By David Morgan, Associate Editor
ARLINGTON, Texas – Race weekend in Texas is finally upon us as the NTT IndyCar Series drivers get set to make their first laps around the behemoth 2.73-mile, 14-turn street course that winds its way around the footprint between the stadiums belonging to two storied franchises in the NFL and MLB – the Dallas Cowboys and Texas Rangers.
With the brand-new circuit making its debut on the calendar this season, teams and drivers have had limited data to pull from as the work to bring the best setup possible for Sunday’s Java House Grand Prix of Arlington.
Simulator runs were had without a true one-to-one comparison with a track scan and with drivers getting their first eyes on the circuit in Thursday’s track walk, it’s really a best guess as to who will be the best out of the gate.
Still, they have some idea of portions of the track to watch out for.
“I’m excited to drive it. It genuinely looks super fun to drive,” said Arrow McLaren’s Pato O’Ward. “There is elevation change in the track. There are three main different surfaces. There’s some older asphalt, new asphalt, concrete, and then polished concrete. So, the car will behave differently in all of them. But I mean that’s what’s going to be part of the challenge.
“Just like any other street course that we go to in IndyCar, you can never expect the same grip level at every corner. And even phasing the corner, you might have something different in the middle than in the exit and on the entry. So, it’s going to be a challenge. It’s going to be a learning curve. It’s a pretty steep one in P1.
“So, I think the name of the game here is just being comfortable. You have to be comfortable in order to start pushing the car to start exposing it because otherwise I think you’re going to be stuck.”
O’Ward added that the nearly mile long backstretch will be a key place throughout the weekend.
“It’s long, but it ain’t straight,” said O’Ward. “So, yeah, I’m curious to see how the cars are going to behave when we get to the snake. It kind of snakes all the way down, but it gets more aggressive as we’re probably like 180, 190 miles an hour. So, the floor of the cars are going to be on the track by then. So, if it gets bumpy there, it can get a little hairy.
“So, I’m curious to see what P1’s going to be for us. And it looks great, man. The layout of the track genuinely is badass.”
Louis Foster, out of the Rahal Letterman Lanigan stable, explained that it was a bit of a shock for him when arriving on site to see the true condition of the racing surface they would be racing on.
“Firstly, I thought it was repaved is what I was told. So, that was a shock when I saw that it wasn’t, but it doesn’t seem like it’s very bad,” said Foster. “There are sections that might be tricky. I don’t think there’s going to be any massive dramas in the sense of safety wise that we need to grind things down. I don’t know yet.
“We haven’t driven it at speed, but when you feel bumps driving in a golf cart, you’ll feel them in an IndyCar. So yeah, we’ll see. I think one of the bigger concerns for me, honestly, is the back straight, the speeds we’re going to be doing into Turn 10, I think it is how bumpy it is down there. So that’s definitely going to be a concern for the cars, for my back, for a lot of things.
“…I think the whole spec of it all with how intricate the layout is, I think it’s a very cool layout. The paint we have all over the track makes it feel quite elevated in a sense. The facility we’re at as well. So, I think generally this trumps every street course on the calendar by far right now.”
Graham Rahal noted that while he did not take part in any simulator time, he has done some homework to get a general idea of what to expect, and anything they haven’t learned yet should be picked up pretty quickly once they hit the track for opening practice on Friday afternoon.
“It’s a little tricky. Obviously, you have the simulator, which I did not do. I watched Mick [Shumacher]’s tape on the sim and stuff. But the sim looks quite different than what this really is, to be honest with you. So, it’s a bit of a challenge,” said Rahal.
“I think the one cool, probably the coolest attribute though of professional racing drivers is their ability to adapt fast. When you get onto a track that you haven’t been to within a lap or two, honestly, you pretty much have got it sort of figured out.
“And that’s kind of crazy to think about, but it’s the truth. And then year after year, you’re remember where…I joke around, I tell people all the time, it’s hard for me to remember my daughter’s birthday sometimes, but I can tell you exactly where a bump is at the apex that turned to at Toronto. And that’s the way our brains work. And so, it’ll be that way for us as we go forward here for sure.”
Marcus Ericsson explained that the action spot on the track will likely change from day to day, from the slow, technical portions of the circuit to begin with and then transitioning to the long backstretch as it gets to race day on Sunday.
“I think the first part of the lap, very technical and slow speed. It is going to be very, it’s a lot of lap time you can gain or looser, but then I think come race day, it is the long straight,” said Ericsson.
“The straight is extremely long but it’s also flowy so it’s not like a straight straight, it is a flowy straight with some corners in it but still flat out. So, I think that’s going to produce a lot of action and then a lot of overtaking opportunities, I think.
“I really believe the race is going to be super entertaining, A lot of action, a lot of things happening. So, I think it’s going to be a great show. I really hope people show up here on race day, but also watch it on TV because I think it’s going to look fantastic and I think it’s going to be a very entertaining race.”
The newest member of the Juncos Hollinger Racing stable, Rinus VeeKay, explained that Turn 2 will be the place he has his eyes on, along with the backstretch like many of the others.
“It’s tough because I only did a few laps in the simulator since we didn’t have an actual track scan, we didn’t have the elevation changes. Turn 2 seems like a pretty big dip with the elevation change at the apex, so I think that’ll be a big one for sure,” said VeeKay.
