2024 Schedule Unveiling

While INDYCAR had hoped to have next year’s schedule unveiled this past weekend in Monterey, sources have said that they’ll wait a little longer now. The goal is now to have it out by the end of the month. That’s due to a couple of factors.

One is NASCAR is hopeful to have theirs out soon and if INDYCAR releases theirs and it shows no more shared weekend next summer at IMS, it could tip the hand of one of the worst kept secrets in racing about the return of the Brickyard 400.

That’s also part of another domino that Milwaukee will likely return in the INDYCAR races’ interim and INDYCAR is going to have an event there to unveil the comeback.

The final piece is Toronto is close to a new contract but it’s not done. INDYCAR wasn’t want to jump the gun on that.

Mix all three factors and you can see why it’s best to wait.

In saying that, we do know some dates and some rumored dates already.

St. Pete is already listed on the Chamber of Commerce site for March 10 and I don’t see a scenario to where the series starts before that. So it looks like March 10 is the season opener for 2024.

March 24 is the All-Star event in Thermal.

Easter is March 31, so we know that’s an off weekend.

Long Beach weekend for IMSA is April 19-20 which means the Grand Prix for the INDYCAR side is April 21. Detroit for IMSA is May 31-June 1 which means the INDYCAR race will be June 2. The GMR Grand Prix and Indianapolis 500 will take place on May 11 and May 26.

Nashville is the season opener next Sept. 15.

So, how does the rest look?

June will be busy with the likelihood of Laguna Seca moving to a late date that month. With Detroit on June 2, you have June 9, June 16, June 23, June 30 and July 6 for Road America, Laguna Seca and Mid-Ohio.

Toronto and Iowa could be July 13 and July 19-20.

You also have the Olympics July 26 through Aug. 11.

After that, it’s Aug. 17 maybe World Wide Technology Raceway for the rumored night race. You can’t do it head-to-head a week later against NASCAR so move it up a week and with Milwaukee coming back, it could run on Aug. 25. Portland has done well on Labor Day weekend (Sept. 1). Nashville concludes the season on Sept. 15.

Which leaves just the early portion.

You have March 17, then April 7, 14, 28 potentially open for Texas and Barber. Do you want to have a lot of races early and an open weekend at the end of April leading into Indy or do you prefer a busier month of April preceding the ever so important Month of May?

Schedule Estimate

March 10: St. Pete

March 24: All-Star Race (Thermal)

March 31: Easter

April: 7: Texas

April 21: Long Beach

April 28: Barber

May 11: Gallagher Grand Prix

May 26: 108th Running of the Indianapolis 500

June 2: Detroit

June 16: Road America

June 23: Laguna Seca

July 7: Mid-Ohio

July 14: Toronto

July 20-21: Iowa

July 26-Aug. 11: Olympics

Aug. 17: World Wide Technology Raceway

Aug. 25: Nashville

Sept 1: Portland

Sept. 15: Laguna Seca

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Silly Season

While a lot of seats are taking shape, there’s still some dominos to fall. Like what is Andretti Autosport doing with their 4th car? Will it be back or will they scale back to a 3 car operation?

Where does Romain Grosjean go? Does he land back with Dale Coyne Racing? Does DCR sign Devlin DeFrancesco?

RLL is likely to retain Graham Rahal. That leaves 1 seat open.

ECR has 1 seat open. I don’t see Ed Carpenter scaling back nor him letting Rinus VeeKay go. The question for them is can they keep BitNile? I think Foyt remains status quo. Penske is set. Ganassi and McLaren are set. Others are close, but Silly season isn’t quite over yet.

Conor Daly hopes to have BitNile back on his side which could lead to ECR looking for substantial money. Sting Ray Robb and DeFrancesco both have substantial funding. Simon Pagenaud had both an Indy 500 and series championship.

The musical chairs is still playing. Who lands where?

Then you have to look to next year’s free agency. Will Power is said to be heading into the final year of his contract. So is Kyle Kirkwood. There’s a few others too. How much does that play out? Do either receive early extensions?

