Everything you need to know about the 2021 Indy 500

The 105th Indianapolis 500 is just around the corner, and whether you’re a regular viewer or coming to it for the first time, we’ve got the talking points and what to watch for in this race covered.

Whether it be the return of fans after a spectator-less 500 in 2020, the addition of a female-led team with a female-dominated pit crew or the fact that this year’s field was the fastest ever on average across qualifying, all of the ingredients add up to a record-breaking and exciting Indy 500.

Not only is the event the biggest on the American single-seater calendar, it’s also worth double points in the championship so the difference between finishing seventh or eighth for example may seem inconsequential, but it could be vital as the only double-points event on the schedule.

Here are the things to keep an eye on for this year’s race.

Cometh the Iceman

Scott Dixon is the reigning IndyCar champion who has six titles to his name, rapidly closing in on AJ Foyt’s record of seven but already comfortably the most successful of his era and in recent history.

The one unusual thing on the Chip Ganassi Racing driver’s resume is in that time, with 50 wins and almost 30 poles, he has four Indy 500 pole positions but only one win, back in 2008.

His pole this year also ended a barren run of IndyCar poles dating back to the 2017 Indy 500. That means he won the 2018 and 2020 IndyCar titles without a pole!

Despite these numbers, something feels good about Dixon this year. He dominated last year’s race only to be pipped when a late caution meant he couldn’t fire back at Takuma Sato, who he believed couldn’t make the end on fuel until a caution flew, and he’s been his usual consistent but brilliant self in 2021.

Even some of the other drivers were in awe of Dixon’s qualifying lap – you get one attempt at a four-lap average and he was first out – and he ended ‘Carb Day’ practice 50-minutes early, insisting that other cars looked good and that it wasn’t a mental ploy designed to throw his rivals off their game.

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Where the Ganassi cars start
1 Scott Dixon
5 Tony Kanaan
6 Alex Palou
9 Marcus Ericsson

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The sight of Dixon zipping up his helmet bag and disappearing into the infield with that long left in a two-hour session can’t have exactly inspired his opposition though, either.

The Ganassi team just looks epic this year, with new signing Alex Palou winning the first race at Barber and making the Fast Nine for the second time in as many Indy 500 attempts, while Tony Kanaan is doing the ovals for Jimmie Johnson this year and believes he has his best shot to win in years.

Marcus Ericsson is well underrated at the Brickyard too, despite a couple of sloppy errors in his first two 500s that cost him dear – like locking up and spinning in the pitlane in 2019 or crashing in 2020.

New aero means overtaking could happen more

The new-for-2020 aeroscreen device is a wrap-around windscreen canopy and you’ll be pleased to know it saves lives. However, it’s not very aerodynamic, both in terms of its shape and in adding weight high up and at the front of the car.

This year, drivers and teams have been able to utilise three new aero upgrades; a smaller hole in the floor, bargeboards on the front of the floor behind the front wheels and diffuser strakes (pictured above).

The goal of these devices is to move the centre of pressure forward, and to reduce the amount of work the front wing needs to do to create the downforce at the front of the car. With the hole and the bargeboards, teams don’t need to run as aggressive a front wing angle and that should mean that cars can follow more closely and overtake in dirty air.

Drivers are not convinced if this means we will see overtaking throughout the pack or just the first four cars, but changes for the lead at least should be frequent.

If conditions are cool these cars come alive, and the forecast certainly suggests sunny but cool at around 60-70 degrees Fahrenheit (16-22 degrees Celsius). In many other series, temperature has a small or marginal impact, but in the Indy 500 its come to be a deciding factor for some cars and teams.

Penske baffles, rookie delights

Penske’s hired its first true IndyCar rookie for the first time since 1978 (Rick Mears, even he’d done multiple races the year before) in 2021 with Scott McLaughlin. Since the three-time Australian Supercars champion arrived at the team, its regular drivers have labelled him a future race winner and champion, and at Indy McLaughlin was its best qualifier.

However, that was in 17th, as the team struggled in qualifying trim for the second year in a row.

For the first time since 2013 last year, Penske didn’t win either the IndyCar title (Scott Dixon) or Indy 500 (Takuma Sato). That in a year where the eponymous team owner, ‘The Captain’ Roger Penske, bought the speedway and the IndyCar series. It was the last way he wanted to cap off a year where Indianapolis had to navigate through losing well north of 300,000 spectators for the 2020 event thanks to the pandemic.

