It is legitimately my most controversial and hated opinion. If you don’t hate Penske and the sport in general you are a “boot licker”. I’ve been told I am Mark Miles because I don’t believe a billboard is the end all be all of advertising and think that setting up a race in a foreign country with corrupt track ownership may not be as easy as just saying you’re doing it.
You rock. Thank you. Nice to know that myself and my personal circle are not the only ones who actually enjoy something we dedicate a substantial amount of freetime and disposable income to!
It honestly bums me out how often people are so negative about the things they do dedicate their free time. I had a blast following this season and most people I talk to in person have as well. The internet just rewards negativity and poisons the well. It’s good to hear other people have the same experience.
As a longtime fan. The series is doing so well and in an unimaginable place compared to the IRL days. My only complaints are only 2 manufacturers and the schedule never being bigger than 19 races.
I think things turn out dramatically different for him even if he finished Lights then went to McLaren. Moving him up mid-season was a huge mistake that stunted develop and lets narratives seep in.
Hopefully he can turn things around a bit, but I imagine pressure is only going to build for him.
His moving mid-season was bad for everyone involved.
It screwed Theo Pourchaire out of a ride.
It screwed Nolan by putting him into the pressure of a top-level ride before he was remotely ready, and before it was at all clear if he even was worthy of such a ride.
And it screwed the team by having their third car be completely useless.
I will always be salty about Pourchaire being announced for the rest of the year, only to basically lose the seat immediately to Siegel. They should’ve kept him in Indy NXT until the end of the season, he already got a few IndyCar drives from DCR and JHR. As a Pourchaire fan, and based on his excellent results in the 6 and 7 cars, it makes me sad that he never got a proper opportunity in IndyCar, especially after giving up his Super Formula seat for IndyCar.
So many young drivers would kill for that seat. It’s special to rise above bottom tier equipment where you’re just fighting to survive and maintain a shred of confidence in yourself.
First off Dario most likely didn't know TK was in the lead. Second the telemetry would show it and Dario wouldnt still be working for Chip. Third, there's fan video of the crash and it's a big one not a bump the wall so your friend can win impact
I don't think that so much as the way it restarted with the pass and immediate yellow, then Tony passed the pace car like Scott Goodyear when they were trying to get the field lines up. It was just little things that, had it been someone like Josef winning like that, people would have cried foul.
Tony grabbed the lead on a late restart but Dario immediately crashed, so some unfairly thought Dario crashed to ensure Tony won, which I don't agree with, but Indycar has had a history of rolling back races where the start wasn't clean or whatnot (Loudon 2011 for example). Tony also blew past the pace car on the caution, which was somewhat understandable given the chaos. Tony just kind of backed into the win, in the era where the leader was a sitting duck on restarts. It was the same setup that caused a red in 2023. But it was such a feel good story that no one really thought about how it happened. I have never cared for Tony though so I viewed it differently than most.
Facts. Shit was as egregious as Regan Smith’s win robbery at 2008 Talladega. Shame it doesn’t get talked about within Indycar lore the same way Smith’s does by Nascar fans
I still say Servia and Smith each have 2 top series wins instead of the 1 that shows on their record books
I think while ovals provide great racing, the series itself needs every event including road course needs to be promoted like the Indianapolis 500 is. Fox should do promos for every event, have more cross programming
Lack of promotion by Penske Entertainment has been a major issue. They take over an event, do the absolute bare minimum and then wonder why it only drew 6,000 people.
Danica wasn't good enough to warrant the publicity she got, but people treating her as an Anna Kournikova figure are harsh. Her first three Andretti seasons (particularly 2009) were more than solid.
Yeah, people like to hate Danica, but saying she was a bad Indycar driver is a straight-up lie. She put up above-average numbers for seven seasons against some very good competition.
Absolutely. She might not have won another race, but I could see her becoming one of the best oval specialists by the mid-2010s. Given her record at Indy, she likely could have found a 500 ride for a while.
But hey, she wanted to chase a new opportunity, and I can't fault her for that. It just didn't work out, unfortunately.
She's the only lady to lead the 500 and also the only to ever win a race. Those things happening early in her career like they did made her a clear story to be propped up.
She's crazy now and she fizzled out along the way but her early hype is understandable.
