Christian Lundgaard made his IndyCar Series debut a year ago during the Brickyard Grand Prix weekend at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. On Sunday, Lundgaard scored his first career podium with a second-place finish behind winner Alexander Rossi.
“It feels amazing,” remarked the 21-year-old rookie on his breakthrough result.
In last year’s Brickyard GP, the former Alpine Academy member appeared with Rahal Letterman Lanigan in the midst of a difficult sophomore season in Formula 2, which produced just three sprint race podiums.
The lasting negative image of Lundgaard’s second F2 campaign was a non-scoring weekend in Monaco, hampered by two mechanical failures in the sprint races – a major setback in a spec category where reliability should be taken for granted. By the end of the season, his fellow junior Oscar Piastri had clinched the F2 title while another, Zhou Guanyu, bagged an F1 seat at Alfa Romeo.
But in a new environment, Lundgaard showed promise in his one-off IndyCar debut – qualifying an astonishing fourth place and even leading two laps before finishing 12th, in the top half of the field. It was enough to convince RLL to sign him up for a full season in 2022.
While Lundgaard had been solid if unspectacular to this point, he came back to the Indy road course using the exact same car and set-up that he ran with last year, converting a sixth-place qualifying result into a runner-up finish.
“I’m just a guy doing my job, really,” he said. “I want to win, so I try as best I can every event.”
“I think the best feeling right now, is that the team really deserves it. They’ve worked super hard, and we’ve had such a struggling beginning to the season.”
He identified round 10 on the streets of Toronto, where Lundgaard finished eighth, as the point where he felt his season was starting to trend upward.
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“I think coming to Toronto was when things started to change. We saw sort of a streak where we started to perform better. Even Road America, Mid-Ohio was there. We were on the edge of [the] top 10. To come here and finish second, I think the team deserves every bit of it.”
With his second place finish at Indy, Lundgaard now sits 15th in the IndyCar championship table. Crucially, he is 27 points ahead of Dale Coyne Racing driver David Malukas in the Rookie of the Year standings with four races left.
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