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Where the Penske cars start
17 Scott McLaughlin
21 Josef Newgarden
26 Simon Pagenaud
32 Will Power

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To cap it off, Penske had a car in ‘Bump Day’ where Will Power – arguably IndyCar’s best ever qualifier and hasn’t started outside of the top 10 since 2008, his rookie year – scraped his way into the field. He starts 31st, having also crashed on his committed qualifying run.

All four of Penske’s drivers are buoyant that they have the race pace to move forward and be competitive in the race, and they’ll need to be. After winning the event 18 times and having put so much work in during the off-season, it’s unforgivable to have another year where non of its drivers challenge.

The youth v veteran movement

I’m not ready to jump on the ‘changing of the guard’ hype train which has been banded about by drivers and media recently.

Yes, some young drivers are proving very successful and 21-year-old Colton Herta (Andretti Autosport Honda) and 20-year-old Rinus VeeKay (Ed Carpenter Racing Chevrolet) have won races this year and are on the front row for the 500.

However, the man who won the Indy 500 last year, Sato, was 43, and the man who led it and dominated it, Dixon, was 39. Dixon is on the pole here again and leading the championship at the age of 40.

Incredibly, five of this year’s top nine qualifiers are 40 or over.

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Age of the ‘Fast Nine’ qualifiers

1 Scott Dixon 40
2 Colton Herta 21
3 Rinus VeeKay 20
4 Ed Carpenter 40
5 Tony Kanaan 46
6 Alex Palou 24
7 Ryan Hunter-Reay 40
8 Helio Castroneves 46
9 Marcus Ericsson 30

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For me, changing of the guard isn’t three or four young drivers popping up and winning races, it’s three or four drivers genuinely challenging for the IndyCar title and the 500, neither of which we saw last year.

A win in the 500 for one of the youngsters – Herta for example is highly fancied as the top qualifying Andretti car – might sway the tide for what we’re seeing in IndyCar actually becoming a changing of the guard. I do appreciate the term is open to interpretation though.

Let’s hope the fact that Dixon took pole by 0.0197s over the four lap average, or 0.004925s per lap, over Herta, suggests the youth v experience battle will be alive and kicking come the race, too.

Last year’s pole sitter and winner in trouble?

Ex-Formula 1 driver and double Indy 500 winner (2017, 2020), Sato, could only qualify 15th for this year’s race and while he’s appeared strong in race trim, the added downforce for this year seems to mean every driver thinks he is better in race running as well.

Rarely spoken about this 500, there has been some unwelcome musical chairs at Rahal Letterman Lanigan in the build up to this year’s event as Sato’s new for 2021 engineer Matt Greasley has had to remain in the UK to attend to a personal matter.

Luckily for Sato, his engineer from last year Eddie Jones was kept on as a consultant for 2021 by the team and he was set to oversee the team’s three cars anyway, so he has stepped in at the track while Greasley works remotely.

It’s hardly the kind of settled build-up to a defending race winner might want, but the team’s cars do genuinely seem fast in race trim.

Graham Rahal (starting 18th) has been one of the favourites through the month of May, that status dampened only by his starting spot, while the team welcomes Santino Ferrucci this year – who qualified 23rd, but has finished seventh and fourth from 23rd and 19th in the past respectively.

Sato and Rahal were first and third last year with Ferrucci then at Dale Coyne just behind, so there’s plenty of pedigree in this team.

History made for women everywhere

The Paretta Autosport team is a female-led outfit launched in January earlier this year with the help of Roger Penske and The Race for Equality & Change initiative supported by IndyCar and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

If you’re coming into Indy fresh and don’t know who to support, this team can be a good pick.

The outfit is affiliated on an engineering level with Penske, and there’s no doubt after she wowed her Penske team-mates with her performance in qualifying to make the field that 2010 Indy 500 rookie of the year Simona De Silvestro is the right driver to lead this team forward.

Its pitcrew (seven members) is made up of four women, some of whom have no motorsport background and have trained to pit in the Indy 500 in less than four months. That’s an absolutely staggering achievement.

The team has met its objective of making the race, and expect to see it out competing in IndyCar again this year.

Alonso’s not here, who are the one-offs to watch?

The big name everyone will be happy to see competing at the 500 is Juan Pablo Montoya, the 2000 and 2015 winner who could tie seven drivers for the second highest number of wins in the event with three.

