Oilpressure

The annual double-header at Iowa Speedway is coming up this weekend. To us older fans, it seems like yesterday that Iowa Speedway opened its doors. It’s hard to believe that it was September of 2006, when the track held its first race – a Hooters Pro Cup Series race won by Woody Howard. The Indy racing League held its first race at Iowa the following June, when Dario Franchitti won for Andretti Green Racing.

Over the years, Iowa hosted some very exciting IndyCar races – some years bouncing back and forth between a Saturday night race and a Sunday afternoon race. By 2013, the track was in financial trouble and was eventually purchased by NASCAR. Many predicted at the time that IndyCar’s days were numbered, as is the case many times when NASCAR enters the picture.

Iowa Speedway was one of many tracks that hosted double-headers in 2020, when so many other tracks became unavailable due to COVID. It was always unclear to me why Iowa dropped off of the 2021 IndyCar schedule, but fans – both locally and nationally – were not happy to see the race go away. For 2022, Penske Entertainment rented the track and took over as promoter, along with area grocery giant Hy-Vee. Together, they created a three-day double-header weekend event that featured top-name concerts before and after each race. The first year was a rousing success. The 2023 event was just as successful, but ticket prices jumped dramatically. By 2024, the event was losing momentum and both races were absolute processional duds.

Susan and I both made our only visit to the Hy-Vee sponsored races last year. The facility was first-class. With the track being so small (7/8-mile), it took no time or effort to get from one end to the other. We both fell in love with the track and the facility, but we noticed the crowd was down from what we had seen on television in previous years and we were very disappointed in the lack of passes or action in both races.

For this year, Hy-Vee is no longer the title sponsor for the weekend event. Gone are the big-name concerts and so are the exorbitant prices that came with said concerts. If you were going for the concerts, you are out of luck. But for the true race fans that were staying away due to the high prices – you are in luck. We were there more for the racing last year, but we will not be in attendance this year – mostly to save money.

Before his bobble last week at Mid-Ohio that cost him the race win, Iowa had been the site of Alex Palou’s last big mistake. In Race One last year, Palou simply lost the back-end of the car and he backed it into the wall on the front-straightaway.

Honda has dominated this season, winning all ten races thus far. However, Chevy has had the upper-hand at Iowa Speedway for the past several years. In fact, you have to go back to 2018 to find the last time Honda won a race at Iowa. That’s when James Hinchcliffe earned his last IndyCar race win, while driving for Sam Schmidt. Counting the double-headers; that’s nine straight wins for Chevy at Iowa. Wirth ten straight wins this season for Honda, and nine Iowa wins in a row for Chevy – something’s got to give.

It has been well-documented what a horrible season Team Penske is going through, with Josef Newgarden having a nightmare season, in particular. After his opening-lap crash at Mid-Ohio this past Sunday, Newgarden is currently 19th in points. If that doesn’t sound dramatic enough, he is just three points away from Graham Rahal, who sits 21st in points. That sounds dangerously close to the cutoff point for the Leader’s Circle money. Who would’ve thought with seven races to go in the season, that we would ever be talking about Josef Newgarden even possibly missing out on the Leader’s Circle? Yet, here we are.

Many race fans are taking great joy in this sudden turn of fortune for Team Penske and Newgarden. It’s tempting to smile when you see a dynasty toppled. Many here in the south are still gloating over the fact that Alabama failed to make the College Football Playoffs last December, even though the person who engineered that dynasty retired the year before. Fans are hoping against hope that Alex Palou, the driver who has won the championship for three of the past four year, will somehow miss out on his fourth. That’s fair.

But I fully believe that the lack of results at Penske are completely tied to the firings of their management back in May. Their leadership was decimated in one stroke. No team can recover from a sudden vacuum in leadership with the caliber of personnel that was sent packing. I suspect they will be in the doldrums for some time. This will take a while.

I get it that a lot of fans can be turned off by Newgarden with his surly demeanor when things go against him. But there is more to it than frustration boiling over from poor results. This is not the team he re-signed with a year ago. His strategist and confident, Tim Cindric, is gone. Two other key people to the organization are no longer there. Those still there are stretched way too thin. The poor results and the sudden change in personnel is enough to make the most pleasant person surly and gruff. I’m thinking fans should cut him some slack. But the haters will continue to pour it on, until his fortunes turn around.

Those fortunes could turn around this weekend, and Newgarden has two chances to do it. He has already scored six IndyCar victories at Iowa, including sweeping the double-header in 2023. When Newgarden isn’t winning at Iowa, other Team Penske drivers are. Last year, Scott McLaughlin and Will Power won the two races at Iowa. In fact, over the last ten IndyCar races at Iowa, Team Penske has won nine of them. That’s even stronger than some of the numbers Alex Palou has been putting up. I am going with what has happened in the long term, instead of what has happened this season. I say that Josef Newgarden will win at least one of the two races this weekend, and one of the other two drivers – McLaughlin or Power – will win the other one. It will be the first win of the season for team Penske, and also for Chevrolet. We’ll see.

Things get going a little bit earlier this weekend, with the High Line Practice kicking things off on FS2 at 3:30 pm EDT on Friday. The regular practice session will get underway at 4:30 pm EDT Friday. Saturday will feature qualifying for both races starting at Noon EDT on FS1, with Race One coverage beginning at 5:00 pm EDT on Big FOX. Race Two coverage will start on Big FOX at 1:00 pm EDT. I am hopeful that they have made enough changes to the tires and aero-package to produce much better racing than we saw last year. If not, and with Hy-Vee out of the picture – Iowa Speedway could find itself on the chopping block in another year or two. That would be understandable, but it would still be a shame.

George Phillips

This entry was posted on July 11, 2025 at 4:03 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.