Following the recent release of the schedule of the 2016
IndyCar Series season, into which New Zealand’s Scott Dixon will lead us, as
defending champion, I’ve analysed the venues where IndyCar will race next year,
and come up with the good, bad and ugly schedule choices.
The Good
Right at the top is the much-heralded return of the IndyCar
Series to Road America. It’s the best road course in North America, bar none,
and it’s been a tough pill to swallow to watch sports cars and NASCAR
Nationwide Series cars race that track in recent years, whilst the IndyCar Series
continued to pursue events at other tracks. Without a doubt, the best inclusion
for 2016. Road America is one of those places that’s popular with fans and
drivers alike. You can almost guarantee an excellent race.
Another returning, traditional IndyCar venue is the one-mile
Phoenix International Raceway, which was a bastion for open wheel competition
for many decades before the disastrous CART-IRL split of the mid-1990’s. The
track might host two boring NASCAR Sprint Cup Series races each year, but don’t
let the PIR layout fool you. It was made for IndyCar Series racing, and Tony
Kanaan, who recently tested there, says the current DW12 chassis is going to
provide some great racing.
Pocono returns, something that wasn't a guarantee as
recently as a few months ago. The triangle superspeedway will unfortunately
forever be remembered as the track where we lost Justin Wilson, but it’s also an
important track from a historical perspective. Unless there’s going to be a
field of 33, I’d prefer to see twin 150-mile races here, separated by 45
minutes or so. Otherwise, cars get strung out, and no one wants to see that for
500 miles.
The Bad
Double-header weekends proved to be incredibly popular in
Detroit and Toronto, especially, when they were first introduced (and also with
more limited success in Houston and on the Texas oval a few years back) and
provided fans with double the racing. Yes, sure, it was a grind on crews and
drivers, but the response from paying customers was overwhelmingly popular.
Why, then, do we have only one double-header event on the
2016 schedule? I’d love to see the Toronto weekend feature two races, and it’d
be fun to end the season with two races at Sonoma. A double-header at Iowa, an
evening race at sunset followed by a race under lights.
The overall length of the season still isn’t great. We kick
off on March 13 and ends in the middle of September – a run of about six
months. That’s not nearly long enough. Another 2-3 races and a month on the
schedule would look much better!
I know IndyCar doesn’t want to run against the NFL where
they can avoid it, and if that remains the case, the powers-that-be need to
find a way of running more events early in the season. The more exposure for
sponsors, the better.
An extra race next year, between St Petersburg (March 13)
and Phoenix (April 2) would be great. Mexico City was rumoured as a possibility
in February, but that event never got off the ground, obviously.
The Ugly
The glaring absence from the 2016 IndyCar Series schedule as
compared to this year’s edition is Milwaukee. The one-mile bullring never
managed to build a big enough crowd to sustain it, and when Michael Andretti’s
promotional arm pulled out, it seemed like the writing was on the wall. Even still,
I held out a little hope that someone would rescue the race weekend.
IndyCar needs to be at Milwaukee. It’s the oldest race track
in America, and has been a part of the sport for so long. The event never
really survived being stripped of it’s decades-old spot on the schedule, the
weekend following the Indianapolis 500. That’s a spot Detroit owns these days,
which doesn’t look like changing anytime soon.
Amid a flurry of lawsuits, the rain-affected NOLA
Motorsports Park round of the series in New Orleans, Louisiana, will not go
ahead in 2015, and there’s some ugly developments as far as unpaid costs are
concerned doing the rounds. Not that IndyCar should have been at what is
basically a club racetrack in the middle of nowhere – and, worse, the deep
south, which is NASCAR territory – in the first place.
Auto Club Speedway at Fontana, where the most exciting – and
insane – IndyCar race I’ve ever seen took place this year, is off the schedule.
That’s likely because there was a pitiful amount of people sitting in the
grandstands.
One more year at Fontana might have done the trick. After
all, the pack racing where cars were four-, five- and six-wide made national
headlines, and might well have pulled more fans through the door in 2016,
despite the furnace-like conditions in Los Angeles in summer, but, alas, we
shall never know.
There are still a glaring lack of traditional venues –
Watkins Glen and Laguna Seca, to name just two – on the schedule. Instead, the series
is trying to start up a new street race in Boston, which still may or may not
get off the ground.
Regardless, we go racing sixteen times in 2016 at fifteen
different tracks (Detroit has it’s usual doubleheader) that represent a nice,
even helping of each discipline of racing: five road courses, five ovals and
five street circuits.
Is it March yet?
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