Raindrops livened up IndyCar at the Milwaukee Mile. What a delightful twist for State Fair Park

WEST ALLIS – In perhaps the most ironic twist possible in this 15-day span at State Fair Park, a five-second sprinkle made all the difference in the Snap-on Milwaukee Mile 250.

Two Sundays earlier, the final day of State Fair, itself, was canceled after 10 inches of rain had flooded the grounds, leaving cars parked on the Milwaukee Mile swamped to their windowsills.

The turnaround already was going to be a challenge.

A staff already exhausted from 11 days of their namesake event – or 9.8 days as it turned out – had less than two weeks to prepare for IndyCar. In 2024, the series helped organize its return to the historic venue, but this time full responsibility would fall on the facility’s staff.

So seeing a favorable forecast for race weekend did everything to lift spirits.

Results: Snap-on Milwaukee Mile 250

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It’s no sure thing, selling Indy car racing, even at a track that’s been around longer than the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in a town that used to support more than one race a year. Several promoters found that out in the 2000s, resulting in a nine-year gap from the most recent failure to the latest return.

The stands were largely full Aug. 24, and advance sales were enough in the week leading up to the race that additional sections of the grandstand were opened for ticket sales.

In turn, the fans were rewarded with a surprise ending and a first-time winner, Christian Rasmussen.

“We’d returned to this track a couple times since I’ve been doing this,” said winning team owner Ed Carpenter, a longtime participant in the series as driver and car owner. “But it seems like it’s finally working.

“The combination and the growth and the strength of (Milwaukee) and also Road America (in Elkhart Lake), we’ve got a strong fan base. We need to keep building on it.

“I’d love to see when we come back next year that we don’t have to have the sponsor covers on the stands coming down into Turn 1. We want to keep pushing that and getting it better and better. It’s a great racetrack, a ton of history. The past two years it’s been a great show. So I’m happy it’s working.”

Some perspective is needed here.

The grandstand holds about 19,000 people. It was mostly full but not completely. Counting spectators in the infield is tough, but they do count the same as the hospitality guests on the outside of the track and they are hardcore fans, the people who lobbied for IndyCar to give the Mile another try.  

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As Carpenter mentioned, tarps cover many sections of bleachers. Those seats were needed 30 years ago, around the time the stands were rebuilt. But the IndyCar of today isn’t what the sport was 30 years ago, or 50, when USAC filled the place.

So no, this isn’t the golden age, but pushing 20,000 for a race on a short oval is a very solid effort for this point in history. Smiles outnumbered complaints hundreds of times over.

The first 200 laps of the race weren’t as compelling as either end of the 2024 doubleheader, but blame that on two factors. First, that weekend set a ridiculously high bar. And second, Alex Palou was doing what he has done often in 2025, carving up the field with surgical precision.

But a funny thing happened on Palou’s way to a ninth win in 16 races.

It rained.

Nothing like the 1,000-year flood, mind you, not the sort that swamps Fair-goers’ cars parked on the track up to their windows. But a couple of drops, from who knows where. And so flew the yellow flag.

“Even though it was not good for me, I agree with the decision,” said Palou, the already-crowned four-time champion. “Maybe in Turn 1 or Turn 3, suddenly you spin because they didn’t call the yellow, so …”

So it was decision time.

If there was one thing learned from 2024 it was the value of fresh tires. Palou had stopped with 54 laps to go, and the caution flag came out 13 laps later. Some teams would bring their drivers back in and hope to make up the distance on new tires. If Palou pitted again, someone else would have gambled and stayed out to try to beat him that way.

For Palou, the call was 50-50. For Rasmussen, sitting in seventh, it was a no-brainer.

“We talked about this before the race, knowing if there’s going to be a late yellow, we set kind of the margin if you can have a 20-lap advantage on the other cars, that’s going to make a big difference,” Rasmussen said. “That’s what we did.

“I’ve been very comfortable on especially the new tires even passing other cars (on the same strategy). We were doing that pretty well early in the stints. I was feeling good.”

The aggressive, 25-year-old Dane restarted seventh, cut his way through the field, went wheel-to-wheel with Palou for a lap and then pulled away over the final 16 laps.

“I knew he was going to race hard,” Palou said. “He was going to pass me or go to the wall.”

Rasmussen’s reputation is that he is aggressive and fearless, but he is more than that.

As he pointed out, he has not fallen out of any races this season because of mistakes he has made, only due to mechanical issues. Rasmussen sat out three races in his 2024 rookie season while Carpenter drove the short-oval races at Iowa Speedway and World Wide Technology Raceway before Rasmussen took over the No. 21 Chevrolet completely. Five of his six top-10 finishes in 2025 have come on ovals. Rasmussen’s first win was only a matter of time.

“People talk about they don’t like everything he does,” Carpenter said.  “We haven’t asked him to change one thing. He’s attacking and being aggressive, not settling for anything. That’s the mentality we want to have as a team.”

And to think, a sprinkle made the outcome possible.

Had Palou won again, fans would remember his dominance, a hallmark of the NTT IndyCar Series in 2025. The number of laps Palou led – 199, and it would have been 215 – would have overshadowed the fact that the race included 685 passes, second-most in series history to the first Milwaukee race in 2024, including 48 by Rasmussen.

Cheers overpowered engine noise when Rasmussen won. The donuts he turned on the front stretch were as popular as a cream puff.

The race and celebration were the sort of lift State Fair Park needed as it tries to rebuild a tradition and as it begins negotiations to extend its contract to bring IndyCar to the Mile beyond 2026.

“Personally I had a bunch of my family here, in the stands, hanging out,” said Scott McLaughlin, the New Zealander who finished third. “Not far from the city. The fairgrounds at the back … it’s unreal.

“Massive credit goes out to Wisconsin State Fair Park. … I was really happy to have a big crowd today, seeing them in the grandstands, it was awesome.”

So was the devilish twist delivered by an unseen cloud.