Colton Herta continued his Laguna Seca dominance and Álex Palou has a championship in his grasp. The Indy Lights champion continues to flip. MotoE had a championship decider for the ages. World Superbike had another championship leader with allegedly four race weekends left, but only two we can count out. Mercedes and Red Bull are still bickering. Andrea Dovizioso will return to MotoGP full-time with Yamaha's satellite team next year. NASCAR had a banner weekend at Bristol for all its national touring series. Chase Elliott needs some thicker skin. It is raining calendars, and that is where we will start this week. Here is a rundown of what got me thinking.
About Two Weeks Ago...
Two weeks ago, I wrote about IndyCar's 2022 schedule and what we knew, what we didn't and what we could expect. Let's just say the actual 2022 schedule had a few more shifts and changes than first expected.
IndyCar will have its earliest start since the 2003 CART season when St. Petersburg was the first round on February 23. In 2022, St. Petersburg opens the IndyCar Series season on February 27, the first time IndyCar has raced in February since Sam Hornish, Jr. won on Leap Day in 2004.
Texas makes a surprise leap forward to March 20, the second round of the season after being ending April and starting May with a doubleheader this year. This move has raised the most eyebrows, as Texas moves to find an open network television window, but this race would fall the day after the 12 Hours of Sebring, a race many IndyCar, crew and other team personnel have participated in.
Those are two of the bigger schedule shifts. Long Beach will be April 10. Barber shifts back to May 1, its latest date in event history but it shifts back due to Easter Sunday and the NASCAR Talladega race being the final two weekends in April. The Grand Prix of Indianapolis and Indianapolis 500 remain on their respective May weekends, May 14 and May 29. Belle Isle returns to being a single race for the first since 2012 and it moves back to the weekend after the "500" on June 5. Road America concludes the first half of the season on June 12. Road America will also conclude a five-consecutive week stretch at a racetrack for the teams.
IndyCar will get a slight break before starting the second half on July 3 at Mid-Ohio. Toronto's tentative return is scheduled for July 17 and that is the first of four consecutive weekends on track. The Iowa doubleheader follows Toronto on July 23-24. The IndyCar/NASCAR combination weekend on the IMS road course moves up to the final weekend of July before the Nashville street race on August 7.
The final three races remain the same. Gateway is scheduled for Saturday August 20. Portland moves back to Sunday of Labor Day weekend on September 4. The Laguna Seca season finale shifts up to September 11.
Fourteen of the 17 races will air on network NBC. Belle Isle and Gateway will be on the USA network with Toronto streaming exclusively on Peacock. While the broadcasting schedule is the best IndyCar has ever had, it is more of the same for IndyCar but even when things are the same, they are not quite identical, and some people are angry. Some of those things are out of IndyCar's control.
IndyCar is not a series that can just add four to six race weekends and fill out the spring window and pad the schedule into October. This is what IndyCar is at the moment, but there are still puzzling moves.
For a series that preaches the importance of date equity, it does change its race dates a lot. I am not talking about one- or two-week shifts. Those shifts are understandable. Road America is the same time of year, as are Portland and Laguna Seca, but Texas has gone from an early June date from 1997 through 2019 to May in 2020 and now March in 2021. Part of that move was facilitated when NASCAR moved its All-Star Race to Texas and what had been the IndyCar weekend this year. The IndyCar race had to move somewhere. Now it is moving for the second time in as many years.
June was never going to be an option for IndyCar in 2022, as Texas will host the NASCAR All-Star Race on May 22 and IndyCar's June is packed, but we have seen this play before with IndyCar and oval races in particular. The race bounces to three different race weekends in a three-year span and then it falls off the schedule.
We saw it with Kentucky over its final three years go from its traditional August date to Labor Day weekend and ending up the first Sunday in October the year after that. We saw it with the Fontana's second stint on the IndyCar schedule when it had four different race weekends in four different months in four years. Milwaukee could not find a suitable weekend in its final years, and it went from Father's Day weekend to July to August. Texas is repeating those same steps.
Next year is the final year of the Texas contract. One year after IndyCar returns to Iowa, it appears the series will be searching for another oval in 2023 because unless mid-March is a hit. A lackluster showing March date likely means 2022 will be the final time IndyCar visits the Dallas Metro Area for a while.
Even the St. Petersburg move is a little questionable. The race was originally planned for March 13. I get that Florida is just as warm in February as it is in March, but we have been sold that St. Petersburg is a spring break race. It is when people can take off from work and travel with their families. February is not spring break time. It seems like St. Petersburg is sacrificing its identity and one of its main drawing points to maintain its identity as the IndyCar season opener, the wrong identity for the long-term health of this event.
We all want the IndyCar schedule to start a little earlier but moving St. Petersburg up to create a two-week gap doesn't really solve the problem. It just creates another. It makes more sense for St. Petersburg to remain March 13 with Texas on March 20 and have a back-to-back to build momentum early in the season. March 6 would even be a better date for St. Petersburg than the last Sunday of February.
