FLRacingFan
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And it should honestly be seven straight, he was all set to sweep Iowa last year as well before the right rear failed while he was leading late in the race.
2023 Hy-Vee INDYCAR Race Weekend at Iowa
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Mispeedway15
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I have a hard time believing Tyler Courtney and Justin Grant couldn’t compete an IndyCar. Christopher Bell was a USAC star and look where he is now
FLRacingFan
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I think the better question is would they even want to. I think I’ve seen Grant say he’d love to run the Speedway, but he wouldn’t give up what he does now for it.
And even then that’s only in the same capacity that Bryan Clauson was an IndyCar driver.
virtualbalboa
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NASCAR isn't winning all the young grassroots stars anymore. That's part of NASCAR's issue. The majority of their talent is cycling through the pavement late model ranks, which means we are predominantly seeing rich kids given the cost of a pavement late model and the purses you win in them. But more to the point:
A] Anyone who points out that a lot of the top open wheel dirt talent would prefer to race ovals is almost certainly correct, and Indycar is and will probably always be for now and forever forwards a mixed series of road/street/ovals
B] Open wheel dirt talent gets 50% of the purse and whatever profit margin exists on their merch. The latter is important because NASCAR drivers are selling merch through Fanatics and get a flat percentage that I've heard is substantially lower than anyone's merch margin. You can sustain yourself as a dirt racer without enormous amounts of family funds being available, though as Rico Abreu and the Macedos prove, money doesn't hurt.
C] The entire ladder system is largely pay-for-play for both Indycar and NASCAR. If you have the option of making money or the option of spending money to be on the track, making money will win out. The costs are also exorbitant. Both Shark Racing cars are operating for 90ish races this year for the price it would cost to put a single Indy NXT car on the grid; Logan Schuchart won a million dollar purse at Eldora, which is in excess of what the Indy NXT champ can possibly obtain between the small race purses and the incentives for the series title.
So Indycar is still dangerous, costs orders of magnitude more of money to get into (with no viable solution to this problem coming anytime soon), arguably pays less money, and the mix of circuits is not to the favor of most of the drivers. Changing any of those individual problems doesn't make sprint car guys start rushing over. Changing all of them is not realistic.
virtualbalboa
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As a guy who is watching Indiana Sprint Week on Flo this week and who was at a non-wing 410 show Friday night at I-96 Speedway, I can't disagree about the history but I can disagree about the future. There was a strong desire from some people in the Indycar fandom, particularly during the you-know-what to basically ask that roadsters come back. I get it. I do. But here's the truth - winged sprint cars are much, much more popular than traditional non-wing cars. The crossover between they and pavement Indycars is not great, but there are aspects about a winged sprint that I can see having a more relevance now. No one is diamonding an Indycar through the corners at Gateway or Iowa. Drivers have all that downforce with wings and then have to deal with dirty air when running behind people or in traffic. Drivers in wing cars are very often working on picking up momentum to make moves around guys, and those are things that more resemble modern Indycar oval racing than what traditional sprint cars are like.
I honestly believe now that some people looked to Indy and the IRL as an opportunity to keep USAC from losing relevance and importance in the racing scene more than the reverse. Now it's too late; I'm sure it was probably true in the past that you could win more at a weekly wing show in PA vs. a USAC national event, but that's certainly been the case for at least as long as I've seriously been engaging with dirt racing. "Traditional" sprints are gonna be a regional thing that I enjoy and like watching, but it has no value to the Indy ladder. Pavement racing at least can have value because it more closely resembles Indycar, but the costs are prohibitive for a lot of racers and it just can't be that thing.
virtualbalboa
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Also, before someone decides to harp on my statement that Indycar pays less money: NXT and every step of the USF2000 ladder up to it are de facto amateur races. AFAIK most drivers don't even receive a cut of the purses in NXT in spite of race purses existing. This is fundamentally one of the issues that popped up with Linus Lundqvist when he won the NXT/Lights title in 2022. Within Indycar itself, there are objectively fewer paying seats in that series than there are in open wheel dirt track racing. That's simply a fact created by the entirely different economies of each series. There is little Indycar can learn from dirt racing because so much of dirt racing's evolution has been intentionally stunted/redirected due to cost controls. Building tube frame high downforce cars capable of >200mph speeds at tracks like Indianapolis is not a solution which appears to be interesting to team owners, track owners, drivers, anyone really.
gnomesayin
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You make several valid points, and I had the same thought about how ironically the dirty air racing on the winged side has more parallels to modern formula cars.
However, the real point I was making is that there is zero cultural connection between winged sprint cars and IndyCar. Nobody rising through the ranks there gives half a thought to IndyCar. Some of them would gladly make the NASCAR leap if it landed in their lap, though those opportunities have largely dried up as compared to 15-20 years ago.
WoO and winged 410 racing is on a trajectory to become more of an end and destination unto itself.
