Oilpressure

One of the biggest laments from fans of the NTT IndyCar Series is that the offseason is way too long. It’s a hard point to argue. The series schedule stretches from roughly mid-March to mid-September. That’s about six months, give or take a week. The season is just one week longer than the offseason.

When you compare that to the NFL season, it’s a pretty long time. From the opening kickoff a week after Labor Day to the conclusion of the Super Bowl, the NFL season lasts for about five months, meaning there is a seven-month offseason. Compared to the offseason for Major League Baseball, the NHL and the NBA – seven months is an eternity.

To compare apples to apples, we need to compare IndyCar’s offseason to NASCAR, IMSA and Formula One. We will ignore pre-season events like NASCAR’s Busch Clash or IMSA’s “Roar Before the Rolex 24”, Instead, we will focus only on a series first and final points-paying event of their respective 2024 seasons.

The Daytona 500 will kick off NASCAR Cup’s season on Sunday Feb 18. Their season will conclude on Sunday Nov 10 at Phoenix. Counting months in the calendar that will contain NASCAR events, you get ten months. Essentially, the NASCAR offseason is only December and January. To me, their offseason is not long enough. Fans, teams and drivers need a break.

IMSA kicks off with the Rolex 24 at Daytona on Jan 28. It is always a fan-favorite to tune in at some point, just to see some racing and (hopefully) some warm weather. They wrap up their season at Road Atlanta on Oct 19. Though they start earlier and end earlier than NASCAR, their offseason is still barely there.

Formula One may be the shortest offseason of all. In 2024, they will start their season in Sakhir on Feb 23 and will end their 25-race season on Dec 8 at Abu Dhabi. They barely have time to catch their breath, before it all starts over again.

There has to be some middle-ground between IndyCar’s nearly six-month offseason, and Formula One’s barely two-month offseason. I would like to see IndyCar have their season last for about eight months, with a four-month offseason. The problem with that is…more games against the NFL.

I strongly support IndyCar doing what it can to avoid going up against the NFL as much as possible. IndyCar fans who are not football fans, scoff at the notion that going up against the NFL is a losing battle. They don’t watch the NFL, so they assume not many other people do either. They’re sadly mistaken.

This post is not about how to shift or stretch out the schedule, in order to shorten the offseason and avoid going up against football. That’s for people that are a lot smarter than I am, to figure out. Instead, we have something to celebrate.

Two months from today (March 10), the green-flag will fly for the Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg. Two months is nothing, when we’ve already been through four months of one of the roughest offseason most of us can remember. It’s really a couple of days less than that when you consider practice starts on Friday for the race weekend.

It was easy to get depressed in November and December. We were slogging through a tumultuous offseason filled with negative news. For those of us in the Central Time Zone, it was getting dark at 4:30 pm and the weather was cold. Here in Nashville, we have not had any snow to speak of this year, but we have had a steady diet of cold weather. Since Christmas Eve, we’ve had no days where the temp got out of the forties – and those were the good days. It has been a consistent two and a half weeks of lows in the mid-20s and highs in the low-40s. Folks that live in Wisconsin, will read that and laugh. To them low-40s is almost beach weather. But for those of us that live in the south; we are used to the occasional day in winter, when the temperature approaches the 60° mark.

Since the calendar flipped to January, the start of the IndyCar season seems much closer than it did even around Christmas. Although it’s still very cold, the days are already getting noticeably longer. With the Titan’s disastrous season, my mind shifted from football to racing even before the Titan’s season ended. I am now completely in race-mode and I can sense the season getting closer.

We will see several drivers in the Rolex 24 in about two and a half weeks. There will be some IndyCar testing at Sebring and other locations over the next couple of months, and then suddenly – it will be Friday March 8, and we will all be trying to steal some peaks at work – trying to see who is setting the pace in practice.

It will be here before you know it.

George Phillips

This entry was posted on January 10, 2024 at 4:04 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.