2025 NTT INDYCAR SERIES Round 1 of 17: Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg Presented by RP Funding
Ahoy me hearties! This here be the S.S. NTT INDYCAR SERIES, about to weigh anchor and set sail on its next 17-race voyage to uncharted waters. On this vessel be twenty-seven sea dogs ready to brave the briny deep in search of glory, pieces of eight, and booty (heh). We’re always lookin’ for fresh blood to join the krewe, so if ye bilge rats care ta know what this voyage has in store, batten down the hatches and read on, otherwise I’ll make ye walk the plank to Davy Jones’ locker. Remember: dead men tell no tales.
Don’t worry that’s the end of the pirate voice.Event Itinerary
Thursday, February 27
16:00-19:00 INDYCAR Party in the Park
17:00-finish 5K Run on the Firestone Grand Prix Track
Friday, February 28
09:10-09:45 USF Pro 2000 Practice
10:00-10:30 Mazda MX-5 Cup Practice 1
10:45-11:20 USF2000 Practice
11:35-12:05 USF Pro 2000 Qualifying
12:20-12:50 Mazda MX-5 Cup Practice 2
12:45-13:45 NTT INDYCAR SERIES Autograph Session
13:05-13:35 USF2000 Qualifying
14:00-14:45 INDY NXT by Firestone Practice 1
15:05-16:25 NTT INDYCAR SERIES Practice 1
16:45-17:30 USF2000 Race 2
Saturday, March 1
08:05-08:45 Mazda MX-5 Cup Qualifying
09:10-09:55 INDY NXT by Firestone Practice 2
10:15-11:15 NTT INDYCAR SERIES Practice 2
11:35-12:15 USF Pro 2000 Race 1
12:30-13:10 USF2000 Race 2
13:30-14:00 INDY NXT by Firestone Qualifying
14:30-16:00 NTT INDYCAR SERIES Qualifying
16:15-17:00 INDY NXT by Firestone Autograph Session
16:25-17:10 Mazda MX-5 Cup Race 1
Sunday, March 2
08:00-08:40 USF Pro 2000 Race 2
09:02-09:27 NTT INDYCAR SERIES Warm-Up
10:10-11:05 INDY NXT by Firestone Race
12:29-15:00 Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg Presented by RP Funding
15:00-15:45 Mazda MX-5 Cup Race 2
All times are Eastern Standard. Convert the schedule to your time here. Or just ask ChatGPT like the lazy ass you are.
The Spotter Guide
What, you thought this would be here by now? This is the NTT INDYCAR SERIES. We’re lucky if we know which disguise Dale Coyne has picked out for Conor Daly to wear in the rent-a-ride special by Friday morning. I’m just hoping it involves a fake mustache and Scott Dixon’s hideous sunglasses. That would certainly be a lot less work than this was.
Viewing Options
North American and United Kingdom Viewers
For the first time, NTT INDYCAR SERIES fans in the United States can turn to the same place on network TV to find every race: Fox.
No, not that one.That’s right race fans, every single race will be on Fox this season, so you won’t have to worry about what channel to tune into, which would be a relief except God knows when the green flag will actually wave. In other words, it’s situation normal: all Foxed up.
Speaking of Foxed up, if you’re from the 51st US state you can follow on TSN or TSN+. If you’re a UK viewer, check in to
International Viewers
Check this link to see how to watch all that can’t miss NTT INDYCAR SERIES action.
Or...
There’s a secret third option! The NTT INDYCAR SERIES is also available for viewing via their very own streaming service, INDYCAR Live*! For a small fee, you too can be a loyal follower of the NTT INDYCAR SERIES without having to sail the high seas in search of streams. Seriously, don’t do that. We want to be able to watch it next year.
*Not actually available for live viewing in the United States. I know, “What the Fox is up with that?” you say, but I suspect you already know...
Trackmania: Gulf Coast DLC
”YACHT BASIN”St. Petersburg Street Circuit
First Race: 1985
Surface: Scorched
Turns: 14 (5 lefts, 9 rights)
Track Length: 1.8 mi
Number of Laps: 100
Race Distance: 180 mi
Ideal Pit Strategy: 3 or 4 stops
Fastest Qualifying Time: 59.2706 (Felix Rosenqvist, 2024)
Fastest Race Lap: 1:00.8779 (Kyffin Simpson, 2024)
X: @GPSTPETE
’Winningest’ Driver: Hélio Castroneves (x3)
’Winningest’ Team: Team Penske (x11)
’Winningest’ Engine: Honda (x11)
2024 Winner:
2024 Lead Changes: 4
2024 Overtakes: 122 (97 for position)
2024 Yellows: 3, for 9 laps
St. Pete is located in the Tampa Bay area, which is a bit like saying that Long Beach is located in Los Angeles or Thermal in Palm Springs, not that I’m speaking from a position of authority on the matter (gimme a break, Jim, I do this for free). If I let geography get in the way of writing something amusing you’d all be reading some hideously dry Frasierian screed about the merits of street art in St. Petersburg. But who wants to hear about that when we could be talking about PIRATES???