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TV Negotiations

In late July, NASCAR announced that beginning in 2025, the Xfinity Series will move to The CW in a lucrative new contract. The deal runs through 2031 and reportedly pays $800 million in total.

That’s a massive deal that will pay dividends for the series. However, my brain got to thinking then, could this indirectly help the NTT INDYCAR SERIES in their next batch of negotiations?

They’re operating on their second contract with NBC Sports which is worth far less than what the Xfinity Series is going to get moving forward. That deal ends next season though as the negotiating window may open up this offseason.

With the Xfinity Series garnering similar ratings to INDYCAR and them getting that much of a bump up in pay, what can this do for INDYCAR in their next set of negotiations?

The Xfinity Series competes in 33 races for which INDYCAR is nearly half of that with 17. So, there’s a per race factor in this process, but still, I don’t think a deal like this could hurt INDYCAR when Amazon was reportedly bidding for some NASCAR races. Plus, INDYCAR has the 100 Days to Indy Show on The CW already which if they’re actively adding more and more sporting programs, wouldn’t them taking a shot at getting an INDYCAR contract be beneficial to the network too?

They have a streaming platform and cable so it could hit both markets and I’m not saying INDYCAR is going to get $800 million, but at least they can get double to what they’re making now, if not WAY more.

There’s more value in INDYCAR in that you have the Indy 500 carrot you can dangle too.

In saying that, you know NBC Sports isn’t going to want to lose INDYCAR either. The 2023 NTT INDYCAR Series averaged over 1.5-million viewers which ranked as the most-watched seaso since 2016, when media rights were split between NBCSN and ABC.

That comes after last season to where the first year of this new TV contract delivered the most-watched INDYCAR season in six years (since 2016) and NBC Sports’ most-watched season on record, an increase of 5% compared to 2021.

A gain in 2022 over 2021 and another a gain in 2023 over 2022.

“We certainly had every intention of renewing INDYCAR,” NBC Sports’ President, John Miller said in announcing the lately renewal with the series in 2021. “We’ve had a great relationship with them that goes all the way back to 2009 when NBC SN was originally called Versus, and then it became NBC SN, and all we had were the cable races.

“And we made a pretty strong pitch to Mark and the INDYCAR leadership that we felt that we could do a lot for the sport if we could have it all under one umbrella. And they went with us starting in 2019, we showed them what we could do with the 500. We’ve shown consistent growth.

“I think you’ve got some of the brightest young races and most competitive racing out there. Week-in, week-out, we see great rating wherever we have an INDYCAR race on with recognizable names who are becoming bigger and bigger stars out there.

“We find that it fits into a very good, tight two-and-a-half hour, three-hour window which we think is important.

“Actually Indy narrow fits very nicely into our schedule. There are 17 races that we can accommodate, as opposed to there are some other properties that we have like the Premiere League which lasts for ten months which basically goes from August to May.

“So every property is different. We look at them and evaluate them in a variety of different ways but we certainly saw the ratings growth. We saw it was getting younger. We see the way advertisers and marketers are gravitating towards this sport. We see the way they are gravitating towards the property itself and the tracks, and we felt this was the right — right sport to make a bet on.”

If he’s saying that in 2021, imagine what he’d say in 2024 with a contract up for negotiation.

There’s another layer to this too and that’s with the NASCAR Cup Series contract also being bided on as well, there’s a chance that NBC Sports could lose NASCAR all together. The Truck Series has an exclusive deal with Fox Sports for their entire schedule. Now the Xfinity Series moves onto The CW for an entire season.

The Cup Series is going to get another bump in pay and we know Amazon, The CW, ESPN/ABC and maybe even a few others are trying to move in on Fox Sports and NBC Sports’ deal. What if they do?

That could leave INDYCAR as the only motorsports left for NBC Sports which in turn gives NBC Sports a lot more money to throw INDYCAR’s way out of desperation, especially if INDYCAR opens dialogue with those other networks too.

You would think that they may want to renew this agreement earlier so INDYCAR isn’t seeking out other networks to bid on them.

