Opinion
After a break of nearly month since the opening event of the 2023 season on the streets of St Petersburg in Florida, the first oval event of the year took place at one of the longest-tenured IndyCar Series venues, the Texas Motor Speedway: famous for a handful of white-knuckle finishes back in the day, and for it’s lightning-fast speeds.
There are few things more gripping in motorsport than watching a driver hustle an IndyCar around the high banks of TMS.
As per usual, there was plenty of action on the track. Here are all the talking points from the Lone Star State:
A late race caution after Romain Grosjean made hard contact in the wall off of turn two put an end to what was shaping up to be an absolute all-timer as far as IndyCar Series oval finishes goes, and gave the Tennessean the win – his second in as many years in the Lone Star State – over McLaren’s Pato O’Ward.
It was O’Ward who dominated the middle stanza of the race, driving an absolute rocket ship that blew by competitors like they were standing still.
At once stage, he had lapped everyone else in the race bar Newgarden, and might gave gotten to do the same to the eventual race winner had it not been for a caution – ironically, for the stricken car of his teammate and pole winner, Felix Rosenqvist.
The likelihood was that O’Ward and Newgarden would have been side by side at the checkered flag and who knows what might have happened then!
Newgarden, who got around O’Ward in the race-clinching move on lap 249, seconds before Grosjean’s accident brought out the yellow flag to effectively end the race, led eight times for 125 laps. It was the second year in a row that Newgarden didn’t lead at the outset of the last racing lap of the event, but still ended up in victory lane.
2021 IndyCar Series champion Alex Palou came home in third for Chip Ganassi Racing, the first of the Honda runners. Close behind was sophomore driver David Malukas, posting his career-best finish for Dale Coyne’s team.
Scott Dixon was fifth and fellow Kiwi Scott McLaughlin in sixth, a year after nearly winning, only to have Newgarden pass him off of the final corner on the final lap.
Unquestionably, Newgarden is the King of Texas, and he – along with teammates Power and McLaughlin and owner Roger Penske – will be hoping that being fast at Texas transfers across to being fast at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, where Roger Penske’s cars have hardly been a threat in the three Indy 500’s run since Penske bought the famous speedway.
Sunday afternoon was like the Indy Racing League of 2002, of Sam Hornish Jr racing Scott Sharp and the Penske cars of Helio Castroneves and Gil De Ferran.
Well, almost like that. The suicidal, hold-your-breath-cover-one-eye pack racing wasn’t there, but everything else reminded me of the halcyon days of open wheel racing at the Texas Motor Speedway. There was barely a lull in the 250-lap contest, which flew by. You regularly had cars two wide and three wide, jockeying for position, making bold passing manoeuvres. And there were a few moments where they were four wide late in the race when things got really crazy. All of this at over 200 miles an hour.
It was exciting, breathtaking stuff, and exactly the sort of product we needed to see from Texas where – let’s be brutally honest – the on-track product has been pretty sub-par the last few years.
Encouragingly, there was a bigger crowd than last year, and you couldn’t ask for much more than what we saw on Sunday as a lure to get the spectators there to renew their tickets for 2024. Hopefully, the superb race convinces a few more folks to get along, and we see a return to big Texas crowds.
IndyCar needs more ovals. But they need a good racing product to make them work, and the series seems to have at long last hit on the perfect package for the insanely-fast 1.5-mile intermediate speedway. Better late than never – and the powers-that-be at IndyCar better not touch it.
I’ve found recent Texas races, particularly since the application of the PJ1 traction control that allegedly made NASCAR racing better there, to be dull. This one was anything but: for mine, the best oval race other than those at Indianapolis in probably six or seven years. And boy does it whet my appetite for the Indianapolis 500.
The best story two races into the season is JHR, whose drivers, sophomore Callum Ilott and rookie Agustin Canapino, have surprised everyone with their speed. Ilott, we know is talented, but the big story is Canapino, a thirty-three-year-old Argentinian touring car driver – Ricardo Juncos is also from Argentina – who hadn’t had a meaningful open wheel start in years, let alone on an oval like Texas. Didn’t matter.
He managed a twelfth-place finish on Sunday, three positions behind Ilott, and ahead of a lot of big IndyCar Series names: Will Power, Simon Pagenaud, Ed Carpenter, Takuma Sato and Helio Castroneves, to name just a couple.
Points:
Pato O’Ward leads the IndyCar Series points championship after consecutive second-place finishes. He is seven points ahead of St Pete winner, Ganassi’s Marcus Ericsson.
Scott Dixon is third, also in a Ganassi car, and O’Ward’s McLaren teammate Alexander Rossi is fifth. Defending series champion, Australia’s Will Power sits in seventh, with fifteen races left to run in 2023.
Drivers and teams move from the high banks of Texas Motor Speedway to the famous streets of Long Beach in sunny California – two more starkly different racing venues, you could hardly find – for what is the IndyCar Series’ second most prestigious event in two weekends’ time.
Anyone who is anyone in IndyCar racing has won at Long Beach – Al Unser Jr. won six times, including three in a row – and there will be a hungry field of more than twenty-five entrants wanting to add their name to the long list of Long Beach victors.
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