Two weeks ago, the state of the 2020 IndyCar schedule could have been summed up in a single tweet. With the always rampant rumor mill running at breakneck speed, word was quickly spreading that the series’ entire west coast swing – which had been condensed into three races over eight days at Portland and Laguna Seca in mid-September – would be lost.
That loss would, at least tentatively, leave the entire month of September with no races, creating a 33-day on-track gap between doubleheaders at Gateway (Aug. 29-30) and the IMS road course (Oct. 2-3). The open slot would potentially be longer than the off time between IndyCar’s first and second races of the year (28 days) and the one between the second Iowa race and the opening of Indy 500 practice (25 days).
And with that, at least one major racetrack began a short-lived public social media campaign to bring the series back after a nine-year absence with two months’ notice. Whether in jest or serious, Kentucky Speedway’s tweets grabbed the attention of the paddock – Graham Rahal approved – and gained traction as IndyCar diehards began to ask, “Why is IndyCar so stuck on a 14-race season? And why, after any sort of momentum gained from the impending Indy 500, would you let more than a month of the season lie vacant following the Gateway doubleheader the following weekend?”
The answer to those questions lies in a series of mid-March phone calls between series team owners and Penske Entertainment Corp. officials. Since the series packed up and left St. Pete without putting rubber to pavement, the 2020 IndyCar series schedule has always had between 13 and 15 races on the calendar. That’s not by coincidence.
“We all as an IndyCar group decided 14 races would be a good compromise, given the state of play with COVID-19, and that was based on a lot of factors,” Arrow McLaren SP managing director Taylor Kiel told IndyStar. “It was a metric we all came up with together, and ultimately, that was the driving factor.
“IndyCar has done a really good job engaging the teams and making sure everyone was spoken for, and that this wasn’t just a top-heavy decision. Everyone stated what their pressure points were and what we needed to achieve as a team, and we collaborated as a group.”
Added A.J. Foyt Enterprises president Larry Foyt: “It was, ‘Well what do you need? And what do you need?’ We’re all just trying to keep our sponsors and partners satisfied and deliver as much as we can.”
Keeping sponsors happy
Across the half-dozen IndyCar teams that IndyStar spoke to for this story, sponsorship satisfaction was almost uniformly the first topic brought up. And it makes sense.
IndyCar doesn’t exist for sponsors, but it exists because of them. Without corporate backing from a myriad number and size of companies, IndyCar simply doesn’t exist. As IndyCar teams hit the track more than a dozen weekends a year in a traditional set of circumstances, competition is the primary focus, but it’s only because their several partners allow it to be so.
“What we’re all trying to do is make good on our end of the bargain for our partners,” Kiel said. “They all fund our teams so that we can go racing, and our duty is to give them the maximum exposure in any number of ways, and one of those ways is to be on TV and to go racing and race up front to give them a return on their investment.”
Though few chose to clarify, most teams said they had a certain number of races they felt they needed to come out of 2020 relatively unscathed. As understanding as a sponsorship partner might be of the hardships IndyCar is facing, they have their own businesses to run that are similarly tight on cash flow. Though large chunks of money had changed hands before this year’s schedule went awry, those sponsors expect a baseline level of exposure for the money they’ve paid.
For some, it’s a black-and-white section of the partnership agreement. For others, it’s an unspoken but understood rule of thumb.
“I need to be around 12-14 (races) to be kept whole,” Meyer Shank Racing co-owner Mike Shank told IndyStar. “At this point, I’ve already had to rebate money as it is, and to go much lower would be devastating for my team. At the moment, we’re moving forward like we’re not going to have to deal with that.”
Added Ed Carpenter, who drives for and owns Ed Carpenter Racing: “At the end of the day, is there a firm number I can give? No. But definitely, every one that we lose, it does make it harder to continue having those conversations.”
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So if you’re IndyCar, why limit the scope of your schedule, especially as the near-constant shuffling has created such a massive void late in the year? On March 26, the series released a 14-race schedule where 13 of them were given a known date – the outlier being the planned season-finale at St. Pete that would later be announced for Oct. 25.
In those 13 races, only once was there a stretch of more than one weekend without a race (between Iowa July 18 and Mid-Ohio Aug. 9). And now, in mid-August, only a maximum of five of those 13 races will end up running on the date and at the location they were announced for on March 26. With that, an entirely new race weekend on the IMS road course was created out of thin air.
All of this shuffling has led to the creation of five doubleheaders among an expected 14 races, where IndyCar would visit just seven race venues and race on eight separate circuits – and that’s if the Mid-Ohio doubleheader that now exists without a weekend after it was postponed last Saturday survives.
The challenge of last-minute tracks
The existence of doubleheaders, instead of exploring the addition of new tracks to the 2020 schedule that weren’t originally on the first version announced in the fall of 2019, is due tothe logistical mess iusing new tracks iwould create. Most teams, along with Bridgestone Americas director of race tire engineering Cara Adams, agree the idea simply isn’t realistic – as much as fans and even some tracks like Kentucky might wish.
“It’s funny. In open-wheel racing, there’s this degree of comfort that teams cling to, where teams have to do a lot of testing before they race, so maybe that’s the apprehensive point there,” Chip Ganassi Racing managing director Mike Hull told IndyStar. “Some teams might be uncomfortable going to a track they’ve either not been to for a long time or not raced at ever.”
