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Update: Before we get into the IndyCar topic of the day, I wanted to give a brief update on my wife, Susan. She was released from the hospital on Monday afternoon – a day earlier than expected.

She has had zero complications or setbacks and she is tolerating soft food, so they discharged her to let her come back to our Airbnb.

I spoke with her surgeon on Monday morning, and he gave me even more good news. The PET scan two days prior to her surgery showed that the tumor showed no cancer activity and was most likely already dead from the chemo. Pathology reports on the lymph nodes surrounding the tumor during the surgery, all came back negative for cancer cells. If there was any question about any remaining active cancer cells lurking deep inside the tumor, that was taken care of by the NanoKnife procedure.

She is not wild about being on the temporary feeding tube, but that will be removed in a few weeks as she weans herself off of it. After this first week or so, she will get to the point that she is only attached to it at night. We have to remain in Louisville for a few more days, just in case complications arise. She is to see her surgeon on Friday and hopefully we will be allowed to return home to Nashville on Saturday. Thanks again for all of the prayers and well-wishes that have gotten her through this. I hope the worst is behind her, as we are still aiming to attend to season-opening race at Barber, the weekend of April 16-18. Now, on to what we normally do here – discussing IndyCar…

There has been no shortage of opinions, since it was announced last week that Formula One veteran Romaine Grosjean will be joining the NTT IndyCar Series for the 2021 season – as a part of Dale Coyne Racing in association with Rick Ware Racing. His announcement also included the fact that he will not run the double-header at Texas, nor will take part in The Greatest Spectacle in Racing – the 105th Running of the Indianapolis 500 on May 30.

Even for those that don’t follow Formula One, you probably know Grosjean from his frightening crash at the 2020 Bahrain Grand Prix, where the fireball that erupted from his car splitting in two lit up the nighttime sky. The burns on his hands suffered from the inferno are still visible, as are the psychological scars. If you have seen the crash, you can hardly blame him.

There are opinions from both ends of the spectrum, from fans and journalists alike. Some claim that having another Formula One veteran join the series gives IndyCar more credibility as a world-class racing series, while others say that he is a menace on the track and will be a threat to other drivers. Then there’s the old argument that the soon-to-be thirty-five year old driver is taking the seat of some promising young driver.

I don’t really buy into any of those arguments. I met last week’s news with more of a shrug than anything else. I don’t think the signing of Grosjean is going to move the needle one bit across the pond; no more than when Max Chilton or Marcus Ericsson came over from Formula One to try and jumpstart their careers in IndyCar. If I’m being honest, I don’t think any former Formula One drivers coming to IndyCar have raised eyebrows in Europe since Nigel Mansell came over as the reigning World Champion for the 1993 CART season.

The 1993 Indianapolis 500 had four former Formula One champions in the field. Mansell was joined by Nelson Piquet, Emerson Fittipaldi and Mario Andretti as former World Champions striving to drink the milk. Fittipaldi won that race, but chose to drink orange juice instead – but that’s another story for another day. The signing of Grosjean pales in comparison to when the Formula One world was actually paying attention to IndyCar in the early nineties.

I’m not overly concerned about Grosjean’s history of unforced errors, either. I would be lying if I said I was intimately familiar with Grosjean’s career, but from what I can gather – he compares favorably with Takuma Sato, another Formula One refugee who has found success in IndyCar. He can be unquestionably fast, but also makes a lot of ridiculous mistakes. As a fan, I find that a lot more appealing than someone content to ride around in nineteenth-place just to be know for taking care of the equipment. A car-owner can take care of a car by leaving it on the trailer, but is that why they race?

I’ve never bought into the idea that by giving a veteran in their mid-thirties a ride, that a car-owner is somehow cheating the ladder system and not giving a nineteen year-old an opportunity that he or she is somehow entitled to. If you have an opportunity to sign an experienced driver with nine fulltime Formula One seasons with ten podium finishes on their resume – you sign that driver. I know some are concerned that Oliver Askew is being cheated out of his prime seasons, but he just turned twenty-four. His time will come.

Overall, I was happy about the Grosjean signing, but it increased my already growing concerns I’ve had in another area – the specialist.

The diversity of the tracks is what I’ve always felt set the NTT IndyCar Series apart from other forms of motorsport. If a driver can score enough points racing on temporary street circuits, natural terrain road courses, short ovals and super-speedways to win a championship – that driver has earned that championship. Over the past decade, we have seen more and more drivers choose to race in just a portion of the IndyCar schedule.

Mike Conway started this trend at the end of the 2012 season, when he announced he would not run the season-ending race at Fontana. This most certainly stemmed from his frightening crash at the end of the 2010 Indianapolis 500, which took him out of the cockpit for the remainder of the season. When he announced he would not run Fontana in 2012, he also declared that he would not run any more ovals – a promised he has kept, but he also hasn’t driven an Indy car since 2014.

Ed Carpenter became an oval specialist after the 2013 season, mostly because he was very ineffective (code speak for bad) on the road and street courses. Since the 2014 season, he has had to hire someone willing to drive the non-ovals only for his No. 20 car – prompting him to hire the likes of Conway, JR Hildebrand, Spencer Pigot, Jordan King, Ed Jones and Conor Daly for partial seasons.