Tampa Bay is rich in pirate culture, owing to its history as a favored stomping ground of mythical Florida folk hero-pirate José Gaspar. Legend has it Gaspar, nicknamed Gasparilla, amassed a huge fortune in a forty-year swashbuckling career and died at sea after being tricked and ultimately defeated by the United States Navy when tempted to buckle one last swash. The Tampa Bay area has held an annual festival in his honor for over 120 years, making him only slightly less famous than Pato O’Ward (I bet Mark Miles doesn’t think Gaspar actually exists either). So you wouldn’t be out of place sporting an eye patch, fake peg-leg, shoulder-mounted parrot, or yelling “AVAST!” here. Just don’t do it in Orlando—everyone knows avasts and Orlando don’t go together.
Anyway, the organizers of the St. Pete race are keen to call it a festival, because apparently anybody under the age of 26 is completely incapable of socializing if there’s not a gathering involving alcohol, baggy pants, mindless shouting, and shit music. With any luck there will be a lot of the first one and little of the latter three this weekend, though we’ll probably hit our quota of mindless shouting at Turns 1 and 2. The NTT INDYCAR SERIES official website notes that “plenty of drivers have gotten into trouble in these two turns over the years”, mostly in 2023. The rest of the track promises little passing opportunity except perhaps at Turn 10 near the Mahaffey Theater, which my fact-checkers assure me is sadly not named after the delightfully wacky actress who seemingly turns up everywhere. Also seemingly turning up everywhere are Firestone’s guaiyoualauleiyulaue tires, which will likely be... turning... everywhere this weekend. While I can’t speak to the accuracy of my spelling, I can confirm that’s a hell of a lot easier to say than Parthenium argentatum. Shiver me timbers.
Good God, I just woke up for the first time since September, and let me tell ya, that was a hell of a nap. What happened?
Grab some coffee, because a whole hell of a lot happened last year, as always! We’ve had the normal rigamarole of drivers leaving, teams joining, and a champion being crowned, but also a bunch of people getting fired for undisclosed reasons followed by battlefield promotions. Conventional wisdom indicates that in all walks of life it’s best to have a thorough understanding of one’s place. I can’t say whether or not these people did that, but I sure as hell won’t. Were I to be writing this for official purposes, I would endeavor to conduct myself with the highest standards of integrity, dedication, motivation, agility, and accountability according to the guiding principles and outstanding values of the NTT INDYCAR SERIES and its partners while delivering a dynamic, high-energy, forward-looking retrospective intended to entertain and delight a diverse, cross-functional motorsport audience consisting of loyal, passionate stakeholders from a tapestry of racial, social, and economic backgrounds.
Alas, I am what our contemporary folk prophet Sean Heckman would call “one of those internet assholes”. You have been warned.
Come on, it’s STILL funny.For only the third time in the history of the series, we had a repeat Indy 500 winner and a repeat series champion with Josef Newgarden and Álex Palou (Rose/Horn in ’47-’48 and Castroneves/Hornish in ’01-’02 were the other two). If you’re a bookie, you know what to do with this information. If you’re a gambler, God help you, you poor bastard.
Newgarden also featured prominently outside of the Indy 500 last season, but for less happy reasons. After hornswoggling the field in the opening round at St. Petersburg with illegal use of push-to-pass that Team Penske probably wishes we’d push-to-forget, the series transferred the win from the All-American snollygoster to Mexican groupie shepherd Pato O’Ward, who never got the satisfaction of leading the championship from it.
The next stop was the bizarre “Not Actually Million Dollar Challenge” at The Thermal Club, which saw Colton Herta sandbag so hard he got the attention of a few F1 teams while Palou stormed off with the cash. The rest of the west coast swing saw Scott Dixon tiptoe to victory in Long Beach with a fuel-saving masterclass that proved age and average fuel economy really are just numbers. Amidst the now-revealed push-to-pass boondoggle was a trip to Barber Motorsports Park, presented as the Augusta of motorsports even though it’s probably more accurately described as something out of Mario Golf. Scott “Yeah I Pushed It” McLaughlin grabbed a statement win while the internet exploded over a falling mannequin.
The Month of May proceeded in a rather predictable fashion, with the field getting a Palou-job at the Sonsio Grand Prix and Newgarden securing a repeat at the 500 after an early wreck-fest and lengthy rain delay allowed him to snatch the lead at close of day and race from O’Ward coming off of Turn Twoooooo. It was possibly one of the best races of the year, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at the results sheet.