“Downforce levels are going to be a talking point with that straightaway being almost a mile long. How much downforce are people running while keeping the corner speeds up, but having that straightaway advantage, I think that’ll be a good talking point and especially getting a tow in qualifying will be very much comparable to Monza in F1, F2, F3, where everybody’s trying to get a tow.
“I think some people get it right, some people get it wrong, so it’ll be interesting.”
Meyer Shank Racing pilot Marcus Armstrong expressed his excitement for venturing into the unknown and the fun that goes into racing on a new surface – at least for the drivers.
“It’s kind of arrive and see what we have,” said Armstrong. “It’s interesting, I mean it’s fun to sort of prepare for, I guess the engineers would say the opposite, but you can’t exactly predict what it’s going to be like. Even the track surface changes about 50 times through the lap, so that’s fun for us, I guess. It’s tricky. It’s a bit of a nightmare for the engineers.”
Mick Schumacher will be making his third career IndyCar start with Rahal Letterman Lanigan and explained that he is keeping an open mind heading into the first on-track activity.
“It looks pretty bumpy. I think the track, they try to do as much as they could to grind it down and make sure it’s flat, but I’m sure it’s not super easy,” said Schumacher. “Obviously, Texas winters are quite tough at times and the summers are brutal hot, so yeah, we’ll see what we find today. I think we have had tracks in the past from what I know that are pretty similar to this and I think hopefully we will have a good starting package.”
“…I mean, we’ve driven Miami with F1, right? So, it’s not the first time we’re driving around a stadium. I think what’s the first time is that we have so many different tarmacs and different conditions on circuit from corner to corner.
“Thinking about Turn 2, for example, where it pretty quickly changes from the black tarmac to the concrete, so that will be interesting to see what grip it is. In Sebring, we’ve found quite a lot of different patches of grip. I presume it’ll be similar here. Yeah, I think we’re all going to go in there and just try and be open-minded after. And then we’ll take this one and then we’ll go.”
Comparing Arlington to Other Circuits
The general consensus among drivers polled is that the Arlington circuit most closely resembles other street circuits, both past and present, that have been on the IndyCar schedule, like Nashville or Detroit.
“I would say this currently feels like a weird combination of Detroit and Nashville, like old Nashville with specifically the concrete,” said Foster.
“Concrete’s difficult to drive on because of the way they have to make a concrete surface. You can’t just lay out a mile straight like you can asphalt. You’ve got to do it in blocks. And that creates, each block that’s laid is laid a little bit differently, which when the speed limit on the normal road is 30 miles an hour and you’re in a road car with suspension, it’s no problem. But yeah, when you’re doing 200 mile an hour in IndyCar and you’re that far from the ground, it’s different.”
Rahal agreed on the Detroit comparison, especially when looking at the similarities between the surface changes over the course of the lap.
“I’ve been telling everybody to me from a surface perspective, from a concrete/asphalt change, it reminds me a lot of a Detroit,” said Rahal. “And so, for us, we are not going to start necessarily with a Detroit setup, but it’s not going to be far off. So, there’s a lot of races that you can relate to pretty quickly, and everybody will have it figured out quite quick, I’ll bet.”
Likewise, from Team Penske’s David Malukas, who echoed the comparison of the track being a mash-up of both the Nashville street circuit and Detroit.
“I think you’re always trying to compare it to street courses. I think with track feeling, it feels possibly a little bit of Detroit and the old Nashville kind of mixed in with each other,” said Malukas.
“But the track doesn’t necessarily look bumpy though. It looks almost more kind of hilly. I don’t know how to explain it. Wavy, I don’t know. It just seems like the track kind of goes slightly up and down instead of more actual potholes where it was in Detroit.
“So, it is going to be interesting to see how the setup is going to compare.”
Alexander Rossi looked even further back to the old Detroit circuit in Belle Isle as the best comparison to the Arlington circuit.
“The horseshoe, well, really, Turn 1 all the way to Turn 9 is quite tight and a little bit strange, so I would say that if anything you would compare that a little bit to Belle Isle,” said Rossi.
“I don’t know how familiar you are with it, but there used to be a section where it was kind of a decreasing radius that was in front of a bunch of suites and such super bumpy concrete, so that this reminds me of that a little bit, but that’s definitely going to be the section of the track where you see the most amount of variance in the beginning of people trying to find what the best way to get through there.”
As for comparisons outside of the United States, it was Baku in Azerbaijan, that Armstrong pointed to, while Schumacher noted that the track reminded him most of Macau on the Formula 3 circuit.
“It reminds me of Baku actually in Azerbaijan, where I used to race when I was a kid, so it’s quite long straights, a lot of longitudinal braking, a lot of low speed stuff to me. It reminds me a lot of that place,” said Armstrong.
“Probably I would say Macau comes close just because of the long straits and downforce level goes down. So yeah, I would say Macau,” added Schumacher.
Whether all of these comparisons remain true will be put to the test when the drivers get their first laps at speed during opening practice at 4:00 pm ET on FOX Sports 2.
Saturday will bring another practice session at 9:30 am ET on FOX Sports 1, leading into qualifying at 2:30 pm ET on FOX Sports 1.
The inaugural Java House Grand Prix of Arlington is scheduled for 12:30 pm ET on FOX.
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