Somehow, it turned around and Saturday and Sunday exceeded all expectations of positivity.
The final two days do not entirely cancel out Friday.
Markham was a first-time event, but with an experienced promoter in Green Savoree Racing Promotions it should have been better aware of the shortcomings leading into the weekend.
Any street course is a challenge to put together, and there will always be some last-minute work that must be done because of the nature of closing down a part of a city and keeping it open to the local traffic until the last possible moment. Even beyond the time needed for course set up, another issue that arose was a lack of tire barriers to properly place around the course, and that also led to the complete abandonment of Friday's schedule.
Green Savoree had been the promoter for the Toronto race. It was not unaware of what it took to put together a street course in Ontario. It sounds crazy to say, but perhaps it was caught out because the Markham course was 2.1 miles in length and Toronto was 1.786 miles in length. You would think it would have accounted for the increased track length and additional braking zones. Markham had five hard braking zones and Toronto layout around Exhibition Place had three.
It could have been a case of everything was underestimated off of Toronto's numbers when the Markham course was different enough that it warranted more infrastructure and safety equipment. It doesn't sound great, and it doesn't make it any better. Everyone knows for next year what is necessary to have the track ready in time for the first session.
2. I have been around a while. This hasn't been the first opening day street course issue. From train tracks at San Jose and Baltimore to surface issues in São Paulo to unbearable bumps in Houston, we have seen significantly disrupted opening days before, and Fridays where we wondered how in the world a race would take place on Sunday.
Some callouses have developed from over the years. Markham was disappointing, but I am getting too old to be angry about it. Disappointment is much worse than anger anyway.
3. Friday has traditionally been a free day to spectators at the Toronto race and that tradition continued in Markham. Some were saying it was to no loss of the spectators because attending did not cost anything. That might be true for admission but it is not entirely free. People took off from work. They traveled and had to pay for gas or parking or both. Some may have come from a great distance and paid for flights and hotels. They bought concessions, merchandise, etc. And they did all of it to see nothing take place on track because the organizers were not ready.
The people might not have bought tickets, but they paid with their time and their time was wasted. For people who were curious observers that planned to sample Friday with maybe an inkling of attending the rest of the weekend, they were met with nothing.
Imagine if you had new neighbors and they invited you over for a party to welcome the rest of the people who lived on the street, and you showed up and they still had 50% of their boxes unpacked and stacked in the living room and dining room, and they didn't have the grill ready nor snacks available and there were no towels in the bathroom... how would you feel about going back to said neighbor's house for future events?
You only get one chance at a first impression. That certainly was not welcoming or professional by any sense, and some were probably turned off from spending money to go back for the rest of the weekend, and they may have been turned off from ever going again. That is a loss that will never be made up.
4. Where does blame lie? We know it is on the promoter, Green Savoree Racing Productions. IndyCar made it pretty clear in its statement at the end of Friday how upset it was with the organizers.
Is IndyCar faultless? Mostly.
IndyCar signed off on this event with Green Savoree promoting it. It puts its trust the race weekend would be ready to go at a scheduled time, and it wasn't. Could IndyCar have done more to check on course construction and how things were looking before the event? Maybe, but IndyCar could not have done much more in terms of course construction. It wasn't organizing this race. The series already puts on a fair number of its own races. This was a third-party handling the planning.
Even if it wasn't the series' responsibility, it still didn't look good that the track was not ready. The common person has no idea Green Savoree is putting on the event. It is an IndyCar event. If IndyCar or any of the series are not running, it looks bad on IndyCar, even if that is not a fair place to direct the blame.
5. Everyone is looking for someone's head on a platter after this and calls of punishment or terminating any partnership with Green Savoree is rather foolish. Green Savoree promotes St. Petersburg and Portland, and it owns Mid-Ohio and promotes that race as well. It has been promoting a quarter of the IndyCar schedule for basically a decade. Markham wasn't great, but it is not enough to end all relationships.
For starters, IndyCar would be much worse without Green Savoree. No circuits are lining up to host IndyCar races. Killing four events would be suicide for the series.
St. Petersburg is an outstanding event. Those renovations may have yet to come to Mid-Ohio as Green Savoree had suggested would happen when it purchased the facility nearly 15 years ago, but that race has strengthened during its ownership of the track. Portland does well for one of the more remote races on the IndyCar calendar, and a facility that the city owns.
It wasn't acceptable what occurred at Markham, but the track record is long enough to know this group will do better next year. If we get a repeat of 2026 in 2027, then we will have a further discussion.
6. Even for all the issues, the Markham circuit was great, Saturday and Sunday were excellent, and it is hard not to be excited about year two. It certainly did not seem like the events of Friday kept people away. Sunday looked phenomenal. The hope is the race we saw will keep the people coming back and bring more people out.
Are there a few areas that could be improved?
The turn five hairpin was not supposed to be designed like that, and while it was an active area of the track, it could be made more into a loop or a hairpin with less of a radius and still be a good passing zone. Turn ten was described as diabolical and could probably be tweak. The first few corners were a little tighter than expected and could be massaged out for next year.
And I think we are all in agreement it would be best to invest in curved barriers for the inside of the corners so we don't lose three or four cars for slightly clipping concrete.
7. We have probably a little less than a year until the next Markham race. Nobody should forget how terrible Friday was, and the goal will be to prevent it from happening again. While stressing the lowest moment of the weekend, it should not completely overshadow the highest moment of the weekend, and as a street course, it was a tremendous layout that produced good racing and despite a number of cautions and a choppy middle of the race, we had a terrific finish that kept people on edge until the final laps.
That is all you can hope for in any race. Markham produced it in year one.
