Murray earns Andretti Cape’s season best result on streets of Detroit
The Andretti Cape INDY NXT crew packed up and headed to downtown Detroit over the weekend. A short but technical street course greeted the team’s two young drivers as they came back from a two week break out of their cars.
Seb Murray qualified in 12th position, and immediately had to put his avoidance skills to use. Entering the braking zone for the first corner after taking the green, Jordan Missig spun right in front of Murray. The Scottish driver navigated through the outside of the hairpin and around the first bit of trouble.
Just one corner later, a large pile-up nearly completely blocked the road in front of Murray. He slowed quickly to avoid a collision, and tip-toed his #2 Dream Racing Dubai entry past a slate of other cars that were scattered across the road. A red flag was needed for cleanup, and Murray was already up three positions to ninth at that point.
A couple other drivers up the road had to make pit stops to repair broken front wings throughout the remainder of the 45-lap event, which promoted Murray all the way up to sixth.
A late restart with one lap remaining saw Murray embroiled in a fierce battle. Contact with a competitor resulted in a broken nose and front wing, and more contact in the hairpin threatened to undo his strong run. He successfully escaped the melee and crossed the line in sixth, securing his best career IndyNXT by Firestone finish and the best result for Cape Motorsports this season.
Unfortunately, Ricardo Escotto was much less fortunate throughout the weekend. His troubles started in Saturday’s practice, when he clipped the concrete barriers during a late push to set a fast lap. The contact led to a larger hit on the outside wall, and caused considerable damage to his #3 Frank’s Red Hot entry. The Cape Motorsports crew spent the afternoon rebuilding the suspension and gearbox, which meant Escotto was not able to take part in qualifying.
Starting from the back for Sunday’s race, Escotto was in a more vulnerable position to the chaos ahead of him. When the 20-year-old came up to the large pile-up on the first lap, the stopped cars were around a blind corner and there was nowhere for him to go. Escotto’s front wheel collided with the rear wheel of Hailie Deegan’s stopped HMD Motorsports entry, which broke his steering and ended his day on the spot. His final finishing position was logged as P20.
After a one week break, the Cape Motorsports crew will reconvene just outside of St. Louis for the first oval race of the year. Last year the team scored a fourth place result on the 1.25-mile World Wide Technology Raceway oval, and has hopes of repeating that performance this year.
Seb Murray
Good finish, best finish of the season! Massive thank you to the team this week. They have given me a great car every session. Turned up on Friday and knew we had the pace, at the top of the charts a lot of the time. Had a bit of a messy qualifying, but we knew we had the pace to go forward.
A very chaotic race at the start with that pile-up. Got a bit of damage to the rear which hindered my straight line speed a bit. That one green flag lap at the end was complete and utter chaos, honestly. There was a lot of damage, but we were grateful to come across the line P6. A very good finish! Hopefully we can go for top a five next!
Ricardo Escotto
Just really disappointed in general. If I had to blame someone for this weekend, it’s myself. Yesterday I made a mistake in practice and it impeded us from going out in qualifying. It really comes down to that.
Thank you to the guys for getting my car fixed up for today. Nothing to do about it today. We have to keep believing and looking forward to the next race.