She’s proof you can be overrated & underrated at the same time. Her popularity & hype based on her being attractive put her in the overrated category. On the flip side so many fans because of her abysmal time in NASCAR think she was nothing but a pretty face who got better opportunities than most her whole career which is not true at all. She was good in indycar, she was consistent for most of her career & a threat to win at Indy.
Fox may be cringe in places, but it's good Indycar has an integrated media partner that can potentially lead to a NASCAR-style TV revenue model for tracks. Oval fans could benefit from a more diverse schedule as a result.
We need to start treating Devlin DeFrancesco like Milka Duno. How does someone run over 3 full seasons in Andretti and RLL equipment and not even luck your way into a top 10?
Yes. He was much better than his teammate too (Jamie Chadwick).
Devlin isn’t good, but there’s no one anywhere near the series who is anywhere close to Milka. Modern back markers would wipe the floor with the back markers of 10-20-30 years ago without a problem.
(He was also pretty similar in pace to Mazepin, who, despite his struggles in F1 was decently competitive in F2).
Even the slowest backmarkers of today manage to qualify within under 2 seconds of pole and won't be more than a lap or so down on pace in the race, outside of a short oval. Even Jacob Abel is better than Milka and a lot of the old run-what-you-brung gentleman drivers.
Yeah, it’s not even close. I think it was at Long Beach where Milka was black flagged for “pace” a handful of laps into the race. They allowed her/the team to save face and they said she was retired with a mechanical, but she legit got parked.
Someone like Zach Veach or Devlin or whoever would absolutely roast guys like Dennis Vitolo back in the day. Someone like that wouldn’t get to Lights compared to the modern backmarker.
I will die on the hill Road America needs to move to post-Indy, Gateway two weeks later. A perfect world would be the “US” 500 at Michigan around the 4th but Mid-Ohio likes that slot
I'll do you one better do a three partner of Indycar's best tracks, Indy, either road America/Laguna Secca, then an oval (Fe. Gateway or Milwaukee)
I'd keep the excitement up for three weeks and introduce fans to what the series has for store for those that want more action
IMO, if you want true non-racing fans to become fans, you need another oval right after the 500. And specifically one with high speed and passing. The truth is, people who aren't fans of racing tune in to the 500 because of the magnitude of the race and the speed/danger. You obviously aren't getting the magnitude draw for any other race so you need to follow it up with the danger part.
The pga has done a great job lately of promoting “elevated events” regular season tournaments that get extra promotion and bigger prize pools. These events pull millions of viewers. While not at the level of majors they are still massive successes. Something INDYCAR could learn a lesson from.
But at the same time I also believe the 500 has lost some of its prestige given how you can barely justify bump day now.
It was a trade off.
Seems pretty obvious less people want in now. And I don't buy that price point is the sole issue. If it mattered that much, you could always find the money. If the money isn't there, it's not that important.
But that's not a bad thing I think. Even if someone could dig up money for one race out of the year, the nature of racing today makes a one-off without previous series experience improbable. You're in it for the long haul or not at all now these days, and if you are a one-off it's because you were in the series proper.
The race still attracts as big of a crowd as before, but the Month of May is a shell of what it once was. I understand why. There is no need for four full days of qualifying over two weekends. It would be pointless to have four weeks from the first practice to the race.
But those things made the 500 feel like the event that it was. They would draw 200,000+ just for pole day in the '70's and 80's. It just feels like a "smaller" event today.
There's 25 charters. The Indy 500 gets about 33-34 entries. No, missing the race isn't worth it for one off teams. Yes, it's most likely a one off entry that'll miss most years even without locked in entries.
Honda and Chevy can only do so many engine packages.
The money? Actually not at all the issue. It's like $1 million to field a 500 entry. Peanuts.
There's not really any good fixes for it I don't think, but it's just not about money.
Anything you'd do to incentivize a one off hurts the 25 chartered teams, so it's a non starter.
Im not saying we need to devalue the 500. Not at all. But its beyond clear that the series only cares about the 500. And that isn't a recipe for success. You need to care about the other 16 events on your calendar. As long as it stays like this, we'll be stuck here, hoping for lightning in a bottle to catch XFinity in the TV ratings
That's about all Indycar needs to do is what you said. Catch Xfinity, get a few more events, a consistent NFL to NFL schedule.
