You might have missed it while waving your American flag and ducking your neighbor's mortar rounds during the long holiday weekend, but something fairly significant happened over in Mansfield, Ohio, on Sunday.
They ran an IndyCar race at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, and it looked like any other IndyCar race.
Pato O'Ward held off Alex Palou to win, and hooray for that, because the guy has had Lloyd Ruby luck lately and was due a W and then some.
But what made this race stand out was not that Pato won, but what he and Palou and every other driver in the field was wheeling around out there.
Honda or Chevrolet, they were all hybrids. Like your Prius, only faster and louder.
It was the first first all-hybrid race for IndyCar -- the teams have been testing them for some time now -- and it was a rousing success. Only one car, Scott Dixon, had issues with the system. And no one who watched was bellowing about "woke racing" or "green energy fossil-fuel haters racing" or anything similarly stupid.
That's because they were too busy watching Palou crawling all over Pato's tailpipes across the last 20 laps.
It's because they were watching Palou hang everything out trying to catch him, to the extent that he damn near lost it a couple times.
It's because they were watching Pato damn near get sideways off the last corner with the checkers just yards away and Palou still coming.
It was, in other words, a hell of a show. One not altered in the slightest because the engines were hybrids.
Now, I don't know if this is what the future of IndyCar looks like. But if it does, I'll take it.
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