go and admitted he was surprised when Palou – who was trying to save fuel – took advantage and made what proved to be the winning pass.

“I had those lapped cars ahead – or backmarkers – and I was struggling a little bit in the dirty air,” he said. “Alex got kind of a run on me, but I thought he wasn't going to go for it. And that's the thing that's going to keep me up at night for a while, that moment and what I did and didn't do.

“To look back at that… like I said, that's going to keep me up at night for a while.”

He took a similar view of his decision to sit behind the off-sequence cars when they rejoined ahead of him earlier in the stint, rather than using them as a shield against Palou.

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“When they came out, I had sort of a half chance to get by one of them, and that would have put a buffer between me and Alex,” he said.  "And when he overtakes me, he kind of had a run, but not a super run, and I sort of opened the door.

“Just those things that you play it in your head a million times already after the finish line, what you could have done differently there. It was tough with those lapped cars ... but I had the best seat in the house there to lead the last 15 laps, and I… yeah. Again, I need to look at it again, but yeah, it's pretty painful.

“The tough thing was those two lapped cars or whatever they were, backmarkers, were sort of creating this dirty air that made it really hard to overtake there in the end.

“But that's the frustrating thing, that I had position on Alex and I sort of lost that, and that is – when that happened, he was definitely in an advantage. That's what I need to sort of look back at and try and see what I could have done differently.”

Ericsson is no stranger to both the highs and lows that the Speedway can bring: he won in 2022 with Chip Ganassi Racing, then finished a bitter second to Josef Newgarden the following year when a red flag was brought out at the end, setting up a single-lap shootout to the finish. 

“[It's a winner-takes-it-all] kind of race, and I had that race covered,” he said. “It's pretty painful.”

The Swede drew some solace from the fact that he was in contention at the end at all after struggling with his handling during the middle phase of the race, but he made it clear that a cloud with a silver lining is still a cloud.

“[It] was a bit strange,” he said. “We started out fairly strong. I felt really comfortable the first part of the race, and then my car went really oversteery; I was really hanging on and sort of struggling to keep up with anybody, and we had to make a ton of changes.

“Then we had a bad pit stop that dropped us right to the back. At one point we were last in the lead lap, so it was really looking like a bad day.

“But that's the cool thing with us and with the No. 28 crew, we keep fighting. We keep never giving up, and we keep fighting through. That's what we did today. I had some really good stints there in the second half of the race where I felt the car came more to me and put us back in contention, and then the last stop was really good. Good call on the strategy, as well. I'm really proud of that fight back.

“It stinks. Second is a good result, but here it's not a good result. Here, you've got to win.”