Written by Archie O’Reilly
IndyCar’s visits to Iowa Speedway have been defined by the beautiful chaos of a frenzy of overtaking. Several lanes were open for drivers in a race made complete by the challenge of navigating lapped traffic amid the quest to manage the threat of tyre degradation.
But things changed in 2024.
The NASCAR-owned track was partially repaved ahead of the Cup Series’ inaugural visit last month. For IndyCar, when combined with a somewhat more durable tyre compound in anticipation for the hybrid system, this has been detrimental to the usual spectacle of one of its finest races year-long.
In 2024, Iowa transitioned into a largely processional one-lane race. And as drivers recall, the game has been changed…
A “fantastic” IndyCar race now “boring”
“I don’t know who decided to do this change,” a displeased Pato O’Ward said. “They ruined a fantastic race. The track is very enjoyable by yourself. The problem is it’s not very fun when you just can’t get by anybody. You can’t fight. It reminds me a bit of Texas 2020, where there wasn’t really a second groove.
“You might get there on the restarts. I flirted with it a little bit. I saw a couple cars doing it, especially for the lead. When you’re done with that first lap after the restart, you can’t. Once you get the momentum going, it’s just accepting the wall basically, or at least really crapping your pants. That’s just how it is.”
After finishing second on Sunday, championship leader Alex Palou was notably downbeat about the nature of the racing. It was a contrast to his usual positive outlook.
“Bit of a shame that we couldn’t really do anything to pass or to do anything,” he said. “Bit of a boring race for everybody: drivers, media. It’s the most boring thing I’ve ever done. It was yesterday as well. It’s a shame that we couldn’t really put a better show. I think everybody will agree that it was a very boring race to drive.”
Rather than any sort of spectacle of passing, positions were almost wholly made in pit cycles, with no on-track passes for the lead. Scott McLaughlin described his Saturday victory as a “team win” after decisively passing Colton Herta in the pits, with his Team Penske teammate Will Power winning via a crucial overcut the next day.
Josef Newgarden put his charge from 22nd to third in the opening race down to making up “probably 80 percent of my positions” during the two pit cycles. The rest came from the gutsy use of the high line on restarts before the prospect of using a second groove deteriorated.
Power on top in fuel-controlled affair
Such was the importance of track position, Palou said “you cannot really judge the race much on pure pace” as drivers were not pushing all-out due to fuel saving and the limited threat of actually being passed. McLaughlin described it as “obviously not a race that we’re used to seeing” at Iowa.
On Sunday, Power won by going long, saving fuel and fortuitously cycling to second under a caution - falling during the first pit cycle - after starting 22nd due to a brush with the wall on his second qualifying lap. What was a four-stop race dictated by tyre degradation in recent years became firmly a fuel-limited event with a more robust compound for 2024.
“Prayed for a yellow,” Power said. “That was the big one, getting that yellow. I felt like we had a better car than Alex [Palou]. Sat back, saved fuel again, went long, jumped him over in that [second pit] sequence.”
It was a stroke of luck that Power found his way to the front, though it proved a gamble worth taking.
“Every now and then catch a Scott Dixon yellow,” he said with a smile. “I need another 15 of them to catch up over the years. Any time I get one... hey, I’m owed about 15 of them from my early days.”
When leading at Iowa, lapped traffic and cars off-pace at the end of stints have previously been factors to navigate. But the lack of degradation negated a lot of this. Challenges with passing, regardless of performance disparities, mean the leader preferred to back up rather than catch slower cars, with little threat of them being passed themselves.
“Five to go, a bunch of cars [were] battling and started really to back up,” Power said. “I was keeping an eye on [Palou in second] and just trying to keep that gap to get big exits. It is a pity. Clearly faster than the group in front of us.
“You just can’t do anything. You simply need a second lane. If there’s a coating we can use or something… but a second lane would make this race amazing as it has been in years past.”
Overtaking frustration and off-line fears
The first race at Iowa in 2023 saw 1,502 on-track passes. The second saw over 1,000 again with 1,168 overtakes on the track. Whether it was drivers negotiating lapped traffic or passes for position, it was a frenetic spectacle that made for a hugely entertaining product.
But in 2024, things have taken a dramatic downturn. There were only 192 on-track passes in Saturday’s night race, with only a minor increase to 204 during Saturday’s midday event. And having less passes - not even all for position - than laps run across the weekend was majorly down to there no longer being that functional higher, second lane.
“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t bummed about the race and how it raced,” O’Ward said after finishing second on Saturday. “Really tough to get that second lane working. That was a bit frustrating because I thought we had a very strong car, definitely a car that was capable of winning. Just no way to get around a car.”
O’Ward feels the challenges with passing harbour a style of racing that is not sustainable given the gambles that had to be taken to make an overtake.
“Guys that want to make up spots have to take so much risk,” he said. “Maybe you look like a hero or it ends up in yellows. That just seems like it’s been the story of the series the last few races. Feels like there’s a lot of frustrated minds out there trying to make up positions.”
Newgarden, who had won five of the previous seven Iowa races, was not pinning the blame on any one driver after a six-caution first race but sided with O’Ward’s sentiments.
