Mick Schumacher got his first laps around one of America’s great natural road courses this week, as 13 NTT IndyCar Series drivers descended on Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, for a June 9 team test ahead of the XPEL Grand Prix presented by AMR on June 21. Santino Ferrucci of A.J. Foyt Racing led the 13-driver group on a day that gave more than half the Road America field a rare head start on a race weekend.
The test came at the end of a brutal stretch for the paddock. IndyCar has just completed five consecutive weekends of competition, capped by the Bommarito Automotive Group 500 at World Wide Technology Raceway, and the trip to Wisconsin meant one more working day before crews finally get a break. Andretti Global, Arrow McLaren and Rahal Letterman Lanigan ran three cars apiece, while A.J. Foyt Racing and Ed Carpenter Racing fielded two each.
Schumacher Discovers the Undulations of Elkhart Lake
For Schumacher, the Rahal Letterman Lanigan rookie with a Formula 1 and sports car pedigree, Road America might be the closest thing to familiar territory he sees all season. Plenty of drivers arriving from European racing have compared the 4.014-mile, 14-turn circuit to classics like Spa-Francorchamps. Schumacher was not ready to go that far.
“It’s a very unique track,” he said during the lunch break. “I think it would be unfair to take too much comparison to other tracks because every track is unique and very special. So is this one. It’s great to experience it.”
What struck the German most was the topography. “I guess the undulation, like, how much goes up and down,” Schumacher said. “It’s beautiful driving through the woods, down on the back straight, going to Canada Corner. It’s very nice scenery to race here. The track’s getting better, and it’ll be good to have this afternoon to hopefully have something representable of what the race might be.”
Schumacher leaned on his teammates for local knowledge before turning a wheel. Graham Rahal has been coming to Road America for decades, and Louis Foster won the pole there as a rookie in 2025. With lap times around the long circuit meaning fewer total laps than at most venues, Schumacher noted the premium on execution: “We have to make the most out of every lap.”
Power Approves of Road America’s Grasscrete Experiment
Will Power, now at Andretti Global and a two-time Road America winner, spent part of his day evaluating something most fans will never notice. Over the past two offseasons the track has installed Grasscrete, a perforated concrete product that lets grass grow through it, in several runoff areas where drivers habitually run wide. The surface keeps cars from digging holes and dragging dirt onto the racing line while still looking like grass rather than inviting drivers to use it as free real estate.
Power, who famously crashed at the Carousel in 2023 after dropping a wheel off the edge, checked out the installation in Turn 14 and gave it his approval. “It’s how much it drops down is the problem, whether you use it or not,” he said. “If it’s, like, raised up a bit you’d probably use it more. But it’s better than dropping into the dirt.”
Siegel Salutes the Crews After a Punishing Stretch
Arrow McLaren’s Nolan Siegel arrived at the test fresh off a crash at World Wide Technology Raceway, and his first thoughts were for the people who had to thrash to make the Wisconsin trip happen at all. “They got to sleep for two hours, three hours before they left St. Louis to come here, so I’m very appreciative of all the men and women that are here,” Siegel said. “It’s not easy, but we all love doing it, and we love being at the racetrack. It’s where we want to be.”
Siegel was the best McLaren finisher at Road America a year ago in eighth, with Pato O’Ward 17th and Christian Lundgaard 24th, so the team has clear ground to recover at a track that did not suit it in 2025. The 21-year-old explained why a rare test day carries so much value in a series with strict testing limits.
“We do not really get to test much in IndyCar, so these days are super important, very, very valuable for us,” he said. “Definitely each car has its own set of test items that we’re working through, and I think that’s been quite smooth so far for all three cars. So it’s a very organized, laid out test plan, and if we can get through all the items on each list for each car, then that’s a huge amount of data to look at before the race.”
Rasmussen Builds on a Podium and a New Contract
Few drivers arrived in a better frame of mind than Ed Carpenter Racing’s Christian Rasmussen. The Dane finished third at World Wide Technology Raceway barely a day and a half before the test, his third career podium and his best result since winning at the Milwaukee Mile last August. He also signed a multiyear contract extension with the team last week.
“It was good to get back in a race car and feel like you can make it do something, you know?” Rasmussen said. “It was obviously a good way to turn the year round and a good momentum builder for going into the rest of the year.”
The challenge for ECR is that short oval pace carries nothing over to a sweeping 4-mile road course, and Road America was a sore spot for the team in 2025, when Alexander Rossi finished 13th and Rasmussen 18th. “Road America is a place that we really struggled last year, which is like why we chose this test day to come to and try and improve our package,” Rasmussen said. “We’ll just keep working away and then hopefully end up with something pretty good here later.”
Why Road America Suits the Rookie Class
Schumacher arrives at Elkhart Lake with a deeper road racing resume than almost anyone in the field. The 2020 Formula 2 champion spent two seasons in Formula 1 with Haas before serving as a Mercedes reserve driver, then rebuilt his career in endurance racing with Alpine’s Hypercar program in the World Endurance Championship, sharing prototypes at tracks like Spa and Le Mans. That background is precisely why observers have circled Road America as a venue where the rookie could outperform his car: the track rewards commitment through fast, blind corners and punishes hesitation, qualities that separate drivers raised on European circuits from those still learning them.
The flip side is that IndyCar’s spec Dallara behaves nothing like a Hypercar or a Formula 1 machine. With less downforce than an F1 car, no power steering assistance of the kind he knew in sports cars until IndyCar’s recent changes, and a field where a tenth of a second can cover five cars, track knowledge converts to results only when paired with setup confidence. Nine days of data analysis between the test and the race weekend gives Schumacher and his engineers their best chance yet to close that gap.
The Stakes When the Series Returns
The test sets the table for one of the most anticipated stops on the calendar. The XPEL Grand Prix runs June 19-21, with the race going green at 1:00 p.m. CT on Father’s Day Sunday, live on FOX. Alex Palou brings a 49-point championship lead to Wisconsin after his fuel strategy stumble at Gateway, and the contenders chasing him got nine days to digest their test data before the cars hit the track again.
Notable in their absence were Chip Ganassi Racing and Team Penske, who sat out the test while five rivals gathered data. Whether that proves costly will be answered on June 21. For the full championship picture heading into the weekend, see our Road America preview, and for how the title fight tightened at Gateway, our Bommarito 500 race recap breaks down the points swing. Thirteen drivers now know a little more about Elkhart Lake than their rivals do, and in a series this tight, a test day’s worth of answers can be the difference between a podium and a midfield afternoon.
