We've only had three, truncated days of Indianapolis 500 practice thanks to some rain, but they were crucial because starting on Friday, all attention switches to qualifying.
On Friday the drivers get to test with the turbo boost turned up, replicating qualifying conditions, which means there's only a short session next Monday and another on ‘Carb Day' Friday next week to shape race set-ups further.
Therefore we can take a lot of knowledge out of this week's Tuesday-Thursday practice and how it's shaped this year's Indy 500 race.
And it wasn't totally irrelevant for qualifying as we had plenty of teams giving that a go on Wednesday and Thursday especially as well.
Here's everything we've learned this week, including who's hot and who's cold heading into the 109th running of the event.
One name stands out
You may remember 500 winner Josef Newgarden told The Race IndyCar Podcast last year how he'd spent most of practice chasing a new set-up and ended up reverting to what he started the month. None of that messing around for him this year.
On Tuesday, the driver attempting to be the first three-in-a-row Indy 500 winner looked like he was playing a video game on the easiest setting as he carved through traffic, and on Wednesday he finished the day early with practice still running.
He finished things off on Thursday where he spent four - yes, four! - hours of practice on the sidelines before proceeding to come out, lay down the fastest lap, no-tow lap and qualifying sim of the event so far, then promptly disappear back to the garage again.
Every bone in your body tells you not to get excited when someone stands out like this early on, but if you put a gun to my head to select a favourite, it'd take less than a second to choose Newgarden.
His Penske team-mates have looked strong too, and Scott McLaughlin may well be Newgarden's closest rival for pole in terms of what we've seen so far, with the proviso that Friday is when qualifying set-ups are perfected with the upped turbo boost on offer.
Kyle Kirkwood at Andretti might throw his hat in the ring in qualifying too.
Top five laps recorded without a tow
1 Kirkwood 222.760mph (Weds)
2 Newgarden 222.555mph (Thurs)
3 McLaughlin 222.193mph (Thurs)
4 Rasmussen 222.116mph (Weds)
5 DeFrancesco 221.650mph (Thurs)
For a note on how futile predicting qualifying now is though, apparently one driver predicted Scott Dixon in the fight for pole, but Dixon hasn't done a quali sim yet this week! He's not alone, there are a handful of drivers saving it for Friday.
Two other teams stand out
Back to the race running and Ganassi's Alex Palou and Dixon have looked very impressive, while rivals have pointed to Ganassi-affiliate Meyer Shank Racing and Helio Castroneves having a strong car in traffic.
For Dixon and Palou, concerns over reliability were the only drawbacks. Dixon needed a new Honda engine on Wednesday evening, his fifth, the total allowed for the year after five races. Palou had to have the part of the driveshaft which holds oil replaced on Thursday morning. Other than that, they look trouble-free and appear to have found the peak speed they just didn't really have last year.
Palou also managed the second highest number of laps this week with over a race distance at 262, with his team-mate Kyffin Simpson managing 265.
Dixon is looking to tie the pole record with six, and to end the longest ever run between victories if he can add this year to 2008. Palou just needs a 500 win to be in the conversation as one of IndyCar's best ever. Plenty to keep an eye on.
Perhaps most intriguingly, Palou is among a number of Honda cars getting a new engine for Friday, and some are wondering if Honda has some gains up its sleeve. It would seem unlikely for it to do that now, but it's intriguing it's going for fresh engines prior to qualifying, rather than waiting until next week like Chevrolet.
Palou set the fastest lap of the week, but comparing the single-lap leaderboard is a bit like charting which cars got the biggest tow. What the drivers and their rivals have to say about their race cars is a much more useful tool than looking at the frankly incomplete order that the regular leaderboard gives you.
Choosing an underdog
It's not a team you would usually expect to see up at the sharp end at the 500 despite its recent storied history, but Juncos Hollinger and Conor Daly look very strong indeed.
Of course, it will have to fight Arrow McLaren and Ed Carpenter to be top Chevy (or second best after Penske if you subscribe to that prediction).
Daly lost a sponsor ahead of the season and always works hard to get on the grid. He hasn't had a great start to 2025, but challenging for victory at his home race would certainly change the trajectory of his season.
"I don't want to get too overly excited about things," he said.