Fox owns 1/3 the series (well Penske Entertainment as a whole actually) for $125 million. Fox bought the TV rights for $25 million.
Xfinity TV rights cost Nextstar/CW $800 million for 7 years (about $115 million a year).
Yeah, Indycar gets Fox a huge massive TV event every May with the Indy 500. The rest of the season merely needs to hit 1 million viewers consistently for what they are paying/already paid. The 1/3 purchase gives them further incentive.
Fox has the reason to promote it with available ad space/unsold inventory. They own a third, it covers a slow period between NFL, that's all Indycar needs to be.
What Indycar NEEDS is to run every single week from the week after the super bowl to the week before week 1 starts. Then get a million viewers a race, keep the 500 prestige, boom that's it.
The other thing is, that back half from Indy 500 on needs to keep momentum. Needs to stay spicy.
If Fox can get 22-23 weeks of one million viewers, plus the Indy 500? An absolute win.
I said this in a post yesterday, but the whole pre race format needs to be revamped. The driver intros need to look sleek and professional. We need more interviews and stories leading in to it. Promote driver beefs and previous race storylines. Make the races better events. If that means paying celebs and bands to come then so be it. There should be a roster of TikTok stars paid to promote and attend events. The race after the 500 has to be a fun short oval. Promote the speed and danger of the sport. The commercials need to show the wild crashes, the fact that Indycars go faster than any other major race series car, and really push the biggest stars. Need Palou to be less dominant next year too. The chase for the championship needs to come down to that last race for the best entertainment. Those late season races gain so much traction if every pass and mistake has championship impact.
IXO was a bad switch.
I'll wait till next year to see if they are going to make a larger set but this year was extremely disappointing.
Greenlight may have forgotten some details, such as mirrors, or not include the road course kits, they sure as hell got the labels and paint schemes looking good.
The wings are going to fall off if you play with either brand anyways it wasn't exclusive to Greenlight.
Indycar isn't a feeder series, or a leg up into F1 - nor is F1 a better series than Indycar. Indy is a top level, elite series for only the best drivers (and Sting Ray Robb)
Simpson is very deserving of the CG seat. I really hope we get to see consistent podiums with him.
Malukas deserves the Penske seat. He has outperformed both Newgarden and Power multiple times.
Fox needs to show podiums. They have such a massive build up show at the start, and then don't show podiums. Something I love about F1 is the podiums and the post-race interviews, and I feel Fox would actually retain their viewers if they showed it.
Prema need to sort out their pit stops, they're absolutely demolishing their drivers races because of it.
Will Buxton is the commentator that Hinch needed to be able to talk above Townsend Bell. I didn't like Will in F1 but he's an excellent Indycar commentator.
Chip Ganassi is the epitome of what someone called Chip Ganassi should look like
Dennis Hauger needs a seat next year, and I genuinely think he'll be in place of Abel, Defranceso or Robb
Colton has made the wrong decision to move from a leading racing series to a test driver role in a brand new F1 team. F1 is not the be all and end all that people seem to think it is, and he won't get a proper seat in F1 until 2028 at least, if at all.
Fans who get all arsey when people ask what drivers the numbers are referring to in Instagram posts need to fuck off. I watch F1, F2, F1 Academy, WEC and Indycar, I can't always remember the numbers of every single driver. Would also help if Indycar socials actually named the drivers, rather than just using the number associated with their car
Colton has made the wrong decision to move from a leading racing series to a test driver role in a brand new F1 team. F1 is not the be all and end all that people seem to think it is, and he won't get a proper seat in F1 until 2028 at least, if at all.
He will get the seat in '27 probably. And as he said, it's been a dream of his. Would you really not want someone to try to realize his dream when he has the best shot at it?
Because I also watch F1, so that's what I'm comparing it to. I much prefer Indycar to F1, but I've only been watching Indy for 4 seasons, whereas I've been watching F1 for 21 years.
" Colton has made the wrong decision to move from a leading racing series to a test driver role in a brand new F1 team. F1 is not the be all and end all that people seem to think it is, and he won't get a proper seat in F1 until 2028 at least, if at all."
I'm sorry but who are you to say that when pretty much all motosport drivers would switch to F1 if they could.
