– The second Free Practice (FT2) for the 2026 IndyCar season’s Long Beach Grand Prix on Saturday featured three red flags. First, Nolan Siegel (McLaren-Chevrolet) hit the wall at the start of the back straight, bending his left front suspension. A few minutes later, Mick Schumacher (Rahal-Honda) slid into the tire barriers in the fountain area.
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And a few minutes later, Romain Grosjean (Coyne-Honda) crashed in Turn 1. The Frenchman, who had celebrated his 40th birthday on Friday, remained unharmed. However, the damage to the track barrier caused an early end to the session for everyone.
As for Mick Schumacher, he had completed 24 laps before his own slide, during which he was finally able to get to know the track. These were his first real laps in Long Beach, as there had been a defect around his Honda engine in the first Free Practice (FT1) on Friday, after which the RLL team performed an engine change for the rest of the weekend on Friday.
With the new power unit, Schumacher initially completed 23 laps in FT2 on Saturday during the 40-minute session available to all 25 drivers. In the subsequent two-part group phase, each lasting 12 minutes, he went off on his second lap in Group 2 – precisely at the spot on the track where he had rolled out with a defect on Friday.
“That was a harmless impact,” said Schumacher. Looking back at his completely messed-up weekend so far, he commented: “Not exactly great, because I didn’t get to drive at all yesterday. Now we can only try to get the car back in shape for qualifying.” The Rahal-Honda with starting number 47 was not severely damaged after going off into the tire barriers.
Schumacher inevitably set his personal best lap time of 1:08.726 minutes, which was enough for P22, on the hard tires, the “Blacks,” because the soft “Reds” were not available in FT2. At least he got to experience the Californian street circuit on flying laps almost a day late.
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Long Beach ahead, Indy 500 on the horizon: Exciting weeks for Mick Schumacher
And Schumacher also got to work on a setup with his new race engineer Eddie Jones almost a day late, though not one directly for qualifying, because then the “Reds” will be the tires of choice. Schumacher’s teammates finished Saturday’s practice in positions 8 (Graham Rahal) and 21 (Louis Foster) respectively. Kyle Kirkwood (Andretti-Honda) set the fastest time. (Result: FT2 in Long Beach)
Speaking of Eddie Jones: The experienced race engineer is initially only temporarily responsible for Schumacher at RLL. The two have been working together since the race weekend at Barber Motorsports Park and will continue to do so after Long Beach at the Grand Prix of Indianapolis (May 8/9), but not at the Indy 500.
For the highlight of the IndyCar season, Jones will switch back to Takuma Sato’s car. This year, the Japanese driver will again drive the fourth Rahal-Honda (car number 75), which is only used at the Indy 500. The collaboration between Jones and Sato has been crowned with success in the past, both in qualifying (second starting position in 2025) and in the race (victory in 2020).
However, there are still a few weeks until the Indy 500. In Long Beach, qualifying begins in three segments, converted to Central European Time, on Saturday night into Sunday at 0:30 AM CEST. (IndyCar Long Beach 2026: Schedule, TV, all info)
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