These schedule changes are the consequences of a good thing. NBC is putting 14 IndyCar races on network television in 2022, one more than its contractual agreement states. It has fewer options and cannot pick the races that best fit the windows to show on big NBC. This contract required races moving around. As I have been saying, IndyCar must get along with all the other sports properties. NBC has many golf tournaments, it has NASCAR, the French Open, Premier League, Notre Dame football and Sunday Night Football. IndyCar will get the weekend it wants for the Indianapolis 500, and a few other events, but other weekends will have to fit in with NBC's other tentpole events.
We saw this year how tough it is for sports properties to fit in. The men's French Open final went five sets. The first half of the second Belle Isle race was seen on CNBC. The Olympics put IndyCar on break for two weeks in August. The Long Beach finale will not be on NBC next week because the Ryder Cup will take place. There are some weekends that will be out of the question. NBC has the U.S. Open golf tournament the third weekend in June. The Tour de France takes place over three weeks in July and there is also the British Open in July.
These conflicts will still exist in 2022 and IndyCar will have races that follow tennis, golf, lacrosse, and many other sports. There will be races pre-empted, but there will also be times when IndyCar runs long into another event's time, like we saw with the first Belle Isle race this year. It will even out, but we cannot lose sight of IndyCar's position in NBC's portfolio.
Fourteen races on network NBC are a great thing for IndyCar, but IndyCar had to meet the network halfway. If that means moving St. Petersburg to February, Texas to March, Road America up a week in June and Portland and Laguna Seca up a week in September, IndyCar plays the game hoping to come out a winner. Some of these moves could turn out to be big gains for the series, but some tracks will be forced to adjust and battle to maintain successful events.
However, if IndyCar is going to end the season on the first NFL Sunday, it should move the final races up sooner and end on Labor Day weekend. Nearly a decade ago, Mark Miles preached how he wanted IndyCar's championship decider synonymous with Labor Day weekend. Since Miles took over, IndyCar has ended on Labor Day weekend once and that was in 2014. Since 2016, the IndyCar finale has fallen during the NFL season.
I want IndyCar to race into October and there are many lovely weekends in autumn for races, but there are not enough weekends for IndyCar to justify going deep into autumn. On top of Laguna Seca, IndyCar needs at least three, if not four more weekend to justify running into football season. Until then, IndyCar should just jam in the end of the season before the first Monday in September. That isn't ideal, but IndyCar's current situation does not allow for the season to spread out over eight months.
At least IndyCar will be starting earlier next year. We might have our issues with gaps in the schedule, but people are going to be joyous to have an IndyCar race in February when that is normally a time when we are a month away from the first race. January will be filled with more urgency. We can make it through a couple of down periods early on. There will be a few busy stretches when it gets warm. Those will satisfy us until another season ends next September.
Champion From the Weekend
Jordi Torres won the MotoE championship for a second consecutive year after a victory in race one and a 13th in race two from Misano after Dominique Aegerter was penalized 38 seconds for making contact with Torres while battling for first on the final lap of the season. The 2019 MotoE champion Matteo Ferrari claimed race victory in the second race after Aegerter's penalty.
The #41 Team WRT Oreca-Gibson of Robert Kubica, Yi Yifei and Louis Delétraz clinched the European Le Mans Series LMP2 championship after it won the 4 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps, its third victory of the season.
Winners From the Weekend
You know about Colton Herta, MotoE and Team WRT, but did you know...
Francesco Bagnaia won MotoGP's San Marino and Rimini Riviera Grand Prix, his second consecutive victory. Raúl Fernández won the Moto2 race, his second consecutive victory and sixth victory of the season. Dennis Foggia won the Moto3 race, his second consecutive victory and fourth victory of the season.
Kyle Kirkwood swept the Indy Lights races from Laguna Seca.
Kyle Larson won the NASCAR Cup race from Bristol, his sixth victory of the season. A.J. Allmendinger won the Grand National Series race, his fourth victory of the season. Chandler Smith won the Truck race, his first career victory and it advanced him to the semifinal round in the Truck playoffs.
The #4 DKR Engineering Duqueine M30 - D08-Nissan of Laurents Hörr and Jean-Phillipe Dayrault won in the LMP3 class at the 4 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps, its third consecutive victory. The #88 AF Corse Ferrari of François Perrodo, Emmanuel Collard and Alessio Rovera won in the GTE class, its third victory of the season.
Scott Redding, Jonathan Rea, and Michael Ruben Rinaldi split the World Superbike races at Barcelona. Randy Krummenacher and Manuel González split the World Supersport races.
Liam Lawson and Lucas Auer split the Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters races from Assen.
The #3 K-Pax Racing Lamborghini of Andrea Caldarelli and Jordan Pepper split the GT World Challenge America races from Watkins Glen.
The #52 AutoTechnic Racing BMW of John Capestro-Dubets and Tom Capizzi and the #11 Classic BMW of Toby Grahovec and Stevan McAleer split the GT4 America races from Watkins Glen. Charlie Luck and Jeff Burton split the GT America.
Coming Up This Weekend
Long Beach is back and it ends the IndyCar season.
IMSA tags along to Long Beach.
Formula One will be in Sochi.
NASCAR begins another playoff round in Las Vegas.
World Superbike remains in Spain and heads south to Jerez.
GT World Challenge Europe closes out its Sprint season at Valencia.
