4 thoughts from IndyCar at Texas: Yellow at the finish, an uncertain future, a team letdown

Four thoughts after IndyCar’s riveting, thrill of a show at Texas Motor Speedway Sunday afternoon:

Keep your green, white, checkered finish, NASCAR

It was a shame, for sure, that what many around the IndyCar paddock considered the series’ best non-500 oval race in more than five years ended with Josef Newgarden taking the white and yellow flags in unison.

What at one point had all the makings of a blowout, as O’Ward held a 7-second lead on 2^nd-place Newgarden and a lap on everyone else with fewer than 100 laps to go, received a proper shot in the arm as yellows bred more late yellows.

Over the closing laps, Newgarden hugged the inside line, begging O’Ward to go the long way around and pull off precisely the dicey move the Penske driver had used to win there in 2022 – albeit with a more sketchy track. Just after the pair completed Lap 247, O’Ward inched ahead on the front stretch dogleg. When Newgarden tried to surge back ahead, they banged wheels. O’Ward was actually scored the leader with two to go, but then, realizing a drag race to the finish would give him a coinflip’s chance at best for a win, he tucked in behind the leader, hoping to use the draft for one last shot to pull ahead for good at the white flag.

It was a masterclass in race craft between arguably IndyCar’s best two drivers on ovals – and it was a shame we didn’t get to see what the final 40 seconds or so might’ve had in store. But it’s for good reason.

NASCAR proved as much the weekend prior, as the Cup series required three overtimes of green-white-checkered finishes to get Tyler Reddick, clearly the dominant car on the day, to take the white flag and seal in a finish, no matter what carnage might follow. It was more than 35 minutes of extra racing from when the yellow flag with four to go flew at Circuit of the Americas to Reddick taking the checkered, largely filled with dead time on the broadcast and a demolition derby heading into COTA’s tight Turn 1 by drivers jockeying for who might fill the back-half of the top-10.

It highlighted what many drivers young and old have called a wild, wild west style of driving late in races – especially on road course restarts, where if you aren’t dive-bombing the guys two rows ahead of you, the guy behind you is bound to do it to you. Race with both elbows out and zero care for anyone else, and you may be lucky to hold your spot or gain one or two.

But in a sport that largely lets its drivers police the chaos on-track, that actually has a sponsor for its overtime shows (Credit One Bank, for those interested) and sees its next week of headlines filled with drivers throwing shots about “wrecking balls” and “12-year-olds on go-kart tracks,” it’s clearly the name of the game – like it or not. It’s no doubt “a show” – good or bad, and until further notice, it’s far and away the most lucrative form of racing in the country.

Insider: Sunday was one of IndyCar's best oval races in years. Will it get too dangerous again?

Sunday at TMS, we saw an IndyCar field late in the race scheming on tires and fuel with a concrete target in mind: 250 laps, no more, no less. And from that, we saw strategy and ninja-like moves on-track dictate how the racing would ultimately play out. If you’re O’Ward, you’re deciding whether to set Newgarden up for a pass heading to the white, or to do so with two to go – unsure of when (and if) a yellow might fall and end the race. It’s a 250-lap chess match with minuscule battles happening across every lap.

Sometimes, it means finishing under caution, but it’s the price to pay to keep from wrecking half the field, watching untold hundreds of thousands of dollars from owners’ pockets evaporate in a matter of minutes and having the risk of being bumped off network TV onto Peacock. IndyCar races are now, and should continue to be, a war across the entire race, with scant few yellow-flag finishes far outnumbered by races that end under green to complete what’s nearly always a solid show.

Despite thriller, IndyCar faces uncertain Texas future

One would hope that IndyCar’s show Sunday would mean that exciting open-wheel shows at Texas are back. It’ll take until 2024 to see if folks in the Dallas-Fort Worth area will fill more than a few thousand grandstand seats at a place IndyCar once drew well over 100,000.

But, as NBC’s Nate Ryan pointed out in his column Sunday, IndyCar may need some help to remain at the track. Rumors have swirled for months about the future of TMS and whether track and Speedway Motorsports officials might consider a resurfacing or a full-blown reconfiguration of the track that opened in 1997. After years of great racing for NASCAR and IndyCar, both series ran into weather delays across their various 2016 weekends, forcing then-president Eddie Gossage to both repave and reprofile the track to aid in drainage and give it a unique layout that separated it from other 1.5-mile ovals around the country.

It took until Sunday for IndyCar to recapture some of the magic that led to the 5th-closest finish in series history in 2016, while wasting several years trying to undo the measures NASCAR had been forced to take to keep the racetrack raceable (which it wasn’t a year ago). In 2019, the sanctioning body laid the traction compound PJ1 down in the second lane in hopes of allowing the Cup cars to run side-by-side. That created an ice rink for IndyCar’s Firestone rubber that, for its three 2020 and 2021 shows, took away any semblance of on-track passing to the level we saw yesterday – 482 for position (200 more than ’22 and 300 more than the average since 2018) and 26 lead changes (the most since 2001).