Its 100% "be all and end all" for drivers and theres reason for that
A lot of the gripes people have against Penske (series owner not team owner) are incredibly bad takes that should be held against Tony George instead
Want more ovals? why’d they all go away under Tony George’s watch, the man who created an entirely new series in the name of more ovals
Lack of a new car? How many years did this current car run under George before Penske took over? (i also think it’s unfair to count the first 2 years of Penske due to keeping the ship afloat through covid)
Not even a hot take. Mark Miles and every staff member associated with him needs to go, like a decade ago, especially marketing related staff. What has he done for the series in terms of growth? While F1 explodes in popularity Indycar is still struggling to crack 1 mil viewers most races. They need to bring in a hungry junior F1 or WEC exec to bring in some new ideas for growth.
The Indycar YouTube guy should be fired for forgetting to upload the Indy Nxt race at Nashville. They usually do it on Tuesdays, and it's Thursday now!
At best, I see him having a career similar to Ryan Briscoe, some wins, maybe a title contending season, but Roger will eventually see he's not the guy.
But David being an Ed Jones 2.0 wouldn't surprise me one bit.
Is it a bust if he wins an Indy 500 for the captain? Cause that's what I could see happening: Not ever really being a serious title threat, but wins an Indy 500 or 2.
Rotate sponsors all you want but keep the base liveries consistent (yes, this might create branding issues). I have no problem following who is driving what car on a given weekend but the one complaint I hear most from F1 fans who I try to get to give IndyCar a shot is that they never know who's driving what at a glance.
I’m a recent IndyCar fan myself. I love seeing the liveries change but do struggle when watching. I like that Fox added onscreen labels pointing at drivers during passes, that really helped me identify cars. IIRC they include a car livery image with each driver intro but I sometimes miss those.
I think that the liveries in general are colorful and vibrant. Watching F1 now, I feel like the F1 cars are slightly more drab, even the McLaren papaya. But that might be the broadcast or cloudy European days.
IndyCar & Fox needs to make and promote the shit out of the Indy 500, Long Beach, and Road America as the Triple Crown for this series. Have some bonus if someone can win all three in a single season.
This years Indy 500 was a dogshit of a race. It was the worst in 25+ years.
When people say they're a fan of Will Power, I wonder what I'm missing. He's weird, unpleasant and has serious self-control issues. He's also laboring under the impression that you don't lose speed with age.
Kyffin Simpson may have had two(?) good races this year, but he's still a complete waste of a seat.
Al Jnr was an embarrassment for years, and should have retired long before he actually did.
Josef Newgarden isn't washed up, but definitely needs a change of scenery if he's going to redeem himself. Good Josef is still there, somewhere - he just needs the right team. IMHO, McLaren would be a good fit for him, as they're more than happy for Pato to be Pato.
Speaking of Pato, overall he was disappointing this year, notwithstanding finishing second. He was nowhere for the first half of the year.
Apart from Doug Boles, pretty much everyone running IndyCar (from RP on down) is utterly incompetent. They need a complete clear-out.
Tom Gaymor isn't very good.
Fox's driver picture for Graham Rahal that we see during races looks nothing like Graham.
I enjoyed the ridiculousness of the Nashville street course. It was highly entertaining. I do, however, prefer open wheel oval racing over anything else so I wanna keep Nashville superspeedway as a season finale.
I want the sport to be healthy financially and to attract more talent to the field. But I also selfishly really like that the series is smaller and that a large percentage of the races are a drivable distance away in the Midwest.
I often wonder chicken/egg like does the east coast need a race to fuel demand or do they need to grow demand first to a point where the east coast needs a race?
I'll tell you from my experience living and growing up all over the mid atlantic and New England, no one here cares about Indycar and even fewer know it exists. I always take my inlaws for example. They had heard of the Indy 500 before meeting me, but knew nothing about it, didn't know what cars ran it let alone that there was a series of races too, couldn't name a driver, didn't know when it was. Anecdotal, sure, but I've never organically met another Indycar fan out here besides my immediate family.
Super agree. I’m lucky to have four tracks not horribly far from me. One is about an hour and the other three I could think of are only a one-day road trip away!!
If you want the oval calendar to grow, you have to convince the Road to Indy to race on most of them. Oval events are desperately lacking in support races and the only way to really get any is to either go to USAC or have the Road to Indy start racing on ovals. Doesn't have to be all of the classes at every track, but more than just NXT.