"These last two days have honestly been two of the most fun days I've had here.
"I feel like we're quite competitive in traffic. Then our first qualifying run was seventh of the no tow, so I feel pretty decent about that. We haven't even trimmed as much as the Penske cars.
"We're just going to keep our expectations in check."
Chevrolet versus Honda
There's a prevailing opinion that, after winning every race in 2025 so far, Honda has made a good step here at the 500.
That might be masked slightly by Chevy runner Penske's apparent strength, but discussing with some team insiders, it certainly seems there's not much gap between Honda and the Chevrolet marque which has won the last two races.
You may remember that last year, many of Chevrolet's cars spluttered with plenum fires (called plenum events often in IndyCar) that caused issues in qualifying. The boost hasn't been cranked up yet but some preliminary testing points to that issue being solved this year.
All aboard the struggle bus
It's hard to write any driver and team off this early in the event, and that's not what we're doing here, but ultimately at this stage of the week it starts to become clear which cars and teams are having a harder time.
Thursday in particular hammered home how tricky Rahal Letterman Lanigan's event might get, with Graham Rahal lamenting his car and its rear-end, while Takuma Sato almost stuck his car in the Turn 2 wall and has already crashed his primary car in last month's open test.
However, their team-mate Devlin DeFrancesco was very high on the no-tow ranking on Thursday with RLL's rookie Louis Foster comfortably mid-pack. So a very broad spectrum.
It's worth pointing out the big challenge with the set-up this year appears to be that the car has inherent mid-to-exit corner understeer, and if you try to totally dial that up, you end up having too much oversteer on entry. So it's about trying to find the tools to get into the sweet spot.
Santino Ferrucci's had a rough week. He likes his own set-ups at the Indy 500 but he hated some changes made to the AJ Foyt car for Wednesday and tried to revert to something more familiar later on.
He said they wouldn't know until Monday if they'd fixed his issue because the rest of Thursday was being dedicated to some qualifying running. But as things stand, qualifying or finishing in the top five looks unlikely if not impossible.
And struggle isn't the right word for McLaren, but given how competitive Pato O'Ward has been in recent years, it was notable that he said: "I think we've got better, but there's still a handful of other cars that I believe are a lot stronger than we are. Still work to do."
O'Ward's team-mate Christian Lundgaard has seemed happy and worked on his original set-up throughout and Nolan Siegel has done a tonne of laps. But out of the teams you usually expect at the front of the field, the picture is least clear of where McLaren is at.
Hybrid picture still isn't clear
Even through Thursday drivers were experimenting with IndyCar's new hybrid device.
It provides a boost of power, but it comes with the negative of having to regenerate energy through the wheels which inevitably slows the car down, something which is hard to do with the high speeds at Indianapolis.
In terms of race running, drivers will lift for each corner and increasingly so through a stint, especially as the heavier weight of the car because of the addition of the hybrid. That means regen is less of a problem, so the focus is on where best to deploy that hybrid power, and also how the tyres are managed over the stint.
Complaints about the tyres late in the stint have been at a minimum, but there's a good reason for that in that barely anyone has done a fully stretched race stint on the tyres! It's certainly going to be an issue on race day especially if it's hot.
Dixon is among those who thinks the tyres could degrade significantly on a four-lap qualifying run, so that will be worth watching. We haven't seen that be the case so far, but that's without the boost turned up.
Qualifying is where more nuance is needed, because you'd hope all four laps are flat-out, so where do you regen if at all in trying to add the hybrid boost to what you have already.
If someone can come up with a clever solution there, they could steal a march.
At the risk of needing to introduce a swear jar for his number of mentions in this feature, we saw plenty of Newgarden's onboard on his qualifying runs and he was regenerating during them.
Lots of drivers have mentioned that they have had people recording other drivers' onboards so that they can experiment with their tactics to find the best one on Friday.
On the effectiveness of hybrid, Newgarden explains: "It's more important at this track than anywhere we've gone because of the drag level. We've not run in a superspeedway configuration yet with this hybrid. It's very, very low drag on the cars. Because of that, they're very power-sensitive.
"Any time you use something to add power, you feel the magnification of it here more than anywhere else. When you are using the hybrid on the straightaway, it makes a very big difference."