On the other hand, USAC still has a fleeting connection to IndyCar because it so Indiana-centric. The myth and lore of the Speedway looms over everything that happens in that state.
Clauson wanted to do IndyCar (after NASCAR fizzled) because of his ties to the USAC world. Windom wanted it as well, though now he's followed Courtney over to the winged side, because it's their best real chance to make some real money. As soon as they go winged racing, the slight chance they would pursue a restored Indy Lights type ladder feels over.
Many of the younger drivers who pursue USAC as a ladder from midgets through Crown cars would still leap at a developmental IndyCar deal, whether the cars share any real similarities or not. It's just in the water in that part of the country.
Of course, rebuilding that bridge would require at least two or three more thriving Iowa-type oval dates on the schedule. We're still a long way from that.
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USAC had an opportunity to remain as the primary source of fresh Indy Car talent … they let it slip away.
In the early 1970’s, Tom Sneva and a few others brought mid-engine super modifieds east and dominated USAC asphalt sprint car racing. It didn’t take long for a group of disgruntled car owners, all of whom had asphalt-only sprint cars in their fleets, to convince USAC management to ban the new cars. Because they “couldn’t afford to buy / build cars that couldn’t be used on the dirt tracks.”
Opportunity lost … young drivers of rear- engined cars in lesser formulae filled the gap, bringing their road racing experience with them.
This car won 6 USAC sprint car races in 1973.
In the early 1970’s, Tom Sneva and a few others brought mid-engine super modifieds east and dominated USAC asphalt sprint car racing. It didn’t take long for a group of disgruntled car owners, all of whom had asphalt-only sprint cars in their fleets, to convince USAC management to ban the new cars. Because they “couldn’t afford to buy / build cars that couldn’t be used on the dirt tracks.”
Opportunity lost … young drivers of rear- engined cars in lesser formulae filled the gap, bringing their road racing experience with them.
This car won 6 USAC sprint car races in 1973.
virtualbalboa
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First, the rear-engines and USAC thing: I know when I found out about that having happened (I'm a young whippersnapper of fourty years old wait what the) the notion that USAC banning them prevented them from sticking with the Indycar ladder generally went right along with it. Obviously it is unknowable, but I think about the parallel development of supermodifieds and I just don't know in the long term if it would have mattered that much. They might occupy that same position in the racing universe that Outlaw Late Models with the giant plexiglass billboard "wings" on the side have today.
Ultimately, aerodynamics became A Big Thing and once the genie was released from the bottle, there was no stopping it. IMO 25 years from now people will talk about the decision of USAC to not go in with winged sprint cars as a colossal folly bigger than any other they committed, and there are a litany of them. It will simply require a sufficient number of people who prefer non-wing cars over wing cars to die out (sorry to say).
If you stop and think about it for a moment, what you say about winged sprint car drivers not having a connection to Indycar is essentially because wing car were banned from USAC. And USAC is, has, and will always have that special relationship with Indycar due to all the stuff that happened between 1956-1978, the geography, etc etc etc. USAC's decision making in that particular instance to protect what they saw as their constituents doomed them. They rejected a product that was basically guaranteed on some level to supplant them, and in time that happened. They might have gotten a couple more good decades out of non-wing cars that way off the USAC name, existing fans, and so on, but like in all things Father Time remains undefeated.
Everything else in the discussion comes back to money. I have tended to look more and more at racing more from my own background in finance, and the more I look, the more things sort of fall into place in ways that maybe don't line up obviously to others. If you look at the Indycar ladder going back to the 80s and 90s, the transition to pay drivers is ultimately led by the loss of having a self-sustaining ladder over costs. NASCAR is full of tube frame chassis at every level that can be built in much more rudimentary shops; Indycar (by necessity) made the transition from tube frames to composite and honeycomb monocoques derived from aerospace tech that cannot be easily duplicated in someone's prefab steel structure backyard shop. NASCAR overwhelmingly raced ovals where its easy to run events from a ticketing, security, and race management perspective: ovals resulted in big crash damage for guys racing composite cars so they preferred road courses where it is much more difficult to run events due to the complexity of all of the preceding things ovals are good for. Bill Tempero all but confirmed that his American Indycar Series was intentionally avoiding superspeedways for that specific reason. It just sort of spiraled that way not because anyone had bad intentions, but because That's The Way Things Are.
Of course, costs in NASCAR are now out of control and drivers aren't hired on merit there anymore either. David Gravel: 2 races in Trucks, 1 in ARCA, said publicly he needs to find sponsorship to put together another part time NASCAR deal of any sort. John Wes Townley: 186 NASCAR national touring series starts and an additional 58 with ARCA because Daddy Runs Zaxby's before he was retired by his ex-wife's boyfriend at close range.
Charlie Spencer
Road courses and short tracks.
Just saw this one but not the second one yet. Penske parade. Josef on cruise control.
Charlie Spencer
Road courses and short tracks.
And for the second one, I told my Darling Bride it was over at lap 30 or so, when Josef passed his teammates.