Last season saw the most curious arrangement, with Daly driving for Carpenter on the non-ovals and in a separate car for the Indianapolis 500; but on a separate and competing team – as he drove the other ovals for Carlin, in place of Max Chilton. Chilton made a similar decision as Conway in 2019, except he still chooses to race in the Indianapolis 500 each year.

Now we see Grosjean making a similar choice, although he has hinted he might run at Gateway later this season.

I don’t like this trend.

I freely admit that I am hesitant to accept change. In fact, most of you know that my motto in life is “Change is Bad”. But I’m afraid this will ultimately end with only one oval race on the IndyCar schedule – the Indianapolis 500. Do you think that can’t happen? The 2005 Champ Car schedule had two oval races – Milwaukee and Las Vegas. In 2006, it was down to the one oval race at Milwaukee. By 2007, there were no oval races on the Champ Car schedule. By 2008, there was no more Champ Car.

I don’t think I am one to sit around and lament the end of the roadster era. It doesn’t really upset me that USAC stars gravitate to NASCAR more than IndyCar. It has made sense for front-engine sprint car drivers to migrate to NASCAR and driver front-engine stock cars, rather than learn the nuisances of a rear-engine car. It’s never bothered me that foreign drivers have come into IndyCar. International drivers have been coming here since the beginning. French driver Jules Goux won the 1913 Indianapolis 500, beginning a streak of foreign winners that wasn’t broken until American driver Howdy Wilcox won in 1919. I actually like the international flavor that foreign drivers bring, and some of the most memorable drivers and characters have come from outside the US borders.

What does worry me is the continual decline in oval races. I understand that the owners don’t like oval races, since cars tend to sustain heavier damage on ovals leading to higher repair bills. I sort of get it that some drivers might tend to shy away from what is perceived as a more dangerous form of IndyCar racing. What I don’t understand is the sudden lack of interest in oval racing among fans. And it’s not just younger fans. I’ve met fans much older than me that continue to say that IndyCar should abandon all ovals except for the Indianapolis 500.

To me, part of the appeal to IndyCar racing is not sitting comfortably in your chair and calmly nodding in approval that your favorite driver took a better line into Turn Fourteen and had a much better exit from the turn than the rival driver. Instead, it’s sitting on the edge of your seat and holding your breath as your driver executes an impossible pass, just inches from another car. You marvel at the bravery of the drivers as they do this lap after lap. If you aren’t occasionally thrilled at what you are watching, why watch it?

Over the decades I’ve grown to appreciate road and street courses, but my love will always be oval racing. It is why I started following this sport as a kid in the mid-sixties. Many of you know that we love going to Road America and Barber every year. There is something special about seeing race cars meander through a wooded area or among the dogwoods and azaleas. That helps soften the fact that you can only see the cars in front of you for a very small portion of a lap. At most oval tracks (beside IMS), you can see the entire track from the stands. It is fascinating to follow a specific car, lap after lap, all around the track as it carves it’s way through traffic. You can’t get that on television and you cant get that at a non-oval.

While sitting in the stands of most oval tracks, you have all the action right in front of you. If you are following a car on the backstretch heading into Turn Three at Texas, it won’t take long to notice an accident heading into Turn One. If you aren’t located directly in front of a video board at Road America, chances are that you won’t have much of a clue what is going on at other parts of the track.

Oval racing is in the DNA of IndyCar racing. It wasn’t that long ago (2010) that there was a major outcry from fans that the current series schedule had more non-ovals (nine) than ovals (eight). The 2015 schedule had six oval races in a sixteen-race schedule. In 2016, it dropped down to five ovals on a sixteen-race schedule. For 2021, there are only four oval races on a seventeen-race slate, and that’s at only three oval tracks – Texas, Indianapolis and Gateway.

What is troubling to me is the small attendance at oval races. The 2015 IndyCar race at Fontana was one of the most exciting races I’ve ever seen, yet only about 3,000 were in attendance at the mammoth 2.0 mile facility. IndyCar tried a reboot at Phoenix just a few years ago, and it failed miserably at the gate. The poor racing in that three-year stretch had a lot to do with it, but I’m not sure edge-of-your-seat racing would’ve made much of a difference.

Having drivers like Grosjean, Conway and Chilton eschew oval racing by labeling them as dangerous is perplexing. Racing is inherently dangerous. That’s what makes the great ones so great. If it wasn’t dangerous, anyone would try it. I would remind Grosjean that his fiery crash happened on a road course, not an oval. The harrowing crash that ended the career of Dario Franchitti took place on a street circuit. Jeff Krosnoff was fatally injured on the streets of Toronto, after he had already driven on five ovals that season. Injury and death can occur on any type of track on the IndyCar schedule, not just the ovals.

So while I am generally pleased that IndyCar is getting another quality driver in Romaine Grosjean, I am concerned that yet another driver is opting out of what makes IndyCar racing so special and unique – the ovals. It is a trend that is going in the wrong direction, in my opinion.

George Phillips

This entry was posted on February 10, 2021 at 3:03 am and is filed under IndyCar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.