Our heroes switched gears from “orderly chaos” to just “chaos” at the Detroit street circuit, a venue virtually bursting with adequatulence. As he often does in such situations, Scott Dixon forced us all to consider him as a championship contender by conjuring a win from nothing—or perhaps from the notion that Chip Ganassi hates broken race cars. Will Power then broke through in the substantially greener pastures of Road America, before Palou secured the final victory of the non-hybrid era in a mysteriously sedate (by 2023 standards) outing at Laguna Seca. From the next race on, a new, electrified era began for the NTT INDYCAR SERIES.
“Hi, I’m Reddy Kilowatt! Remember kids, electricity can kill First blood in the hybrid era was drawn by Pato O’Ward at Mid-Ohio, fighting back the omnipresent Álex Palou while Scott Dixon’s season hopes were ended by the mysterious blue smoke of non-compliant electronics. Team Penske secured the first electrified oval wins at The Hy-Vee Country Music Double-Header Iowa Extravaganza with Scott McLaughlin and Will Power, who proved a more successful duo than Luke Combs and Post Malone.
The rest of the season passed in a blur, with a race what felt like every other weekend. Colton Herta ended a personal draught of 41 races and claimed Honda’s first hybrid win at Toronto after a chaotic finish that included the US edition of Australasia’s most intense sports rivalry. Gateway saw Josef Newgarden characteristically return to prominence and controversy with a dubious collision-causing restart that removed Power from the race. Power avenged this defeat at Portland, but Palou minimized the damage by securing his third consecutive Top 5 finish. The final three races of the season saw the series return to classic oval venues, with two action-packed showings in Milwaukee and the Big Machine Music City Grand Prix relocated to the Nashville Superspeedway. Chevy dominated Milwaukee with wins for O’Ward and McLaughlin while Palou and Honda faltered with an electrical failure, but Honda and Herta won their first hybrid oval races together in Nashville while a loose belt laid waste to Power’s championship hopes.
Thus finished the 2024 edition of the NTT INDYCAR SERIES. The end of an era? The beginning of another? Hard to say. I figure if life is made up of years, and years made up of months, and months made up of days, and days made up of hours, and hours made up of minutes, and minutes made up of seconds, then I’ve just written a really long sentence. The hybrids are here to stay but will hopefully like the aeroscreen will become better integrated when the new car arrives, which feels like it will properly mark the start of something fresh. More than likely, though, we’ll have to deal with the DW-12 for four more years.
Pause.
The Verdict
Better than: Álex Palou winning with a race to go in 2023
Not as good as: The Sonoma Six-Way of 2015
Wait for it: A calendar that doesn’t cram 473 races into 12 weeks
On This Season of the NTT INDYCAR SERIES...
2025 is a big year for us. Unless you’ve been living under one of Sting Ray Robb’s bent-up Dallaras, you know the NTT INDYCAR SERIES heads into the season having signed a headline-strangling agreement with Fox. As part of this here boner-fied TV deal, we say goodbye to Random WinAmp Guy, 100 Days to Indy (which may be coming back, we don’t know), and Your Home of the Olympics, and hello to Will Buxton, a trio of Super Bowl TV ads, and a full slate of network TV races. Sure, we had to sacrifice Peacock to get here, so it ain’t all roses, but it’s nice to be liked. It’s also nice that the deal comes with about the same amount of cash for the series as Alex Palou allegedly owes McLaren. Hell, McLaren’s head honcho could even be described as “content” with where things are heading.
The TV partner isn’t all that’s changing, either—Indianapolis Motor Speedway Commander Doug E. Ballz has replaced series president Jay Frye. I don’t know why Frye got fried, but what I do know is that the dildo of consequences rarely arrives lubed. We’ve also got an increase in the price of Leaders’ Circle contracts, eye cameras and drone cameras, more alternate tires during race weekends, new driver warning systems, and legal self-starting in the pits. So maybe those with an eye for changes aren’t approaching things with the right level of... meticulosity.