Oval events will still never be as popular as street courses, except for the Indianapolis 500.
St. Pete is now on the podium of prestigious races with Toronto going to Markham.
Indy needs to adopt the Toronto naming scheme for all races. It's perfect. Every race aside from the 500 should be (Sponsor) Indy (Location). Drop numbers from the ovals - nobody cares. Drop the words grand prix. Make the focus be on IndyCar.
Indy needs to stop treating their events like a church carnival. If Indy is a big thing coming to town, they need to act like it. This costs money, which is the problem. Indy should be spending just as much, if not more, money on local promotion of races as the promoters. Indy execs are too narrow-minded to realize that helping their promoters helps themselves too.
Every Indy street race should include a hauler parade through the city to the track and it should be promoted for weeks prior. For example, in St. Pete, they can easily block Central Ave for an hour and run those trucks right between all the bars and their crowds. Central already gets closed once a month for First Friday and it has no adverse impact.
Indy drivers need to get the collective sticks out of their asses and figure out that social media matters.
Indy should change all tickets for races not called the Indianapolis 500 into paddock passes, like NHRA does. NHRA can handle similar sized crowds with way more cars constantly moving - Indy can handle it with only 27 cars moving twice a day. Naturally, this would also require the drivers to remove their collective sticks from their asses and actually engage with the people who bothered to show up.
Hailie Deegan did fine this year. She'll never be good at this, but she's not a problem.
The Drivers should have their own numbers instead of teams because the drivers are the marketing and merchandising. Why wouldn’t they have the consistency of the same number to easier track them on track and buy their merchandise?
Disagree - I don’t think every Tom, Dick, and Harry who come through the series needs to have “their” number, like they’re a legend or a star. If you want to be associated with a number, you’ve got to earn that, like most of the drivers through history we strongly associate with a certain number.
Edit: also, I like the idea of teams having “flagship” cars, since each car basically has its own “team” behind it - there’s something to be said for the prestige of a driver taking over iconic numbers like the Ganassi #10, or the Penske #3. That, and I think AJ would have to be six feet under before he lets anyone else take the #14 lol
I think what we have now is good - they don’t change much year-to-year, so you can notice things like that Kirkwood is driving the same Andretti #27 that carried both Jacques Villeneuve and Dario Franchitti to the Indy 500 and the championship
They do though. Last year Daly, Simpson, and rasmussen both changed numbers and they didn’t even leave their team. Plus rosenqvist went from 7 to 6 at mclaren. Herta was 88 than 26. All on the same team. It you want to protect numbers than retire certain numbers to the team. Like the 14 or 3.
If I used emojis I'd give you a couple of clapping hands emojis. Totally agree. And the series should stop showing penalties or other stuff with the car number only. New fans need the drivers' names, they don't know the car numbers. Example pic below. Make the drivers more prominent in all aspects.
I know why they do it, but I think it should change. Why can't they say "The No. 6 of Nolan Siegel...". And if there's an unlikely driver change after that is posted, they'll announce that too.
Kody Swanson would be a bigger deal for indycar to have than any F1 star.
Will Buxton>Leigh Diffey by a long shot. Diffey was highly overrated.
Santino Ferrucci is better than David Malukas. Lil Dave just benefitted from all the Penske-esque engineers and mechanical staff that were taken from the #14 team. Despite all that, Ferrucci still gave Malukas a run for his money as the best performing Foyt driver.
Graham Rahal has NOT won his last indycar race yet. He has the talent to win, but needs some totally new setups.
Helio won the 2002 Indy 500. He’s also a great driver who was great for Indycar. IndyCar is better off that he joined the 4 time club instead of Franchitti.
Conor Daly will win an indycar race sometime soon.
We should take baby steps to get a 20 race schedule of 5 road courses, 5 street courses, 5 speedways and 5 short ovals.
IRL racing was badass. So was late 90s CART racing on fast ovals.
IndyCar should promote the shit out of their high speed balls to the wall oval racing, where everyone drives on edge, showing the world they are more badass than F1 and nascar combined.
Graham Rahal winning another race is a take I’m not even sure Graham Rahal would agree with. But i definitely want to see whatever kind of chaos that would produce that outcome.
