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After an unusual Indianapolis 500, the IndyCar Series keeps up its regular schedule of heading straight to another event the following weekend.
It’s not Detroit as it has been traditionally (or Milwaukee as it was for many years further back), but the medium-sized oval at Gateway, ensuring the teams and drivers don’t have a minute of rest to contemplate their Indy 500 success or failure.
Many fans who aren’t regular IndyCar followers often drift away after the 500. And Scott Dixon holding an 84-point lead might suggest there’s not much of a title battle to stick around for.
But it’s far from over yet, even if it’s not at all clear how many races are even left to run this season. Here’s The Race’s guide to why you ought to stick around.
How many races are left?!
A glance at the schedule will tell you there are five confirmed races left in the IndyCar season. There could be seven and there could be fewer than five, it’s the great conundrum of the coronavirus.
The five technically pinned down are this weekend’s double-header at Gateway, a double header on the Indianapolis road course on the first weekend in October and the St Petersburg street race on October 25.
However, the postponed Mid-Ohio double-header is still part of the agenda. Penske Corporation president Mark Miles, speaking before the Indy 500, said: “We’d like to be there, I think it’s like the second week of September for a double-header.
“Like all of these decisions, it’s going to be driven by the situation on the ground in Ohio. It will probably be something that we won’t know until we get closer to the end of August period.
“The teams are ready to go. We’d like to be there. [Broadcaster] NBC has saved some time for us. Hopefully we’ll have a double-header at Mid-Ohio in mid September.”
America is so big that it’s pointless to make predictions on whether a race will go ahead by its coronavirus case number in that state. Often big cities in states skew numbers, while public health officials are monitoring more than just the case number when advising sports whether they can go ahead or not.
Florida, where the St Petersburg round is due to take place, has the third highest number of cases but is trending downwards, which could mean it is deemed acceptable to hold the race in late October. However policing crowd attendance at a street race has got to be tough, so there are many factors affecting the remaining races.
Mid-Ohio was postponed just a month ago – days away from the planned date – which gives you an idea of just how fast things can move.
Dixon’s massive lead isn’t safe yet
The number of races remaining obviously dictates how safe Dixon’s huge 84-point championship lead is.
If only four races remain he’s well on the way with only 216 left on the table, and he would need someone to outscore him by 21 points per race. Obviously that amount fluctuates depending on long the season becomes.
On paper, Dixon looks set for the remainder of the season. He won on the Indianapolis road course earlier in the year, had podiums in 2017 and ’18 at Gateway and four consecutive top sevens at St Petersburg including second last year. He also won at Mid-Ohio last year.
However, Penske’s Josef Newgarden does threaten. He only finished outside of the top 10 three times last year and is a challenger at every single circuit on the calendar. He won the 2019 St Pete race and would have won on the Indy road course earlier this season but for an ill-timed caution that ruled him out. He was also the star of last year’s Gateway race before an alternative strategy paid off for rivals.
Penske had a poor Indy 500, and that was particularly painful for Newgarden – both the only Penske driver without an Indy 500 win on his CV and the only champion in the field in that position. Anger over that will spur him on for the rest of the season.
There’s a gaggle of drivers behind Newgarden who are also in play and could mix things up if Dixon and Newgarden have bad rounds at any stage.
Can Sato do the double/treble?
We’re not talking about the championship/Indy 500 double here I’m afraid, merely winning back to back races for the first time in his nine-year IndyCar career.
While Sato has become somewhat of an Indy 500 specialist, since 2011 he’s only won five other races.
However, one of those is Gateway where he won last year on an alternative strategy.
It was a key point in Sato’s career in America, as the week before tensions over his aggressive driving style came to ahead when he was deemed to have caused an accident early in the Pocono event.
The 43-year-old has become a legend stateside owing to his Indy 500 performances. But he can have a lot to offer at other venues as well when he reins himself in.
He’ll be a contender at Gateway, but qualifying especially has been an issue for Sato this year and that may well be important this weekend.
The Gateway format is the same as that used at the Iowa double-header: a two lap run where the first sets the race one grid and the second lap sets the grid for race two. That’s a 2020 variant on the usual two-lap average system used to set oval grids away from Indy.
Sato almost always has a respectable championship finishing position, but never quite makes the step to title contender. He still has chance to turn it around this year after jumping six positions to sixth at the Indy 500. If he does close in on the title, he’ll be ruing the qualifying crash that took him out of the first race of the season at Texas.
Is McLaren’s IndyCar team a title contender?
With a brilliant sixth in the Indy 500, Patricio O’Ward is third in the standings – which would match the team’s best finish in IndyCar, achieved by Simon Pagenaud in 2013 when it was still Schmidt Peterson Motorsport.
The team kept most of its SPM personnel while welcoming technical help from McLaren, but one of the areas the team has really played a blinder is by mirroring McLaren’s young F1 line-up with O’Ward, 21, and rookie Oliver Askew, 22.
While Askew has been a little more inconsistent if just as impressive in his peaks, O’Ward almost took victory in the second Road America race earlier in the year, and only has two finishes outside the top 10.
Given a fresh chance after an inconclusive stint with Red Bull last year in Europe and Japan, O’Ward looks rejuvenated and has managed to rise to third without many standout results. Those could well be set to come.
O’Ward and Askew both delivered top four performances at the last shorter oval round – Iowa – and with bedding into the team now complete, results should only improve the more time the pair spend with the squad.
Although it’s hard to imagine O’Ward seriously challenging Dixon, there could well be a fight on for second place with Newgarden and Graham Rahal. What a story that would be for team and driver.
Especially given Arrow McLaren SP came under criticism for ditching James Hinchcliffe for 2020.
Will we see two quality drivers get one-off returns?
Speaking of Hinchcliffe…
He has refused to rule out returning to IndyCar later this season following the conclusion of a three-race deal he signed with Andretti Autosport to keep his racing career alive.
Hinchcliffe was the highest finishing Andretti driver at Indy, and while both of his other results were outside the top 10, he’s impressed team boss Michael Andretti enough that he should be working on a full-time return for the Canadian next year. His new sponsor Genesys has really taken to IndyCar and who would blame it for giving the affable ‘Hinch’ a chance.
Elsewhere, Citrone Buhl made its debut at the Indy road course earlier this year and completed its two race schedule with the Indy 500. While both ultimately ended with DNFs, Spencer Pigot had been the star of the road course round before a power issue and looked set for a top 10 challenge at Indy before crashing out.
Maybe the team and Pigot could both be persuaded into another Indy road course outing, especially as Pigot benefited from a late supermarket sponsorship deal for the 500, and the Rahal Letterman Lanigan team will have the car sat there and ready to go. That is once it’s repaired from Indy…
Is there a comeback in Rossi?
When he’s angry, usually he’s unstoppable in IndyCar. But can Alexander Rossi salvage a season that promised a title assault but has delivered only 14th so far?
Technical issues, a bit of bad luck and a few errors have led to this point, with the freshest disappointment being a contentious penalty for an unsafe release while fighting for the lead of the Indy 500 last weekend, before crashing out having been mired in the pack because of it.
There’s no doubt some of the circuits lost this year has really hurt Andretti Autosport, but Rossi’s been a regular top three contender since 2017 and there’s no excuse to be as far down as he is right now when he’s usually the team’s leading light.
Gateway, the Indy road course and St Pete have been happy hunting grounds for Rossi before, and at this point it’s just about putting some points on the board and making the championship position respectable. He also won at Mid-Ohio in 2018.
His team-mate Colton Herta is seventh, so an ideal comeback would be around there but it will require some podiums or wins to make that happen.
