Insider: Double points for Indy 500 seems right but it just didn't matter enough

THERMAL, Calif. – Want to get a rise out of an IndyCar fan or driver? You only need two words:

Double.

Points.

In a sport so centered around its traditions, there can be nothing more divisive than change for change’s sake or something that messes with the Greatest Spectacle in Racing.

We saw it in 2014, when Derrick Walker, then-IndyCar president of competition and operations, announced a points gimmick designed to “reward teams and drivers that continually rise to the occasion at key times of the year” by awarding double points for a driver’s finishing position at the three 500-mile races on the schedule.

And we saw it Thursday, when a late-night press release did away with the double points format for the Indianapolis 500. Because, outside one significant exception in 2015, double points – whether used for all three 500-mile races, the Indy 500 and the finale or simply over Memorial Day weekend – had virtually no effect on the championship’s finish, despite what the series would have you believe.

“Over the years, the rule has proven to overly penalize full-time championship teams that have performed poorly in the 500,” read IndyCar’s release Thursday.

Added series president Jay Frye: “While double points at the Indianapolis 500 has not altered who won the season-long champion, occasionally it has had a negative effect on the final position of the full-time teams.”

Double points aren't overly penalizing

Now, before we go any further, a couple quick points:

>>Teams and drivers are about the title race and the 22 Leaders Circle spots. I can promise you Marcus Ericsson will never give another thought to the fact he fell from 4^th in points to 6^th during last year’s finale. He will forever care he couldn’t parlay his 500 victory into a championship.

>>To be blunt, those fighting for a position at the bottom of the Leaders Circle (the nearly $1 million prize for finishing in the top-22, with a few exceptions) are doing well to finish in the top-15 in the 500. Finishing last in the 500 and receiving 10 points, versus 20^th and the 20 points that comes with it, isn’t the deciding factor whether your team finished 24^th instead of 21^st. With double-digit races following the 500, there’s ample time to make up whatever small margin exists.

So, what we’re talking about here is an “overly penalizing” system. Yet in the three seasons it was only used for the 500, it's only resulted in a single position swap within the top-5 in points: Scott Dixon finished 3^rd in points in 2021 rather than 4^th after he ran out of fuel in pitlane. Pato O’Ward, who took 4^th in the 500 that year, moved up to third.

You know what wasn’t “overly penalizing” in 2022? A system that saw the 1^st- through 5^th-place finishers in the title race finish 15^th, 13^th, 21^st, 29^th and 9^th in the 500.

Back in 2021, I did a deep dive into this very topic to see at the halfway point, how double points had affected the championship race. The most glaring example was Graham Rahal, who at the time sat 9^th in points, 121 back of eventual champion Alex Palou after the No. 15 Honda team looked to be on its way to a 500 victory before one of Rahal’s wheels wasn’t properly secured before leaving the pits. It fell off half a lap later and sent him careening into the wall, dropping him from a near-certain top-5.

Finishing 32^nd Rahal would’ve lost just 35 points to Palou instead of 74 without double points and would’ve been 6^th entering Mid-Ohio with an 86-point deficit to make up. He and his team would’ve been wondering, ‘What if,’ but the mistake would’ve been far less penalizing in terms of the championship.

“I’m not saying we’d be leading in points, because we haven’t won a race, but you look at the average finish you need for the championship, and it’s typically 5.8 or so,” Rahal said at the time “(Without the 500 and before 11^th at Road America), we’re right there (at 6.4). The way double points works, it hasn’t been great for us.”

But Rahal wasn’t nearly title-contending material that season, with just two top-5s coming in the back half of the year. With single or double points at the 500, he would’ve finished 7^th in the title race by season’s end.

Double points impact on the 2015 season

Serious impact from the use of double points has been limited to a single season. In 2015, Dixon and Juan Pablo Montoya tied for the title after the six-time champ won the finale, while the 1999 CART champ struggled to slam his rival’s window shut in 6^th.

DIxon's three wins to Montoya’s two gave him his fourth Astor Cup in a tiebreaker. Had double points not been awarded for the finale, given Dixon’s 47-point deficit, Montoya would’ve had to do little more than start the race.

Doing away with double points altogether, however, would've changed the championship winner that year. Interestingly, the pair’s finishes in the 500 and finale nearly mirrored each other (1^st and 6^th for Montoya, 4^th and 1^st for Dixon), and so with Montoya having lost four fewer points than Dixon, with a single points format, the Colombian driver would now be a two-time IndyCar champion, with Dixon still two away from AJ Foyt’s all-important seven.

Iowa doubleheader now means more to championship than the 500

What Walker’s decision in 2014 really did was attempt to fix a problem that didn’t need fixing. Unlike its counterparts in NASCAR, which has required a playoff system to inject energy and excitement into its title races, and F1, which often sees drivers clinch championships with several races left, IndyCar’s long been free of that issue. Since Dan Wheldon’s runaway title in 2005, the finale has always had something massive on the line, albeit in varying manners.

The scrapping of the system, though pushed for by drivers in recent years, creates another imbalance that, frankly, seems even more glaring. In getting rid of double points at the 500, a race drivers have said doesn’t need them to feel any more important and where the use of them (at least in their minds) can be quite punitive, it now means less in terms of the championship than the Iowa doubleheader.

That weekend is 492 miles of racing (compared to 500), with drivers running two qualifying laps (rather than the minimum of 12 the 500 polesitter does) and includes just 90 minutes of practice, rather than nearly 30 hours for the 500.

Count me firmly in the camp that drivers and teams give the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend their absolute all because of the allure of the milk bath, the Borg-Warner, the ring, the massive check and the place in racing immortality, rather than for a boost in the title race.

Awarding the 500 normal points feels severely inadequate, and yet, double seems potentially too costly, which means where we’ve landed after this decade of near constant change, is right in the long run. But just as Walker’s experiment essentially proved a dud, Frye and Roger Penske’s latest move looks and feels more like change for change’s sake – or, if nothing else, three years too late.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indy 500: Double points seems right but it just didn't matter enough