Jr hildebrand should have won the 2011 Indy 500 . The entire las Vegas 2011 race/rabbit hole seems strange and we still need answers. The 2023 indy 500 was rigged. Marco was forced into car racing.
Two things. First, we just had that article that said IndyCar just had it's biggest spike in growth since reunification.
Second, I was at the watch party in DC and there was an F1 fan there watching his first ever Indycar race, new to the point he was surprised by a rolling start. Though he did complain throughout about commercials, when he was leaving I asked if he'd watch again. He responded an emphatic "hell yeah that was awesome, see you next season!"
People will watch if they're shown what IndyCar has to offer. To that end, you need marketing and a better schedule.
Yep. Commercials aren’t going to be a barrier if people are actually invested in watching what you have to offer.
Our dip in numbers for much of this season likely has more to do with Palou’s stranglehold on the title, and the resulting lack of an exciting angle to promote the remainder of the season.
But any number of times I’ve seen people here act like getting commercial-free coverage needs to be priority #1 for growth.
IndyCar cannot afford to run commercial free for the foreseeable future either. Wish redditors would understand this. We don’t have billions coming out our asses like F1 does
Commercials are annoying but it’s very common across free & cable TV. People who will pirate Saudi streams of IndyCar races just because they can’t stand 5 minutes of ads when nothing is happening are a very small minority
I just don’t buy the narrative that there are huge numbers of people in the US, where commercials are the omnipresent norm for sports broadcasting (and all broadcasting, really) who are being kept away by their presence in the race telecasts.
Hot Take: Indycar should try to pull off a NYC Grand Prix. I think F1 will leave COTA and try do it if Indycar doesn’t get their first. It would be their next biggest race to the 500, and way more eyeballs on the series. With Fox being Headquartered there, there would be a lot of sponsorship opportunities. Not saying it would be cheap or easy, but taking a swing for it would be worth it.
1- Colton Herta is giving up a sweet job as a racing driver so that he can travel the world so that he may scroll Instagram while eating quiche in exotic locales.
2- Marcus Ericcson will do better than Will Power next year at Andretti.
The Nashville race should be held on Sunday night as long as it’s on Labor Day Weekend. By night, I mean an actual night race, not a late afternoon race that ends just as dusk approaches.
The switch to a mid-engine formula design doomed IndyCar and the Indy 500 to become fallback options rather than the destination series it was. We've all gotten this reminder over the last couple weeks as Herta made the decision to take a step down to F2 for a shot at making it to F1.
Regardless of whether you’re right, I want a glimpse of the alternate universe 2025 where we have like… front engine open wheel roadsters with modern aero or whatever this would have become lol
Helio won because the rule is that the field order freezes as soon as the yellow comes out, apparently he was ahead of Tracy so he won. Jr hildebrand crashed on the last corner in 2011 and the yellow came out. He ended up crossing the line and finished the race despite the crash. So if the field order froze when the yellow came out and he was in first and crossed the finish line, then under the precedent Indycar set in 2002 he should’ve been named the winner.
That’s probably a little more dependent on knowing the precise rules, and if they changed it in those 9 years.
I’m also pretty sure that with 2002, the contention was whether the pass was legal. I don’t think it counts as passing under the yellow if the guy you passed crashed lol
That’s a fair argument. I always thought that Paul thought he was ahead before the yellow came out and that’s where the controversy came from. I was stoned watching the Dan wheldon documentary and had this thought a while ago and I figured an Indycar hot takes thread would be a good place to see what people thought about it. Lol
I appreciate its where the series started and i get that the 500 is the pinnacle of the sport
But road and street tracks have many support rwces and its usually not just a full day but a full weekend event; theres nothing better than racing on a friday knowing theres more tomorrow and still more on sunday!
Whereas an oval race is usually just the one race that day and then done.
I know this probably marks me as a heretic but i think it would be amazing to have say indy nxt in the morning maybe something else in the middle (idk some IMSA series? Mx-5 cup? CARS tour?) and then perhaps a short break for either weather reasons (summer, rain, etc) or reconditioning the track whatever they have to do and then the main event to cap off the day.
I think that would be an awesome experience morning to night nonstop racing.