Mark Miles said in the last time they negotiated, that they did look outside of NBC Sports, but it’s also going to take a lot to supplant INDYCAR away from NBC Sports too.

“We did, as we said before, take the time to understand the marketplace, and what the interest of others might look like, but you know, for us, whether it’s this media partnership or important sponsor relationships, the incumbent is always going to win ties, and there wasn’t a tie,” Miles said. “NBC, it ended up in the agreement that really offered a superior choice.”

Miles and Miller have a long history of working together than spans three decades, so you can see that this is an important deal for all sides.

Which further means that INDYCAR which has the Indy 500 and 16 other races that feature similar ratings in those events in comparison to the Xfinity Series and NASCAR’s version of AAA is getting $800 million spread across seven seasons.

INDYCAR has a lot to offer by virtue of that.

Which is why I feel like this means that the next TV deal puts the ball in the court of NBC Sports. They’re a great partner for INDYCAR but INDYCAR is on the verge of a breakout and a massive TV contract is just what the series needs to propel them further forward.

We keep talking a 3rd OEM, but when you race in front of practically sellout crowds everywhere you go, have the most competitive series in the world and now can muster dare I say $200 million TV deal, this series is set for a massive breakout.

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Hybrid Testing

INDYCAR sent 1 Honda and 1 Chevy down to Sebring last month to test the new 2024 engine package. Scott Dixon and Will Power drove the cars and gave it a resounding review. As we inch closer and closer to 2024, testing this new engine package becomes more prevalent.

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Larson’s Indy 500 Test

Kyle Larson is a modern day AJ Foyt or Mario Andretti. Less than seven hours after landing in Indianapolis in the wee hours of Sunday morning from winning the Knoxville Nationals, Larson was on site at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway unveiling his car for the 108th Running of the Indianapolis 500. It sat next to his ride for next May’s Coca-Cola 600 too.

The Hendrick 1100 is ahead and Larson is the driver. 3 1/2 hours after the unveiling, Larson was set to hop into his No. 5 Chevrolet and run the NASCAR Cup Series race on the 2.439-mile road course layout.

Think about those sentences. Larson led every lap in a sprint car in Knoxville, Iowa. That came after he qualified his Cup car in Indy. He then flew back, showed off his Indy 500 and Coke 600 cars and raced in a Cup event after that.

“Obviously I’m extremely excited, but at the same time, I’m so busy racing and trying to take care of my family that I haven’t — like it hasn’t really set in yet that it’s truly a reality,” Larson said on Sunday. “When you have days like today and you unveil the car, all those little steps, it definitely makes it seem more real.”

Real it is. Larson is doing the double. He was on site in May to take in a practice day.

“It’s obviously very exciting,” Larson said during his May visit “It’s been something that I’ve wanted to do for a very long time. I wanted to be patient and kind of wait for the timing to feel right. It feels right. Having Hendrick Motorsports be extremely supportive of it, supporting the efforts with Arrow McLaren, it’s something that I’m extremely excited about.

“To have Rick (Hendrick) and Jeff Gordon involved. Jeff kind of told me that I get to live out a dream of his. That’s really special also to me.

“I’ve obviously come here a lot in a stockcar. I lived in the area for a couple years. So this place for a long time felt like home or a second home to me.

“In my opinion, this is the biggest race in the world, so you want to be a part of the big ones. Hopefully someday be a winner of a big event.

“Look forward to it. Happy to be here today. Look forward to kind of taking in as much knowledge as I possibly can in a single day, just trying to better prepare myself for whenever I get behind the wheel.”

One thing that he’s done was taken part of a sim session at Mid-Ohio. He was astonished by how these cars run in comparison to a Cup car.

“I did Mid-Ohio, and it was — I would say like when I first got in it, I thought I would be out of control and go in the grass, all this stuff,” he said on Sunday morning. “I was like, okay, I feel like I’m doing all right, like I felt like I got into a rhythm.

“They were just, the engineers and stuff were staying pretty quiet. They would chime in like, hey, you know, everything looks good. Just keep working on your braking zones and stuff. Okay, more brake pressure, whatever, go a little deeper. Yep, that’s a little better. And I’m like, well, how much more do I need? They’re like, well, you need about a thousand more pounds of brake pressure. I’m like what?

