2023 IndyCar Season

SneakyQuick

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Will use this thread to follow the indycar 2023 season posting highlights and comments
 

SneakyQuick

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A lot of crashes but an aggressive and entertaining race. The swift swede prevailed!
 

BeyondFedUp

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Thanks for this thread and video coverage, SneakyQuick. Looking forward to it.
 

SneakyQuick

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Hey no problem. As I’ve said before Indy car has rapidly risen in my estimation having seen a few races now. Hope you guys enjoy it, there is a tremendous amount of hand eye coordination and stamina required to even finish in the top ten of a single race. That it’s dominated by good old YT makes it a lot less bS prone as well.

Course at some point it might pull a nascar and promote a terrible driver in the name of diversity, but for the time being anyway I’m going to watch and enjoy it!


It’s more or less all I have left to look forward to sports wise
 

SneakyQuick

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PPG 375 race this weekend at Texas motor speedway in Fort Worth.


It’s a sort of tri-oval with a small straight and one long one. 375 miles and can be quite action packed. At lap speeds of approx 220 mph with a decent amount of passing it should make for a good race.

Felix rosenqvist of Sweden won the pole position.

Worth checking out tomrw I think.
 

SneakyQuick

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Great race. Josef Newgarden got a big win and Pato O’Ward was disappointed as he also ran a great race. There were some late crashes which impacted the strategy a bit but it was a clean race overall.


Hope y’all enjoy the highlights. They are available on YouTube not long after each race. 2 races down and I believe 17 more to go.
 

BeyondFedUp

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Thanks for these highlights SneakyQuick. I feel the drivers are just full-on insane. In a good way. Even more than NASCAR drivers. These speeds and intricacies of that track pattern look lethal. The side with the shorter straightaway and the slight turn inward looks gnarly. Great highlights brother.
 

SneakyQuick

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Oh yeah. If you like nascar at all, indycar is far better in my view. The speeds are higher and the passive is super aggressive.

That and MotoGP are quickly becoming my favorite sports
 

SneakyQuick

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If Josef newgarden and Marcus Ericsson don’t look like the two least likely people to get endorsements then I’d be stunned. Hahah
 

Matra2

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Watching the Toronto race - first Indycar race I've seen in years - and I must say the aesthetic quality of the cars has deteriorated. Those 'windshields' are terrible looking.

I can't believe Castroneves is still driving. For a second I thought Bryan Herta was too, but it turns out to be his son, Colton.
 

SneakyQuick

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I thought the Toronto race was pretty entertaining though I just saw the extended highlights, didn’t have time for the full race today.

It’s true that a lot of the races don’t have the glamour of formula one, but there is still some exciting moments.

Getting more into Indycar and motogp has helped to fill the pain of ignoring pro football basketball and baseball for me.
 

Phall

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Cool thread and interesting highlight videos.

Is there a TV station that shows races or a website that reports the results?

Questions as a true racing noob: what’s the pecking order, so to speak, for the different types of car racing? Is IndyCar endemic to a particular region of the world? The US seems to focus on NASCAR events, but that’s still equally “niche” to me here in the northeast.

Say a teenager decided he wanted to get into racing. Is there a “starter” car class you’d use to break in? There’s a racetrack near my hometown (which is a lot of fun to attend) that seems to start with “funny cars” and ascends upward toward modified stock cars, which win the only substantial prize money. Where might you go to try to break into the sport, and what would be your path?

Clearly the pit crews are made up of passionate gear heads - are a good number of them former aspirant drivers?
 

Matra2

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Historically, Indycar was big in the US MidWest but split in two in the mid-1990s into the US-focussed Indy Racing League (IRL) and the more international, but US-based, Champ Car series (CART). The latter had considerable appeal in other parts of North America in the early 2000s and was also big in Brazil, with a respectable following in Germany & the UK. The two rival series basically destroyed each other and eventually were forced to reunite but it has never recovered its former status or popularity. Today it seems like the prestige and $$$$ of one race, the Indy 500, holds the series together. That race alone is a big factor in the series having a contract with NBC.

Formula One has always been considered the top series in the world. Its fans tend to look down on Indycars as the cars are off-the-rack kit cars, nowhere near as technologicially advanced as F1, with drivers who didn't make it in F1. But in the last two decades F1 has got more and more watered down by regulations designed to cut costs and make it safer and so it is less interesting today than at any time in its history, though it is by far the most popular motorsport series in the world. The aforementioned Moto GP (motorcycle racing) would be #2 worldwide. NASCAR is #1 in the US only but even it has seen its popularity crater - that whole FBI investigating a noose in a black driver's garage was an insult, among many, to longtime fans od fthe sport.

All the series have lower levels for youngsters to develop their talent and eventually, if they get the sponsorship, break into Indycars, F1, or NASCAR. The Indycar lower formula/league used to be called Indy Lights but I haven't kept track of it.

Motorsports seem to be in decline just about everywhere and there's political hostility to them from hypocritical environmentalists. (There's an electric car series - Formula E - but the sound of the cars is so awful I can't sit through it). I'm not confident about the future of any of these car racing series but they are a good escape from the "diversity & strength" of most other sports leagues.
 
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