“It’s hard to pin anything on anybody because it was tough for every car to make something happen,” he said. “I thought our car was great and it was really difficult for us. I would imagine any person up and down the grid was fighting to make something happen. It’s very different to what it was last year. Last year you had a lot to work with.”
Feeding into a more orderly Sunday race, drivers appeared to have had confidence in going off-line diminish. But this may have ultimately let to the dramatic last-lap crash as Sting Ray Robb vaulted over a slowing, out-of-fuel Alexander Rossi and flipped multiple times, necessitating a hospital trip for further evaluation, from which Robb was cleared.
Ed Carpenter was also involved and ended up on top of Kyle Kirkwood as the pair lost control of their cars in an attempt to avoid the accident. Ultimately, the reluctance for Rossi to pull off-line or Robb to risk passing off-line bore out one of the biggest crashes seen in recent years.
“Like putting MotoGP on dirt”
There are concerns that the IndyCar package simply did not suit the nature of the partial Iowa repave, which produced good racing in NASCAR. The comparisons that Palou made were stark.
“The package of IndyCar tyre, aero, engine… whatever we had on track this weekend, it was impossible to make it run,” Palou said. “It was never an issue before. Having that said, we’ve seen other series here run well. We cannot compare. It’s like putting a MotoGP on dirt. It’s a cool track but you cannot put it on the same [track] and expect a very nice race.”
A race that was formerly perfect for IndyCar and its fans with “tonnes of overtaking and tonnes of tyre deg and things to do” is suddenly an inadequate fit. Newgarden suggested starting 22nd for the first race may have been fine last year but was “almost the kiss of death” on the repaved track.
“I don’t think our car and our formula works super well for this type of track adjustment,” Newgarden said separately to Palou on Saturday. “We’re different than a Cup car - we’ve developed our car differently than they have. It doesn’t always mesh. It definitely didn’t mesh tonight.”
Even before racing commenced, Scott Dixon remarked about how Iowa has “definitely changed” over the years but misses the character it possessed before the repave was completed in an attempt to smoothen the corners.
“We went through a good period for the last 10 years, whether it’s multi-lane, high deg… one of the best short track races that we have had,” Dixon said. “With the partial repave that they’ve done, it has taken away a lot of racability that we had.
“I miss last year’s track. I think drivers refer to it as character. It had a lot of character. It had a lot of bumps. It was definitely hard work - qualifying was very tough. Then obviously you had the use of two, three, four lanes in the race, especially on restarts and things like that. I hope it gets back to that.”
Could package changes improve things?
There has been lots of discussion about how Iowa could return to its previous calibre as a race. Power suggested he had heard a full resurface could be completed “in a couple of years” and possibly give a better chance of the high line working.
This was posed to O’Ward the day prior, who was pointed in saying: “I don’t think it’s up to me, is it? Probably up to NASCAR.”
Another suggestion is that the tyre compound could be changed further to encourage more degradation amid a currently conservative approach to compensate for the weight added by the new hybrid system. There appears to be a feeling that this has been somewhat of an afterthought amid the lengthy hybrid test programme.
After a pre-event test at Iowa, some downforce was taken away from the cars - amid average lap speeds reaching up to 190 miles per hour - and the tyre compound was softened amid a lack of degradation. But the alterations were seemingly not enough amid the continued hybrid learning process.
“I would just say this race tyre this weekend is quite temperature sensitive,” O’Ward said. “When they’re cold, they really are like: ‘No, no, no thanks.’ They really reject anything that is like: ‘Push, push, push.’”
Power had several theories about other contributing factors to why the racing may have suffered at Iowa. The resounding sentiment is that something has to change.
“I just wonder if we’re too heavy,” Power said following the first oval race with the hybrid system. “Then when we add the downforce, it overloads the tyre. That’s the predicament. I feel like if we were 200 pounds lighter, you could run more downforce, run a softer tyre.
“I think that should be and probably is a big focus of the new car coming in a couple years, to knock a lot of weight [off] - Formula 1 is trying to do the same thing. If you saw the racing at the beginning of this year, which is the lightest we’ve been for a bit, it was pretty fierce, good, hard racing. It was a lot more moves and closer racing.
“Even with this package, maybe a softer tyre might work with this downforce level. I don’t know what the answer is but we’ve certainly got to do something for next year. We went from the best oval race we would have all season to potentially the least amount of passing.”
McLaughlin maintains that the absence of a second lane aside from the opening laps of the race or after restarts is an overriding issue, with build-up of marbles making the high line too treacherous to venture into. But he agrees that there are still other areas for improvement.
“We need to somehow work a way to get the second lane to work, whether that’s a compound that goes on the racetrack or something that acts with our tyre and allows us to continue running that second lane,” McLaughlin said. “That thing worked - I passed three cars today on the outside of the restart.
“It does work. I think it will work through the race if you can just eliminate some of the excess rubber that goes on there. I think the package could help. I think IndyCar could go to work with downforce levels, working with Firestone on a few other things. But you just can’t blame the track because at the end of the day they have to repave this at some time.
“If we can somehow get our cars working when a repave happens and know what we need to do to make it work, we won’t run into these issues. I feel like we go into it and not do the right amount of study or whatnot to get it done and to get it to work.
“That’s not a shot at the sport, not a shot at anything. It’s working together with the amazing people and the geniuses we have up and down pit lane. It’s just a matter of making it work.”
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