NTT Data Indycar Series Round 15 of 17: The World Wide Technology Raceway (???) at Gateway, St Louis
I hope you enjoyed this week! After a race – well, a lap really – at Pocono when Indycar’s profile took a reverse nose dive towards mass relevance by having a driver people have sort of heard of upside down and on fire, the relentless Indycar tour of incident and merriment rolls into St Louis, Missouri with the promise of nightfall, speed and hopefully passing at the uncannily 1920s-sounding World Wide Technology Raceway, formerly known as Gateway, formerly known as That Race CART Used To Schedule On The Same Weekend As The Indy 500. I assume the racetrack is named after the Gateway Arch, which, er, arches across the Mississippi River. Presumably it’s a gateway to the Great American West, or perhaps to the blue-brown wobbly thing that links up with New Orleans, although since history ended and time was declared a flat circle, it may just be another broken image in the thrice-shuffled Tarot deck the world has come to resemble. While Wikipedia steers clear of such metaphysical flapping, it does put the arch down as “Missouri’s Tallest Accessible Building”, which raises Missouri questions all of its own.
Anyway. This is a lot of waffle to say: Indycar race. Gateway. Saturday night. Good.
Here is the schedule; or, Whenabouts On Saturday Night?
This one is a two-day event, because why not? We get Indy Lights and the NASCAR equivalent of the Vanarama Conference too. Times below are Missouri time, which Google tells me is 6 hours behind Airstrip One. Perhaps it’ll be dark by the end of the race, or perhaps not.
Friday, 23 August
1pm: Indycar practice 1
5.15: Indycar qualifying
6.30: Ex-Mazda Pro 2000 qualifying
7.30: Indy Lights qualifying
8.15: Indycar practice 2
Saturday, 24 August
1.45pm: Pro 2000 race
3.25: Indy Lights race
4.35: NASCAR K&N Series Monaco 125
7: Indycar Bommarito 500(km) GO
What’s up with this track then
Gateway is one of those tricky ovals shaped like an irregular polygon, which makes it essentially a road course. It’s one-and-a-quarter miles long, which no other oval is, which sort of adds to the sui generis, take some risks, we-don’t-know-what-we’re-doing late 1990s CART feel of the track. It works, anyway. Here’s a video with bright colours and James Hinchcliffe’s hands that shows you what the lap looks like. One of the corners is tighter than the other. See if you can guess which one:
More urgently, this is the last oval of the year. I don’t know if there are any Indycar drivers left who are awful on ovals, but what is a fact is that the last two Gateways were won and fairly dominated by Team Penske. While nothing could possibly be as memorable as Paul Tracy taking out his teammate Dario Franchitti there in 1999, still pretty memorable was Josef Newgarden almost taking out his teammate Simon Pagenaud in 2017, but instead merely taking the lead and putting one hand on whatever big trophy it is that they hand out at the end of the season. Those Penske boys! Anyway, I assume they’ll be tough to beat. Less bleedingly obviously, a look through the past two years shows unexpected fifths for Zach Veach (2018) and Conor Daly (2017). These twilight races seem to throw up odd results as the track cools, setups go off and drivers are inhabited by the primal spirits dividing the night from the day, so keep an eye out for the lower reaches of your spotter’s guide.
The points table being what it is, with Josef Newgarden maintaining about a win’s distance from Alexander Rossi, Simon Pagenaud and Scott Dixon and a likely double-points shitshow still to come at Laguna Seca, nothing as decisive is likely to happen this weekend. That is unless Josef somehow manages to knock all three of his championship rivals into the wall, which given what happened last Sunday we shouldn’t entirely rule out. Speaking of the points table, the mostly-invisible Ryan Hunter-Reay has collected enough finishes for sixth spot in the championship. Oh yeah, Indycar, it’s so competitive, anyone can win. Fact: 2013 had mostly the same drivers as today and Marco Andretti ended the year fifth. That was a sour note to commemorate Ryan Hunter-Reay’s 250th Indycar start, which is an impressive achievement given that he started the decade without a full-time drive despite winning his first race as a Young American all the way back in 2003. So apologies and congratulations (congratupologies?) to him.
Anything else we should know about?
The Spotter’s Guide here will take you through all the shiny liveries that will look extra shiny under the big lights and sort of muted and attractive in the dusk. Conor Daly is borrowing Max Chilton’s dad’s Gallagher car, Ed Carpenter is in, Simon Pagenaud is in the truly offensive Menards yellow, and Felix Rosenqvist is swapping his usual NTT Data blue for a spiffy and somewhat NASCAR-y Monster Energy paintjob and stickers. So it’ll be 22 starters, 248 laps. The rest of the field is running out of chances to do something out of the ordinary and reel in Mr Four-Wins Newgarden. Might happen.
) the chances for a driver at slamming the wall with 190 are quite a bit better than that they are with 230.
