Gateway IndyCar Postscript

Will Power

From all indications, this past weekend’s Bommarito Automotive Group 500 was a worthy sequel to last year’s successful return of the Verizon IndyCar Series to Gateway Motorsports Park. Another robust crowd saw Will Power drive the No. 12 Verizon Team Penske Chevrolet to victory lane 1.3s ahead of Alexander Rossi. Series championship leader Scott Dixon came home third.

The win was Power’s third of 2018, and the 35^th of his career moving the 2018 Indianapolis 500 winner into a tie for 7^th all-time with Bobby Unser. It was also – interestingly enough – Power’s 4^th win in the last 9 oval races.

With two races remaining, the Australian sits third in the championship standings 42 points behind Rossi and 68 points behind Dixon.

Speaking of the championship…..

I’ve been saying for a few weeks, not only in this space, but on the AR1 IndyCar Podcast with Brian Carroccio (shameless plug), that the 2018 championship battle is shaping up to be an absolute classic.

Central to this notion of the championship being a classic, is the fact no driver is surrendering significant ground. No one is limping to the finish, as everyone seems to be at or close to the top of their game.

Consider that the top-4 have all won three races this season; the same top-4 have won 10 of the 14 pole positions (I’m not counting Dixon’s entrant points pole this weekend).

And as you can see by the table below, no one has surrendered significant ground in the last three races.

Recent Finishing Positions

Pos	Driver	MDO	POC	GAT	Pts
1	Scott Dixon	5	3	3*	568
2	Alexander Rossi	1*	1*	2	542
3	Will Power	3	2	1	500
4	Josef Newgarden	4	5	7	490

In short, the 2018 championship race has been a heavyweight fight with the combatants in peak form throwing their best shots. And there’s no indication that the final two races will be anything different.

Decision to lineup on entrant points

[adinserter name="GOOGLE AD"]As you probably know, Friday’s qualification session was rained out and the decision was made by INDYCAR to set the field based on entrant points. The

entrant points provision exists, of course, as a fallback, merit-based procedure to set the field in the case traditional qualifying cannot take place due to weather or whatever else.

That said, such a provision should be exercised in my opinion only when ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY. And yes, at Gateway this weekend, the race day schedule at the track was much busier than say Pocono the week before. However, the series still had ALL DAY Saturday to adjust the schedule and mix in whatever practice or qualifying session they deemed necessary.

After all, we’re two races from crowning a champion here. Shouldn’t the contenders and other competitors be afforded the courtesy of the series making every effort possible to allow this championship to be determined on the track? And it just seemed to me, that little effort was made to have a proper qualifying session.

Gateway Success

When the track is not owned by NASCAR lovers ISC and SMI, IndyCar can draw a crowd

I’ll admit: when the series first announced they would be returning to Gateway prior to last season, I was amongst the biggest skeptics regarding the viability of the event. However, two well-attended shows have certainly gone a long way to piping down those such as myself. And I think its fair at this point to at least acknowledge the things we know Gateway does in fact have going for it, to possibly create a template for the series pursuing future events.

1) Near a metropolitan area; but not too major a metropolitan area

I’ve long been of the belief that IndyCar is better off targeting secondary markets such as St. Louis rather than major metropolitan areas. Think Birmingham and St. Petersburg, two markets the series has enjoyed a certain degree of success. Heck, Indianapolis is a secondary metropolis population wise.

Long Beach is perhaps in a category of its own with proximity to Los Angeles and San Diego, yet in a community and entity unto itself.

Such areas have large enough populations for an event to succeed. However, those markets aren’t so large that an IndyCar event gets buried amongst numerous other stick-and-ball teams and other events. In other words, IndyCar has the chance to be important in St. Louis, hopefully Portland this week, and other secondary markets in a way that it cannot in places such as New York, Boston and Chicago.

2) No NASCAR event at the track

Pocono attendance suffers from two NASCAR Cup races within 8 weeks for the IndyCar race

Think about it: putting the Indianapolis Motor Speedway aside, the other ovals IndyCar raced at in 2018 all have serious NASCAR conflicts. Of course, this is not blaming the tracks, this is simply a reality of the business. But Pocono, Phoenix and Texas each have two NASCAR Monster Energy Cup Series races. At Pocono, the IndyCar race is three weeks after the second of two NASCAR events. For Phoenix, INDYCAR ran 27 days after the NASCAR race.

While Iowa does not have a Cup race, the IndyCar race (July 19-20) is wedged between two NASCAR weekends:

-June 16-17: NASCAR XFinity Series and NASCAR Gander Outdoors Trucks Series
-July 26-27: NASCAR K & N Pro Series and Xfinity Series

Granted, the list of viable oval facilities that don’t have NASCAR races isn’t exactly a long one. But the desire, if at all possible, to avoid conflict with NASCAR would seem to give an event a better chance.

3) Content

The Gateway weekend had Pro Mazda and Indy Lights joining IndyCar. Fans got multiple races and continuous track action, and this is important for a sport that depends on people to travelling relatively long distances for its events.

4) A favorable time slot for fans

An evening race undoubtedly works better from a weathering the heat standpoint during the summer, and we saw that Iowa is making the very wise decision to put the race back on Saturday night in 2018.

But Saturday night allows fans more flexibility in travel. A fan can travel from a few hours away, stay one or two nights in a hotel, still have the ability to travel a few hours and be home at a decent time for work the following day.

A Sunday race that starts 2 p.m. or later really makes it a stretch for fans. For example, Pocono the week before started just after 2 p.m. and with the Red Flag the race was not over until nearly 7 p.m. A fan that travelled to Pocono, from say Baltimore (about 3 hours) is home at best around 10 p.m.

Of course, there are numerous considerations when scheduling an event, and I know all of the above are not easily satisfied. However, I think at the very least the success of Gateway relative to other comparable events should give the series and industry a little food for thought.

Growth

CJ O'Donnell appeared on CNBC. Why not a driver too?

I’m going to repeat this until someone presents me some data. But I keep hearing that IndyCar is growing. The latest to sing this tune was Hulman Motorsports Chief Marketing Office C.J. O’Donnell appearing on CNBC last week. O’Donnell noted that IndyCar has been “showing growth the last four years or more."

Now, I’m not fileting O’Donnell here. He’s a marketing guy and it’s not his job to go on TV and say “yeah, I mean, you know we’re just kind of stagnant here, man." But can someone please show me any metric(s) that indicates this “growth" everyone seems to have accepted as Gospel?

Also, when the series obtains a precious few minutes on such a non-racing platform, wouldn’t it be wise to send a driver? I get that CNBC is a business network, but a driver could easily be prepped for a 3-minute chat. Nothing against O’Donnell, who was very gracious the one time I met him, but the stars of the sport are the drivers, not the marketing officer.

Brian Carroccio is a senior columnist for AutoRacing1, and the host of the AR1 IndyCar Podcast with Brian Carroccio. He can be contacted at BrianC@AutoRacing1.com.