Photo: Chris Jones
HMD Motorsports’ Caio Collet is carrying concern about Andretti Global’s pace advantage in St. Petersburg, even if it is specific to the street circuit.
Dennis Hauger smashed Indy Nxt’s St. Pete track record as he took pole on debut and then converted it into victory, and his Andretti team-mate Lochie Hughes topped the other qualifying group before finishing second in the season-opening race.
Series sophomore Collet was 0.505 seconds slower than Hauger in qualifying, having already trailed him by 0.566s in the first practice session and 0.3625s in FP2 when Abel Motorsports with Force Indy’s Myles Rowe set the pace.
By finishing the race in third, Collet achieved his target for the weekend. But it did not leave him happy, as he explained to media afterwards.
“For sure it’s good to start on the podium. We aim to be in the top three all year, we want to fight for the championship. So in a way one of our goals we achieved, but for sure we were a step behind the whole weekend, especially behind Andretti as a team. So we just need to keep working hard to match them next race,” mused Collet.
“Very hard [to hold on to third]. I had to burn a bit of push-to-pass, to be honest. The whole race we had together with my engineer to do a good strategy and on P2P to be able to hold [Rowe] off and be in a fight if one of these [top two] guys made a mistake.
“So we did a really good job there, but as a team we struggled a little bit this weekend. For sure we need to come back home to the workshop and manage to improve for Barber [Motorsports Park]. I hope it will be a little bit different.”
Although the same team has won in St. Pete and at Barber as recently as 2023, no driver has taken winning form from the streets of Florida through to the rolling hills of Alabama (when they have been run that way around in the calendar) since Pato O’Ward in 2018.
Collet plans to use in-season tests before round two in May “to be able to do a step to match” Andretti, and as part of a nine-car team he should be able to use time in testing more efficiently than drivers at other teams including Hauger’s own.
“I think it will be different the next few rounds at Barber and Indy. They are road courses, so it’s a little bit different from here, but we need to keep our heads down and working all the time. I think last year also in the ovals we struggled a little bit, so we definitely have some work to do. But apart from that it was nice to start off the season doing a solid weekend in the top three,” concluded Collet.