Six oval races to close the second half of IndyCar’s 17-round season, with those six ovals spanning the last eight races. If you’re a fan of ovals, or Team Penske, the move of IndyCar’s season finale from the new street circuit configuration in Nashville to 30-ish minutes east to the city of Lebanon and the 1.33-mile Nashville Speedway is a blessing.
With the loss of Texas Motor Speedway from the tour, IndyCar headed into 2024 with only four ovals to visit. The return of Milwaukee and its use as a doubleheader helped to bring the oval race tally up to six — along with the Iowa doubleheader, World Wide Technology Raceway trip, and the Indianapolis 500 — and with Nashville Speedway in the mix, the series has five distinct ovals and seven oval races to offer.
For those who hate street courses and have been lamenting the downsized presence of ovals in IndyCar, this announcement on Valentine’s Day might be received like a bouquet of roses. Fans of Roger Penske’s team must also be rejoicing as the team owned by the series’ owner has another oval where it can flex its muscles.
The last time IndyCar closed its season on an oval, Penske’s Will Power claimed his first championship back in 2014 at Fontana, and over the last two seasons, no team in IndyCar has been as dominant on ovals as the Captain’s squad. In 2022, Penske’s drivers won three of the five oval races, a tidy 60-percent sum, and if it weren’t for the failed suspension component that fired Josef Newgarden into the wall while leading with ease at the second Iowa round, it would have been four out of five.
In 2023, it was four oval wins from five oval races and an 80 percent victory rate for Penske; only Scott Dixon’s fuel-saving sorcery at WWTR prevented Penske from reaching 100 percent on ovals. As the team looks to defeat the reigning champions at Chip Ganassi Racing, which has been one of the series’ strongest performers on street courses, the Nashville change throws an interesting twist into how the title could be settled.
In light of the venue change, I’m sure IndyCar will add a Nashville test day or two to the calendar for its teams since the series hasn’t been there since 2008. Its concrete track surface was a tricky thing to master with the old Indy Racing League cars when the series made its debut in 2001 and it didn’t get much easier to tackle through the last race in 2008.
Tire degradation was extremely high at Nashville, so beyond a test for teams, I’d also expect the series to book time at the track with Firestone to work through a few downforce and compound options and refine the package with a few teams playing lead and follow and select the best fit for passing and tire life.
Another wrinkle to consider, if we assume IndyCar will stick to its mid-season introduction of its energy recovery systems, which are rumored to be on the cards for a July 5-7 debut at Mid-Ohio, is how the use of hybrid powertrains on a big oval to close the season — and potentially name a champion — will impact the event.
Since hybrids won’t be in play for May’s Indy 500, Nashville would serve as the biggest oval to feature the new ERS units made by Chevrolet and Honda and offer a 60hp punch of acceleration when the supercapacitor is charged. Nashville would also become the fastest oval where the new hybrids would experience the highest and most sustained speeds which, with new technology on hand, and provided the 2024 drivers’ title hasn’t been settled early at Portland or Milwaukee, will introduce big fears about ERS reliability determining who comes out on top at the championship finale.
It’s not as if ERS units couldn’t fail on the streets of Nashville, but nobody welcomes the idea of seeing if the hybrid powertrains can survive bigger stresses and demands to close the season than were previously expected.
And if you were hoping that all of the hype spun by IndyCar and the promoters of the Music City Grand Prix regarding the end-of-season shift from Monterey’s Laguna Seca road course to the revised and high-energy downtown Tennessee street race would be a huge boost for the series, both parties now have a lot of work to do to create the same atmosphere at one of IndyCar’s long-forgotten tracks.
Huge anticipation had risen among fans and teams for the new Music City GP in the heart of Nashville’s never-ending party; how exactly the series and promoter replicate that in the lovely Tennessee hamlet of Lebanon is both an unenviable task and a mystery.
The change also raises the natural question of whether the street race will return, but that won’t be known until the Tennessee Titans finish the new NFL stadium that’s due for completion and use in 2027. With the street course tied to portions of where the former and replacement stadiums live, a once-per-year IndyCar race has indeed been parked while the city’s big future income generator is prioritized during construction.
And to be fair, this is a failure of the promoter in charge of putting on the Nashville GP for IndyCar, and not something the folks at Penske Entertainment were directly involved in. Huge and ongoing internal issues within the Music City GP organization led to widespread firings in January, and Big Machine owner/event sponsor Scott Borchetta, who was a co-owner of the race, bought out his partners and has taken sole control of the event.
In a welcome sidebar, despite being told by multiple sources that Jason Rittenberry, who led the GP on behalf of its owners, was among the fired, he texted — after not returning a number of calls — to correct a note in my news story and confirm he was still centrally involved, which is a good thing. Along with Borchetta, his passion for the event has been a difference-maker.
But, in spite of knowing the behind-the-scenes story, it doesn’t change the perception of IndyCar being the series that, year after year, can’t get its stuff together and deliver on the things it says it will do.
With every racing series booked into their 2024 track schedules, finding a late and suitable replacement for the Music City GP wasn’t going to be easy; engaging with Speedway Motorsports Inc. to use the Nashville Speedway this year, and likely for a few more, does appear to be the best outcome in a situation filled with compromises.
The blowback on IndyCar, while undeserved, is the latest in a long line of setbacks that are very on-brand for the series where any steps forward are seemingly guaranteed to come with a few steps back.
Based on all I’d been hearing recently about the struggles going on with the Music City GP, I’m relieved to hear IndyCar will hold onto and have a race in Tennessee. From what some insiders were saying, the race was at risk of being lost altogether, so keeping the event alive deserves recognition.
While I don’t love losing a street course in order to gain an oval, I’m less concerned about where IndyCar ends its year and more focused on it delivering the excitement it deserves and full crowds it has lacked at Laguna Seca. That’s what the grand rebirth of the downtown Nashville street race was meant to solve.
Viewing the situation though my glass-half-full lenses, I’m rooting for IndyCar and Nashville’s promoter to deliver that same downtown energy to the speedway.
I couldn’t tell you how it will happen, because the speedway location won’t offer the possibility of pouring into the adjacent streets and bars and clubs to celebrate moments after the checkered flag waves, but there’s no doubt about the need to create something that comes close a half-hour east of where the big bash was meant to happen.