Why is there so much pressure on everyone at Iowa Speedway, more so than at any IndyCar race so far this season?
There are a few simple reasons, so here we go.
Alex Palou has a huge championship lead but he called Iowa his worst track last year. With a double-header here, if he’s poor in both races it’s a big chance for his rivals.
Step forward Josef Newgarden who should have won both races last year but for a suspension issue in the second, and before that, had an average finish of 2.4 across the previous Iowa races. He’s led more laps at Iowa than the rest of the field combined!
He has four wins there, not to mention he’s also won both of the oval races in the 2023 season so far, so it’s obvious people are piling on the pressure for this weekend.
Asked if this was his biggest chance to erode Palou’s lead, Newgarden said he “wasn’t thinking about it that way” despite admitting even internally it’s “easy to say” among his Penske crew.
“We’ve got to be so much better, I think our oval programme has been really strong this year but we have to be better than an oval programme,” adds Newgarden.
“We have eight races left, it’s going to take all of them to be in the championship fight.
“With the way we’ve shook out to this point of the season. I’m not banking on anything.
“There’s no doubt we have potential to be good at Iowa again, we should be, how good is hard to say, it changes so rapidly.
“We have to be good everywhere if we’re going to have a chance.”
Series standings
108 points available at Iowa
1 Palou 417 points 2 Dixon +117 3 Newgarden +126 4 Ericsson +142
5 O’Ward +143
Unlike Newgarden, whose Penske team elected to run at Road America instead, Palou and most of the field headed to Iowa to test last month.
Like Newgarden, the pressure is being piled on Palou because of his Iowa struggles last year making the track the most obvious hurdle to winning a second championship.
“Last year was one of the worst weekends for me personally,” says Palou, who actually only finished sixth and 13th, not his worst results of the year by a margin.
“Not for the team, though. I remember it was quite exciting for the team.
“But I struggled quite a lot there. Even in 2020, my first year in IndyCar, then last year quite a lot. Being a double-header it’s obviously worse because it’s double points, let’s say, on the same weekend.
“Honestly, the test was good. We worked a lot on our tyre deg, long runs. It’s always good if you can start P1. If you have tyre deg like we had, like I had especially on my car last year, you go from third to ninth in one stint, which is what happened.
“I learned a lot on how to drive it better, how to get more confident. I think we made the right step.”
As long as Palou starts both races, his absolute worst case scenario if he finishes last in both races and nearest rival Scott Dixon takes a maximum score is that his lead is down to 19 points.
Palou will have his work cut out, as even two top 10s will be a tough points blow if Newgarden clinches both race wins.
Newgarden would bag at least 102 points for two wins, and if we take Palou’s average of the sixth and 13th last year and assume he’ll be somewhere similar, a pair of 10ths would give him 40 points, giving Newgarden a 62-point swing with the gap leaving Iowa at 64 points with 270 points still on offer.
Can anyone stop Newgarden winning? The fact that Penske did not test at Iowa may end up being significant. On this week’s The Race IndyCar Podcast JR Hildebrand recounts the different ways new tyres and set-ups can make a huge difference – especially when you don’t test – at Iowa.
That’s before you consider how good Pato O’Ward is on any short oval, winning and finishing second last year.
There might be a dark horse to consider, also.
For the last couple of seasons Andretti Autosport has lamented its performance on short ovals, but Colton Herta topped the recent test and completed well over a race distance in terms of laps.
“We’re pretty excited about how the test went,” Herta’s engineer Nathan O’Rourke tells The Race.
“Kind of the chink in our armour the last few years is short oval performance.
“They’re all just a little bit different. From a set-up standpoint, I would say ovals were by far our primary focus over the off-season.
“We’ve spent a tonne of time on Iowa just working through simulations and different set-up ideas just really trying to understand what our problems were for that track. It’s the type of place where degradation is key.
“It’s easy to look at the timesheet and say, ‘Oh, you had a good test with a fast lap’, but I think you could look at our results from last year and say ‘there’s a chance you could have done that one lap pace last year, but what happened after that?’
“The more interesting thing to look at on the timesheet is just how many laps we did. We didn’t want to just have half a stint on tyres and move on to the next set just to kind of test things.
“Colton really bought into staying out, I don’t think we did a run that was shorter than 15 timed laps at the test because we really wanted to get the tyres up to peak temperature and understand what was going to happen to the balance over the long run.
“Every car out there is going to wear the tyres out to nothing. But [the key is] how well you distribute the load across the tyres, not just across the four tyres but across the surface of the tyre.
“I think on that note, we’re pretty excited.
“Maybe we find out when we go to the race we are trying to optimise the wrong thing. But we’re both pretty bullish about the progress we made, certainly we seem better than what we had last year, so we’ll see.”
Though Iowa and Gateway (which hosts IndyCar in August) are both considered short ovals, they are chalk and cheese in what they require. So developing a single short-oval package is tough.
Iowa is bumpy and one of the worst tracks on the calendar for tyre degradation. Gateway has very little banking and certainly is not so hard on tyres.
“There’s absolutely nothing about Gateway that applies to Iowa apart from the fact that it’s called a short oval, it’s such a different beast,” confirms O’Rourke.
“The biggest thing again, which separates Iowa from any of the tracks that we go to, is just the amount of degradation. Percentage-wise there’s no track in the same ballpark.
“So that’s the hard part, when that degradation does come, are you quicker doing three stops versus four?
“An all-green race, you might be better off doing more pitstops, just having fresher tyres on, but that doesn’t really apply at Gateway, there’s very little degradation there.
“We actually tried that in the simulator where it’s like, ‘we’re going to Gateway, let’s try the Gateway set-up at Iowa’, and you can’t even complete half a lap. We did think about that at one point, ‘like are we overcomplicating this?!’”
So the complexity of the track’s demands, the amount of time teams have dedicated in the off-season to this race weekend because it’s effectively double points, and the seeming chink in the armour of Palou here, is why there is so much pent up frustration over getting things right at Iowa.
The pressure is on, but if it’s any consolation, Ed Sheeran is playing the post-race concert, so that should provide an opportunity for people to relax once the racing is done!
Keyword: Is this the IndyCar pack’s last chance to stop Palou?