That apprehension starts with the company that plays a major role in, quite literally, keeping Indy cars rolling through the season. There’s a reason Bridgestone Americas, which designs and manufacturers the Firestone tires that IndyCar team uses for each race, test and practice, does so much offseason testing, while also relying on data that the series and individual teams gather during their own late-fall and winter on-track sessions.
“For places we’ve been before, we can get pretty close looking at simulation data,” Adams said. “But for a new track, it’s really difficult. Not only do you have a new layout, which means different loads and speeds on the tires, depending on how much banking there is, but the one thing that’s really hard to quantify is how abrasive the track is and how that tire interacts with the racing surface.”
Adams explained how, for offseason testing at Richmond before this year's planned return to the track, Firestone developed what turned out to be a solid tire construction. As it turned out, though, the compounds they tested struggled on a track IndyCar hasn’t visited since 2009 – even though Firestone had still been a series partner at the time.
“Even the most durable tires we brought to the test were still wearing out,” Adams said. “It’s hard to adapt, particularly for an oval or a super-speedway race without having that background on that track to off of to race with the current chassis.”
Even for Texas Motor Speedway, where IndyCar has run each year since 1997, it was well documented June that, due to production restrictions related to the coronavirus pandemic, Firestone was unable to bring its planned tire make a model for the 2020 season-opener – instead, having to rely on previous models that weren’t designed with the aeroscreen in mind.
Though other factors were at play – namely, sections of the track darkened (and therefore were much hotter with less grip) due to a PJ1 traction compound that NASCAR had previously applied – passing proved incredibly difficult.
Adams said she and IndyCar president Jay Frye are in almost daily communication – so much so that she has his number in her phone’s “favorites” list so calls can come through while she’s in “Do Not Disturb” mode. So you could say she and Firestone have known about the future of this year’s IndyCar schedule as far ahead as any partner. Already, the tire manufacturer has had to be plenty flexible in shifting around tire build schedules or planning to use tires for one road course that were originally meant for another.
But that level of flexibility ends at the idea of IndyCar visiting one of a handful of Midwestern oval tracks – Kentucky, the Milwaukee Mile, Michigan International or Kansas – with just eight weeks’ lead time from formal announcement to green flag.
'Walking a very delicate line'
Some teams said they’d be fine operating with the attitude of a local pickup basketball squad, a “name your time and place” mindset.
“If someone said to us, ‘We’re going to go to Kentucky and race (any given day), we’d be willing to do it. Absolutely,” Hull said. “We’d go there in a heartbeat. Our degree of comfort would only be affected by the fact that we wouldn’t have a lot of track time, but guess what? We’d figure out how to do it, and so would everyone else in the field.
“If the goal is to stay within engine miles, where we’d have some left, our team would prefer to have another race, rather than IndyCar say to us ‘Oh, now the season’s over. You have enough engine miles to go do a test somewhere.’ We’d prefer to go do a race somewhere.”
Others feel starkly different – particularly when you add in the idea that just about every realistic iteration of a race weekend for IndyCar in 2020 puts IndyCar further in the red with either the absence or limitation on fan attendance – even if it might mean more opportunities for teams to pull in race winnings and sponsor dollars.
“Could we make it happen? Yeah, probably,” Kiel said. “But is it the best thing for the sport? I don’t know.”
Added Shank: “We just can’t be popping off 15, 16, 17, 18 races this year. I don’t think it’s fair to Roger. It just extends his loss. He’s trying to walk a very delicate line, where Roger’s trying to keep the teams whole and keep IndyCar whole in this. It’s not going to be perfect right now, and what he’s doing right now is a small miracle, honestly.”
Does a 14-race champ deserve an asterisk?
With all that mind, though, how will the 2020 season be remembered, aside from all the schedule changes and the August fan-less Indy 500? Will all this be enough to keep a series of asterisks out of the record books?
At the moment, just one race short of the projected halfway point, teams seem to think so — both Ganassi, as well as those chasing the No. 9 of Scott Dixon in the standings.
Since 2001, IndyCar, or the IRL, has run at least 13 races each season, with nine different series champions over 19 seasons.
“You’ve got to have enough races to determine who really is the best over a series of races,” Hull said. “And if you don’t have what some would consider a reasonable number of races, how do you crown a true champion?”
Dixon has a 49-point lead over Simon Pagenaud heading into the Indy 500, with just four more points separating Pagenaud’s Team Penske teammate and defending series champ Josef Newgarden in third. Since 2015, where the final eight races of the season included one double-points race (the same as the projected end of the 2020 slate), the points leader with eight races to go has won the title three out of five times. Three times in that five-year segment have the top-three drivers with eight to go also made up the final championship podium.
All that considered, Team Penske president Tim Cindric feels plenty comfortable at this point in the season with two of his three drivers, both former series champs and 2020 race winners, making up Dixon’s most likely direct competitors. In fact, he’d be comfortable even if the Mid-Ohio doubleheader or a separate race or two were to become 2020 casualties.
“I think even with a race or two less, we’d still feel fine,” Cindric told IndyStar. “In some ways, this has been even more difficult in the circumstances everyone is working under. We’re still running ovals and road courses.
“And I think this has legitimized it all, whether we’re plus or minus another race here or there.”
Email IndyStar motor sports reporter Nathan Brown at nlbrown@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter: @By_NathanBrown.
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