But TMS may see a resurfacing before IndyCar’s likely spring return in 2024. “If they change the track and resurface it or anything, it just ruins it for us,” Will Power told reporters post-race. “For us to find the tire and downforce level is really hard, but they’ll probably do what’s best for NASCAR, not for us.

“And honestly, if they saw the race today, they’d be crazy to do it."

IndyCar’s solid-but-not-spectacular race a year ago led to a double-digit percentage increase in attendance, new track president Mark Faber told NBC Sports, and one would think that with another step up in promotion, they’d start to see what one might consider a decent crowd in 12 months. But if NASCAR holds another snoozer playoff race in its lone visit to Texas this year in September, we may soon learn of plans to aid the series that pays the bills.

“I told Will (Power), ‘We want your ideas, but we have to talk about IndyCar AND NASCAR,” Faber told NBC Sports post-race. “We’ll see this fall. (SMI chairman) Marcus Smith has already talked about working with iRacing on three models of what to do with the configuration. We’re working on it, and we always want to get better.”

'Absolutely unacceptable' weekend from RLL

Graham Rahal is as brutally honest as they come, but when it comes to Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing, the IndyCar veteran typically takes a glass-half-full approach. At St. Pete, where he’d finished 20^th or worse across the first two practices and qualifying and as a whole RLL had finished 17^th or worse in six of the nine performances, Rahal attributed he and Christian Lundgaard’s ability to finish 6^th and 9^th in the race in a simple swap of the brakes.

Before he crashed midway through, Jack Harvey had been cycling between 10^th and 15^th. After a massive organizational shakeup that followed RLL’s expansion to three fulltime cars in 2022 that came without the proper personnel in place, ships seemed to have been righted. The team’s performance in Texas – dismal now two years running – brought serious question marks back to the table.

Still with an ounce of smugness left in his voice, Rahal took his team’s qualifying performance Saturday (24^th, 27^th and 28^th in a 28-car field) in stride, saying he was “disappointed” and noting RLL’s cars were “missing something big because the cars don’t accelerate.” He hadn’t required 6^th gear at all in his run – a glaring issue for what he called “draggy,” “slow” cars. Yet, he ended his post-qualifying interview with NBC with this:

“We’ve got to keep our heads down. I know people are frustrated, and I’m excited to read the Twitter-ati and how poor we are, but the truth of the matter is we’re all trying extremely hard. (Our performance) is not acceptable, but tomorrow, we’ll be fine as we always are here.”

Things were, in fact, not fine.

By Lap 36, all three cars had been lapped, and through the first 180 laps – before several cautions took out a handful of cars – none of them ran better than 20^th outside pit stop cycles. Rahal was pacing the three cars – all three laps down – in 18^th, 20^th and 21st when he had nowhere to go with 27 laps left and ran over the top of a skidding Devlin DeFrancesco to end his frustrating, forgettable day.

And when met outside the infield care center by the NBC broadcast, Rahal let his guard down. Though Texas and the Indy 500 are very different races, the team’s lack of competitiveness in both a year ago, combined with Rahal’s comments about the cars’ lack of competitiveness on the aerodynamics side, leave some glaring question marks headed to the two-day open test at IMS later this month.

“Our setup to start the race was so far out the window that it was everything I could do to hang on as long as I did,” Rahal said. “I’m definitely frustrated. This entire weekend, we expected a lot out of the team and none of us were in the window at all. For a team like us, it’s absolutely unacceptable.”

Pit stops

∎ As he noted on Twitter, Marcus Ericsson, the points leader coming into this weekend, was well outside the contenders across the weekend, and yet he managed to finish 8^th. It’s good enough for 2^nd-place in points after two races as he heads to Long Beach, where he had podium pace a year ago.

∎ Even after two races with significant attrition (19 of 45 competitors haven’t finished thus far), that Juncos Hollinger Racing – last year’s little engine that could – has put both its cars inside the top-12 in both races (including an Argentine stock car driver getting his first open-wheel experience) is something to be marveled at. Sometimes, survival is the name of the game in IndyCar, but Callum Ilott and Agustin Canapino have done more than that to finish 5^th, 9^th, 12^th and 12^th to start. They’re not yet ready to truly compete with the title contenders – even as Ilott appears to have that type of talent – but they appear to be as good, if not better, than some long-tenured teams in this series early in 2023.

∎ Felix Rosenqvist and Romain Grosjean left St. Pete wondering what could’ve been. Both find themselves in contract years, in championship-level rides and with the belief that, on any given weekend, they can deliver podiums – or better. But both need to start delivering on those lofty expectations if they hope to hold onto their rides come 2024, and for both, however the weekend may have gone – a pole for the Swede and running at the front for two laps in the race’s final stretch for the Frenchman – didn’t produce worthy results. Potential only goes so far, and the pair will now head to Long Beach with urgency continuing to rise.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: IndyCar at Texas: Thoughts on a yellow finish, Rahal's letdown, more