Wordsmith!There’s been plenty of movement on the driver and team front as well, notably with the addition of F1 ladder veterans Prema, who began their season by losing their chief engineer. Thankfully, they managed to retain their chosen driver pairing: McLaren/Juncos-Hollinger football and F2 runner-up Callum Ilott (why not Ilott?) and Ferrari sportscar ace and lexicological nightmare Robert Shwartzman, though they very nearly ended up enlisting the services of F1 REMF Logan Sargeant. Prema begins the season without a charter, the
Since we don’t read anything unless it’s a list these days, save your TL;DR’s and check out this snazzy-ass list of driver changes:
• Marcus Armstrong (Chip Ganassi Racing -> Meyer Shank Racing)
• David Malukas (Meyer Shank Racing -> AJ Foyt Racing)
• Sting Ray Robb (AJ Foyt Racing -> Juncos-Hollinger Racing)
• Conor Daly (returns to Juncos-Hollinger Racing)
• Devlin DeFrancesco (returns to Rahal Letterman Lanigan)
• Louis Foster (INDY NXT -> Rahal Letterman Lanigan)
• Christian Lundgaard (Rahal Letterman Lanigan -> McLaren)
• Alexander Rossi (McLaren -> Ed Carpenter Racing)
• Rinus Veekay (Ed Carpenter Racing -> Dale Coyne Racing)
• Jacob Abel (new to Dale Coyne Racing)
In other news, Chip Ganassi Racing has downsized from five cars to three, McLaren has retained rookie Nolan Siegel, Will Power is in a contract year, and Romain Grosjean has crash-landed into a reserve role at Prema.
Some things to watch for this weekend?
Obviously push-to-pass usage…
I kid. Maybe.
If testing times are to be believed, Team Penske and Chevrolet look to have retained their edge from last season, even if it is a wafer-thin edge since the entire field was covered by 0.8 seconds. Though he’s claimed the only hybrid win on a street circuit so far, Colton Herta is the only Honda driver to win a race since the NTT INDYCAR SERIES went hybrid, and Honda hasn’t yet managed a hybrid triumph on a road course. With Marshall Pruett claiming Honda is already “nine toes out the door”, this could prove to be the main storyline this season if Chevrolet maintains its advantage. Hopefully we don’t lose 50% of our engine manufacturers this season, but if I know anything about difficult situations, it’s that you should expect the worst and hope for the best—at least, that’s what Jackie Chan told me.
The weather is going to be on the cool side of things again this year. McLaren and Team Penske were well-poised in those conditions but that was before we discovered electricity. Speaking of which, the ability of the drivers to restart their own cars with the hybrid system should theoretically reduce the number of yellows we see this year. I say “theoretically” because it certainly didn’t stop Power from introducing his teammate to Mr. K-Wall last year in Toronto.
On the topic of yellows, according to the NTT INDYCAR SERIES website, these fellas are off to an early lead in the championship. The only thing less likely than them staying there after this weekend is Takuma Sato winning this year’s championship, but God knows what sort of debauchery I’ve invoked by speaking that reality into consideration.
Stuff for the Die-Hards
NTT INDYCAR SERIES Fantasy Challenge Driven by Firestone
The official fantasy game has a new home this year in the form of GridRival, but the stakes are the same as ever. You’ll need a smartphone and the GridRival app to play. HowSwedeItIs is our defending champion.
I’m retired from hosting duty—H0R has got the details, so bug him about it if you’re interested. I spent too much time writing this to learn the rules yet (I hope to God you read this on a desktop or all the effort I went through to make the image names funny whiffed completely).
Massively Important Historical St. Pete Information
- This will be the first time the Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg was run on March 2.
- Since 2012, when Chevrolet joined the NTT INDYCAR SERIES, Honda has only won this race 4 times.
- The last wet race at St. Petersburg was in 2010. It featured a battle for the lead between Vitor Meira, Raphael Matos, and EJ Viso, and a Turn 1 collision between Mario Moraes and Scott Dixon.
- Team Penske is the only team whose drivers are all former winners of this race.
- If you were to watch every NTT INDYCAR SERIES race at St. Petersburg from start to finish with no ad breaks, it would take you 43 hours, 46 minutes, and 19 seconds.
- 434619 is the SKU for a 1.3716 mm Autolite Platinum Spark plug used in Ford or Mazda vehicles.
You Wish You Had...
… a children’s book???
Take a Drink Every Time...
... you hear, “Only on Fox!”
Do You Remember...
… the first Grand Prix of St. Petersburg?
Anagram of the Day:
Three-Time Champion Alex Palou/Approximate Linoleum Cheetah
This is St. Petersburg
Fox Sports says the Grand Prix of St. Petersburg is one of the 50 can’t-miss sporting events of the year, but for all of us, that’s just a given, because to us, every year this is the biggest thing to happen in Tampa Bay since the Bucs won the Super Bowl (thankfully at least Tom Brady seems to know what’s up). There is a palpable excitement surrounding this season, and it’s not just because we got to see Josef Newgarden in an open shirt during the first promo. It’s nearly March, spring is almost in the air, May is almost here, but most importantly, it’s time to say those three words we ached for half a year to hear:
IndyCar. Is. Back.
Welcome to the fastest racing on Earth.