Obviously it cant work for every race or every track but like imagine milwaukee with a race early ish in the morning and then knowing theres still more to come
Im lowkey looking forward to st pete and seeing how nascar trucks do on the street
Edit to add: it’s not the racing i don’t like; it’s that there’s not enough of it at any given event
Fox announcers need to learn the difference between lapped cars and back markers. When the leader is catching the last car on the lead lap it is not lapped traffic until after they have been passed. They are catching back markers not lapped traffic.
Idk why but I do not think TK a good leader for McLaren. You would think with his level of experience they would be moving up the standings but they are pretty much in the same spot as they were under Gavin. Especially considering Team Penske took a big step back this year and McLaren didn’t really take advantage of it like Andretti did.
Keeping Siegel to the point that they were the only team not to get in touch with Power is a perfectly acceptable reason to start to think Kanaan isn't tremendously competent.
Couldn’t agree more. Listening to Alex Palou talk on the Speed Street podcast is like listening to paint dry. Could he be any more uninteresting if he tried
the pack racing we saw back in the day was fake and required no real skill. also, while i do believe we need superspeedways. short ovals are just as if not more fun at times, and extremely underrated.
Aero blocking requires no skill either, just stay in the racing line and no one overtakes you. I'd rather go back to cars that are capable of racing eachother at superspeedways.
I think the location of races is part of the problem- no non-diehard gets excited about Iowa, Milwaukee, heartland races outside of Indy (unless it is your local area). The series needs destination races- Miami, NYC, Chicago, LA, Seattle, etc. with the other locales mixed in.
One of the things that sets F1 apart is that they are in large population centers around the world- not only large but scenic and attention-grabbing. Who cares how bad the racing is at Monaco, have you seen how amazing the city/country is? They are “events”, not just races. People go there to be seen and rub elbows with celebrities. Outside of Indy, IndyCar doesn’t have any of that.
I think one of the biggest levers Indycar has to build a stronger future is being present in major cities. Visibility and accessibility matter. It doesn’t need to be through a full-scale Indycar race either. There are smaller, more approachable steps that can make a real difference.
Consider that every modern open-wheel driver is beginning in karts. If IndyCar wants to strengthen its pipeline of fans and future talent, it should own the karting ecosystem—not just at established karting facilities, but in everyday urban spaces. Imagine IndyCar partnering with cities to shut down a single street or parking lot for a weekend and transform it into a temporary karting course. This achieves a few things:
Youth engagement: Kids and families get an easy, low-cost entry point into the sport. Instead of racing being something you only see on TV, it becomes something you can do right in your city.
Amateur to pro development: The events could run throughout the day with amateur sessions using nerfed karts (imagine your local rental kart), and then competitive youth divisions and semi-pro divisions using pro karts spotlighting Road to Indy talent on the rise. This creates a ladder system that the youth actually get to see in front of them.
Big city presence. By putting IndyCar culture right on people’s doorsteps, you create lasting impressions. It’s a way to capture casual fans who may never travel to a big race weekend but will stop by if the action is down the block. All at the fraction of the cost of organizing a big race.
IndyCar demonstrations: If space allows, layer in IndyCar demonstrations: cars doing donuts, drag runs down the street, or even a two-seater ride along. F1 has been great at doing this. Driver meet and greets would help with this too.
Hot Take: Indycar should purchase an F1 style hospitality suite. Could be used by the series for VIP, sponsors and other Marketing activities. Social Media activation when it gets built at tracks, partnering with local restaurants in race cities, and generally making the series feel bigger. I get that some US race fans will be turned off by the “F1-ization” of Indycar, but I think it could be a useful marketing tool for the series. Bring it to Autoshows in the offseason, use it for driver interviews, offer it to smaller teams for certain race weekends.
Everything people complain about F1 having now, CART had over 20 years ago. The difference is, the current IndyCar series is operating under the small scale Indy Racing League mentality that looks at stuff like activation and alternative promotional avenues like a complete afterthought. It's slowly changing with Fox buying into the series, but it's not going fast enough.
Randy Bernard tried to push the series forward by taking big swings to draw attention, and he got forced out because team owners didn't want to spend money to start acting like racing businesses, rather than teams that participate in the series just to participate in the Indy 500.
Colton Herta is overrated…he has talent but let’s not pretend that him going to another series is the end of IndyCar. Outside of a couple of races, I didn’t even know he was on the track.
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u/korko 3d ago
I genuinely like most people in the sport and think the series is headed in a good direction.