“So the max brake pressure there is like 2,800 pounds. That’s insane. I’ve never pushed anything that hard. Like for instance, here into turn one we’d be like 800 pounds of brake pressure max. So trying to get your brain wrapped around slamming the pedal that hard and releasing it quickly but also like maintaining some was just super difficult for me. I couldn’t ever figure it out. I felt like I regressed once I got closer to the max brake pressure stuff.

“Then, yeah, Felix Rosenqvist, he showed up and was way faster than me, so it was starting to get frustrating. It was just eye opening to see data, right? Like I’ve always heard about the downforce cars and braking and all that, but I’ve never seen the telemetry of what they’re doing behind the wheel. So that was definitely interesting. To see how consistent, they can be while pushing that hard was pretty wild, definitely eye opening.

“Like I’ve said in other interviews, no matter the result from this whole experience, I’m going to come out of it a better race car driver. I already have, I think, just in the short amount of time I spent in the simulator.

“It’s definitely having the support that I do from the teammates at Arrow McLaren as well as Chevrolet and drivers who have raced INDYCAR stuff before as well as stock cars. I’ll have a lot of people to lean on to soak up a lot of knowledge. So very, very thankful for that.”

Next up is a test here in October. That’s when this thing takes on a whole new level.

“I’m sure once things slow down in the off-season and I have a lot of time to sit around and think about the upcoming season is when it’s really going to hit,” he said. “I’m sure that’s when all the nervousness will start to creep in, but as well as the excitement.

“I look forward to prepping even more. I definitely, obviously, look forward to October and getting to do the rookie orientation. I am — I have thought about that a little bit, so I am nervous when I do think about that. But I think once I get in the car, a lot of those nerves will hopefully go away after a few laps, and it will feel like home, just like all the other race cars I drive.”

Larson has driven a lot of cars and that’s by design. He’s a racer.

That’s where Larson feels his best and more in his element. It’s a big reason as to why Rick Hendrick softened his stance on allowing his Cup drivers to take part in extracurricular activities outside of their Cup cars.

See, before Larson came aboard, it was always a firm no on doing anything like that. Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson and everyone else only typically raced in the Cup Series and rarely moonlighted even in an Xfinity car or anything else.

Then with a shot to get Larson and give him a redemption tour in 2021, Larson maintained that it was a big part of his life in dirt racing and wherever he ended up, it would be with stipulations that he was allowed to continue doing so.

Chip Ganassi, his last employer, allowed him to do so but put limits on it. Hendrick was swayed by Jeff Gordon to allow Larson to race on dirt and it was a decision that led to immediate success.

The 2021 championship doesn’t likely come if Larson isn’t on dirt throughout the season. Mr. Hendrick never has had any hesitation though about it. Even with Chase Elliott getting injured off track while snowboarding in Colorado or Alex Bowman missing three races due to injury from a sprint car crash in a series that Larson runs, Hendrick could have put an end back to it. He didn’t. Larson is appreciative.

This is what makes Larson click. I don’t think there’s many drivers in the world that are as well versed and an all-around talented race car driver as Larson. Racing on dirt is an art and Larson is Picasso on it.

To take him away from those opportunities doesn’t let Kyle Larson be just that, Kyle Larson. Drivers have talked over the years on how you can’t take much from a dirt car obviously to a Cup car, but what you can take over is repetition and confidence.

“Just try to raise as much as I can get as much seat time as I can,” Larson told me. “I believe yes, it does help your mentality and your confidence.

The thing with racing is, it’s very much momentum based. NASCAR with this Next Gen has proven to be harder to keep that momentum with so much up and down results. Does running dirt help Larson mentally when he’s going through any rough patches?

“Well, I’ve had a great year on dirt but on the Cup season has been very up and down,” he told me. “Speed wise has been good, but results wise has been up and down. So I would say it doesn’t matter.”

It’s more personally helping him than anything else.

