Yahoo Autos This Weekend in Auto Racing (June 13th, 2021)
IndyCar - Detroit Belle Isle
Saturday, June 12th - 2:00 p.m. ET - NBC - Streaming on the NBC Sports app
Sunday, June 13th - 12:00 p.m. ET - NBC - Streaming on the NBC Sports app
Following up Indianapolis with Detroit has become tradition, and this year that tradition has moved to two weeks after the 500. Helio Castroneves, the triumphant winner of that race, is not here this weekend; his part-time schedule for Meyer Shank Racing does not include these events, so he will instead race in Tony Stewart's SRX this weekend.
For those who are racing, a double points Indianapolis 500 won by a part-timer has done a strange thing to the championship standings. Second-year driver Alex Palou, who finished second, now has a commanding 36-point lead in the standings. Scott Dixon and Colton Herta, finishing outside the top 15 after being the two fastest cars of the Month, have fallen to second and an alarming seventh. Patricio O'Ward and Simon Pagenaud, who finished top five in a race where five part-time entries filled the top ten, have moved to third and fourth.
O'Ward will have the advantage today. He starts on pole for race 1 at Belle Isle, and he has a buffer of drivers outside of the current title fight in Alexander Rossi (currently 15th) and Romain Grosjean (part-time, but currently 21st) directly behind him. After this weekend, half of the season's championship points will have been given out. Anyone who wants to compete for a title knows they need to start winning races now.
NASCAR - All-Star Race
Sunday, June 13th - 8:00 p.m. ET - Fox Sports 1 - Streaming on the Fox Sports app
The NASCAR All-Star Race, a long-standing off weekend activity that traditionally pitted the previous year's race winners against one another for a significant cash prize, lives on in a new format on a new weekend. The race is now at Texas Motor Speedway, and the outlandish new format features five guaranteed cautions and no green flag runs longer than 30 laps. The race is also testing an even lower horsepower output than usual, a startling 510 hp from a series that was close to 900 as recently as 2014, in an attempt to create even tighter racing.
Between the stages and the spacer, the concept of this race is experimentally doubling down on everything that has made NASCAR's product markedly worse since 2014. All of those things have been attempts to improve racing that have backfired, so NASCAR is digging in further in hopes that there is gold underneath. Unlikely, but it is at least trying something, and that might be worth a shot.
IMSA - Detroit Belle Isle
Saturday, June 12th - 5:00 p.m. ET - NBC Sports Network - Streaming on the NBC Sports app
Yes, Belle Isle is the host to two IndyCar races and an IMSA race in the span of about 24 hours.
The IMSA race features both DPi and GTD, and, therefore, the two best categories in the series today. In DPi, Kevin Magnussen will start from his first career IMSA pole for Chip Ganassi Racing's Cadillac. With Magnussen on pole in DPi and Grosjean third in IndyCar, there is an outside chance that the 2020 Haas F1 teammates could become winners in their respective American series for the first time on the same day.
GTD, as ever, is deeply competitive. The Peregrine Racing Audi will start on pole, but the top seven are covered by less than half a second and represent six wholly different teams and manufacturers. GTLM is not officially present in this one, but the two Corvette Racing C8.Rs that make up the entire class field in non-endurance events will be competing on a non-championship basis.
FIA World Endurance Championship - Portimao
Sunday, June 13th - 6:00 a.m. ET - Streaming on the MotorTrend app
A delayed Le Mans is still two months away, but the battle to win it overall began months ago. Every World Endurance Championship event represents a chance for Toyota's privateer competition to prove that they can bring the fight to the heavy favorites when it matters most, and this weekend marks the most competition Toyota has seen since the LMH class debuted earlier this year. Portimao marks the debut of Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus, the American team that has built their own Hypercar, the SCG 007, in an attempt to dethrone the lone factory in the class at Le Mans later this year.
Both groups will be disappointed by qualifying. The Toyotas will start second and third, outgunned by the Alpine-run 2020 Gibson LMP1 car that has been grandfathered into the class for this season. The three are just under a second quicker than the LMP2 leaders, while the SCG 007 has qualified two seconds behind the Hypercar leaders in the middle of that LMP2 group.
But the race is 8 hours long, and that leaves plenty of time for the positions to change hands. Both Alpine and Glickenhaus are hoping to see competitive pace against Toyota at Portimao, but all three manufacturers understand that this series is about preparing for Le Mans first and foremost. To survive 24 hours, a car must be able to survive 8 with ease.
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