Montoya is taking Alonso’s seat at the Arrow McLaren SP team, and is making his first 500 appearance since 2017.

He hasn’t appeared overly-confident about his race package over the month of May – he’s known to pull no punches to anybody when it comes to honest of feedback – but he’s also one of the most talented drivers to sit behind a wheel many of us will see in our lifetime, so he can never be ruled out. Especially in Indianapolis.

Sadly he starts 24th, well behind his team-mates Pato O’Ward (12th, last year’s rookie of the year) and Felix Rosenqvist in 14th.

The team has just gone quietly about its business and won the last oval race at Texas, which earned O’Ward an F1 test for the privilege from Zak Brown, who has been in attendance this month of May.

Certainly outsiders, but they can’t be ruled out – and the Schmidt Peterson Motorsport team the squad merged from has had some very strong days at Indy.

Elsewhere there’s Montoya’s long time sportscar team-mate Helio Castroneves, who qualified eighth in what is his first 500 ever (he’s started 19 so far) in a team that’s not Penske. If qualifying’s anything to go off it looks like he left at the perfect time.

It’s not quite a one-off as he’ll do six races this year.

Castroneves could join three drivers – AJ Foyt, Rick Mears and Al Unser Sr – with four wins, the most in the Speedway’s history.

He joins the Meyer Shank Racing team backed by – of all things – F1 owners Liberty Media, and its engineering deal with Andretti means that team has effectively built eight cars on this grid.

Speaking of Andretti, it’s fielding Stefan Wilson, who impressed in practice but could only manage 28th on the grid, while Marco Andretti has stepped back from full-time IndyCar and competes here with the confidence to win from 25th on the grid having changed his floor after qualifying.

Pietro Fittipaldi was one of the pleasant surprises of qualifying as he delivered 13th in the car he replaces Romain Grosjean in for the ovals.

Fittipaldi’s grandfather Emerson has two wins in this event but understandably Pietro is looking to establish his own legacy and score a full-time IndyCar seat. He missed the 2018 Indy 500 in his rookie year due to a huge sportscar crash at Spa, so a second chance in 2021 is most welcome at a team buoyed by Grosjean’s performances so far.

Sage Karam is another one-off entry many esports followers will recognise with Dreyer & Reinbold Racing. With the team shrinking to one car this year, Karam did well to be fastest on ‘Bump Day’ and make the field.

The driver the team has lost for this season is JR Hildebrand – The Race IndyCar Podcast host – who topped the four AJ Foyt cars on his first appearance with the team.

He’s led the way in terms of set-up during practice – don’t worry, other people have told us that – and felt he could have improved on his 22nd-place start had he gone for a second qualifying run.

Fuel mileage and strategy

A stint at Indy is likely to be around 33 laps, but caution periods are frequent and that means drivers can save fuel. The tyres don’t appear to degrade too much – especially in cooler conditions which are expected – so playing with fuel and strategy is more likely at the 500, unlike road and street course races in IndyCar where undercuts/overcuts can be very powerful with two sets of tyre compounds in use.

There’s two things to consider with fuel – distance and time in the pits. If you stretch your green flag-run out, you might be in the window to catch a caution later in the race where it’s more advantageous to pit, whereas if you burn through your fuel and have to pit earlier, you could miss that hypothetical caution.

There’s also the time consideration which is that, if you have five pitstops as the leaders did last year, if you extend each stint before those stops by a lap, that’s five laps worth of fuel you don’t have to put in the car at the final stop, potentially shortening the time you spend in the pits at a key moment.

It’s also worth considering though, that you can drop too far back into the pack if you’re saving too much fuel. Also, it can be advantageous to burn the fuel in the last stint as the chances of a late caution – which is what happened last year – could leave you (Sato in this case) out front with the race shortened or run with laps where you can save fuel under yellow.

Caution timing and weather – e.g. rain – can also play into strategy decisions. For example, if rain is seen on the radar and the race is past the halfway point where it will be complete if it is stopped, teams may stay out longer in order to hope that they can hold the lead when the race is ended.

These are just the basics of what can play out in the Indy 500.

One specific example relating to this race I can give is that no one will want to lead the field because the leader will be burning so much fuel it will be bad for strategy. So we should see the lead swap frequently.

Starting grid

Grid Results

The race is due to start at 1245hrs ET, 1745hrs BST.