“Of course, Kyle put a lot of pressure on me, and I’m used to that with cars, but it’s all good,” Hendrick said. “We’re real excited. Do it with Chevrolet too. Never raced anything but a Chevrolet, so we can do that. Again, we’re real honored to be able to even come participate in this event. So we’re excited.

“We all talked about it. Kyle wanted to do it. We’re just very fortunate that Arrow McLaren were able to put it together for us. So I can’t wait to have that car in the museum.”

Larson hasn’t won NASCAR’s Super Bowl, the Daytona 500, but if he’s going to win INDYCAR’s, it takes a lot of preparation. That’s what brought him here in May. What brings him to the GM facility in North Carolina. What brings him back to Indy to the McLaren shop. He’s all-in.

“I’m kind of glad that Kyle said, This is something I’d really like to do one day,” Jeff Gordon said. “Do you think this is something that Mr. Hendrick and Hendrick Cars would want to support?

“We’re happy that that’s all going to come true in 2024.

“I think for today, it’s such a different world, right? This car. I think as a driver, driving a race car is sort of natural of what you need to go fast, to compete. But you’re talking about Indianapolis at 230-plus miles per hour, what it takes to get comfortable, what kind of language there is for a driver of the types of things that they’re talking about versus a stockcar or a sprint car.

“For us, I think on the Hendrick Motorsports side, it’s building this relationship with Arrow McLaren so that next year we can do everything we can to maximize its full potential, get Kyle everything he needs, to get Arrow McLaren everything they need, to make sure that this effort goes as smooth as possible and gives them the best opportunity to get a great result.

“I did say to him he’s going to be able to live out a dream of mine. I go back to the mid to late ’80s when I was living here in Indiana, raced all around here. Every race car driver’s dream, if you race around Indianapolis, is to get here, to compete at this facility.

“I watched guys like Rich Vogler, a few other competitors I raced with, come over here and do that. Certainly it was on my radar. But NASCAR came calling. Once that happened, I kind of shifted my focus to that.

“I don’t know if really the right opportunity or it ever became serious enough after that to become a reality. So to me, this is equally as exciting because, one, I sure as heck right now don’t want to drive into turn one at 238 miles, whatever they’re running (smiling), but Kyle does. Kyle is capable of it.

“The fact that Rick has never been to the Indy 500, we’re going to go to Le Mans this year, next year he’s going to come to the Indy 500, that’s extremely exciting for our organization, as well as the things we can learn from Arrow McLaren in what they do here to compete for this event. I think there’s crossover we can learn from one another.

“Super excited. Excited for Kyle. As well as he has the ability. When he has the equipment and the resources, the people surrounding him, he has the ability to go do extraordinary things. We’ve seen him do it in other cars. I have no doubt that he’ll be able to do that in the Indy 500 next year, as well.”

I asked Gordon if this is maybe the start to HMS joining the NTT INDYCAR SERIES in the future one day.

“I know what Rick’s answer would be if he was sitting here. It would be an absolute no (smiling),” he said.

“He loves racing. He loves cars. When he comes here next year, he might change his mind a little bit. NASCAR is always going to be our primary focus, where our history, our legacy lies.

“I will say that if you want to run a good business, you have to diversify yourself. We’ve seen ourselves get into GM defense manufacturing, we’re seeing ourselves go to Le Mans. We’ve dabbled a little bit in IMSA. We have a great relationship with Chevrolet and our friends at GM.

“If there’s something that makes sense for us as a company, as Hendrick Motorsports, then we’re certainly going to look at it, look at whether or not it makes sense for us or not.”

Larson says that not only is this his dream, it’s his dads too. This is the No. 1 race in his dads book which is why it didn’t fall too far to the younger Larson to race here. He feels like his dad may miss half the race next year due to tears in his eyes from being so happy in that moment.

As far as why now, he says that when he was with Ganassi, despite everyone thinking he’d race here, he just wasn’t ready yet. He didn’t feel he accomplished anything yet in NASCAR to merit the focus of doing both. Now, as a 2021 Cup champion, he feels like he’s done enough to try a new venture.

Good thing too. This is going to be a massive story next May.