Q: With the Nashville race moving to the season finale for 2024, and Laguna Seca moving to March, that leaves a big void on the West Coast. It puts Portland out west all by itself. Any possibility of Sonoma being added to the schedule? And the talks of Milwaukee replacing the second IMS road course race… that’s just typical IndyCar. Instead of expanding the schedule, they just replace venues. All we hear is they want a 20-race season, but they are stuck on 17.
AE, Danville, IN
MP: Not sure I follow. We’d have the same amount of West Coast races, but instead of two of them being stacked at the end of the season with Portland and Laguna, we’d have two stacked towards the beginning with Laguna and Long Beach, and then a late return to Oregon.
Sonoma was a ghost town on our last few visits, and I can’t see why that would change unless the track and IndyCar spent a fortune to promote it. We barely have enough people at Laguna, which is a longer drive from the Bay Area than Sonoma, so we’d probably lose some people from one to barely boost another. I’d be the happiest guy here if both of my home tracks were capable of drawing meaningful IndyCar crowds, but since that’s not the case, I’ll keep hoping Laguna recaptures more of its former open-wheel glory. Having been there for its peak CART years where it took an hour or more to get into the main gate because race traffic was backed up for miles, I hate being able to cruise in on race day with no delays.
Some significant expenditures are on the way for 2024 with the move to hybridization, and that’s not just the engines, but also some major component updates for each entry that aren’t cheap. In a year where off-season costs will spike, dialing up the running costs by pushing the calendar out to 20 would have a lot of team owners hitting local dispensaries for items to calm their nerves.
Q: I know Colton Herta is not having a great year. A lot of it is bad luck mixed in with some bad team strategy… and a few of his own mistakes. But when he’s on, he is as fast as anyone. I would love to see him in F1, not only representing American but representing IndyCar. For the life of me I don’t understand why he didn’t do a winter regional formula series to gather the required Super License points. Yeah, I’ve heard all about how he shouldn’t have to do that, but the fact is he did need to do that.
As much as I love IndyCar and think it’s more competitive, it’s not the top level of motorsports.
Ken, Lockport, NY
MP: Don’t underestimate the value of being taken seriously. A desperation move where a race-winning IndyCar driver competes in the equivalent of Little League games in the hope of making it to F1 generates life-long headlines that are nothing but embarrassing. If you have to get on your hands and knees and beg and demean yourself to get someone to marry you, is that a marriage worth having? Maybe if that marriage is to Red Bull or Ferrari or Mercedes. But would you become a joke just to marry an AlphaTauri or Alfa Romeo? Come on, man.
And if F1 meant that much to him, he could have and would have done it, but since he didn’t, we can assume his need to do F1 rates below your need for him to do F1.
As for where IndyCar sits compared to F1 since I’ve been alive, we had a brief period in the early 1990s where the CART IndyCar Series scared F1, but other than that blip on the radar, nobody with a proper sense of the past and present would claim IndyCar is the top level of motorsport, and that’s nothing new.
Q: Do you have any idea why IndyCar doesn’t make rock stars out of its drivers? F1, NASCAR, and even Formula E do it, and it seems like most of the fans eat it up.
Sanford, London
MP: It hasn’t been IndyCar’s strength for a good while, and that spans the old IRL, Champ Car, and today’s IndyCar Series. Romain Grosjean was IndyCar’s most popular driver the moment he arrived, but that was due to the crazy fire and death-threatnin’ story that went worldwide and traveled with him to the series. He’s been overtaken by Pato O’Ward, and you can thank his Arrow McLaren team and Pato’s big personality for taking him to the top.
I know some of the series’ most popular drivers have, in recent years, begged for race footage to share with their followers — many who aren’t based in the U.S. — to help grow IndyCar’s fan base and global footprint, and they’ve been met with responses asking for exorbitant rights fees.
Treating drivers like a profit center instead of the series’ best promotional allies who are armed with whatever they need to reach more fans to help the series is one of life’s great mysteries.
As an aside, Formula E has many excellent drivers, but like Josef Newgarden or Scott Dixon, they walk through airports and dine in restaurants without anyone noticing, and half of NASCAR’s Cup drivers would probably fall into that category as well outside of the series’ most popular regions. F1? That’s the silly part; even the worst drivers and team principals get recognized wherever they go, all thanks to Netflix…
Q: Do you see any chance of IndyCar using the green-white-checker that NASCAR employs? It seemed like in Race 2 at Iowa some teams were thinking of coming in for tires before IndyCar closed the pit lane. I know only a handful of cars were on the lead lap, but if they knew they were going to have a shot at restart that might have created some more drama and excitement for the end.
Andy
MP: I don’t. IndyCar has also said it has no interest in the GWC routine.
I’ve never cared for the approach where people can drive like idiots in the final laps with no concerns about their bad behavior shortening the race and taking away their chances of a good finish. I also like knowing a race is going to be however long a series said it would be, whether it’s capped by laps like in road racing or distance with ovals. If the Indy 500 is meant to be a contest to see who can cover 500 miles before anyone else, then it should be 500 miles long, not some vague amount that can grow to 505 or 512 and keep changing if drivers repeatedly cause mayhem. Just feels wrong to me to have endless do-overs.
At Iowa, there weren’t many, but we had enough laps to determine a winner under green and so they raced. All the cars on the lead lap had an opportunity to perform at a higher level than Josef Newgarden, but didn’t, and he won. Seems like the race played out naturally, so I’m satisfied.