The dynamics of the 2024 IndyCar season will change significantly after this weekend's Sonsio Grand Prix at the IMS Road Course. Oval races will account for more than half of the remaining races, including a stretch of three to close the championship fight. RACER.com Editor Mark Glendenning detailed the unique side of the 2024 schedule in the latest issue of RACER Magazine (Mar/Apr) speaking with one driver looking to capitalize on the opportunity.


How’s this for an odd stat: None of the last three NTT IndyCar Series champions – Alex Palou in 2021, Will Power in ‘22, Palou again in ’23 – won an oval race during their title-earning seasons. Palou’s yet to win one at all. Meanwhile, Josef Newgarden won four out of five oval races last year and ended up fifth in points.

OK, nobody’s saying that ovals don’t matter, but it is a fact that their impact on the last few title campaigns has been limited.

That probably won’t be the case in 2024. This year, there will be seven oval races on the schedule, which is the most since 2011. That includes two-double header weekends (Iowa and series returnee Milwaukee) and, in a late twist, the season-finale, following the surprise news that the Nashville GP street race will be replaced by a trip out to Nashville Superspeedway for the first time since 2008.

Plus, when oval season hits the series this year, it will hit hard: of the seven left-turn-only events, six fall within the final eight races.



World Wide Technology Raceway sits between double-headers in Iowa and Milwaukee in an oval-heavy run-in to the season finale at...another oval, 1.33-mile Nashville Superspeedway. Photo: Michael Levitt/Motorsport Images

SUBSCRIBE TO RACER"It’s extremely oval-heavy to end the season," says Arrow McLaren’s two-time oval winner and perennial title aspirant Pato O’Ward. "I wouldn’t be surprised if there are late charges in the points with drivers who are very strong on ovals.

"You don’t have a Joker card for ovals anymore. You have to perform and get the best out of everything that you’ve got for street courses and road courses, and you’ve got to do the exact same on the ovals. If you’re counting on the road and street courses to save your championship and you’re just kind of cruising on ovals…there’s too many points tied to ovals now."

From a purely points standpoint, the rising count of ovals on the schedule offsets the Indianapolis 500 reverting from a double-points to a regular points-paying race in 2023, although there’s plenty of scope for debate over how much the double-points era impacted the final outcome of the title. Palou’s second place at Indy in 2021 gave him an additional points buffer for the title fight, but he’d still have beaten Newgarden to the championship if the "500" had awarded single points, albeit much more narrowly. Same goes for Scott Dixon in 2020.

This year, instead of talking about double points, it’s all about the double-headers, both of which are on short tracks. Says O’Ward, a bad start to either event won’t necessarily mean the entire weekend is a write-off, but it will put a huge emphasis on rebounding for race two.

"It definitely puts some pressure on you to make sure that if you’ve had a bad first race, you don’t have that again, because it’s like having two bad weekends in a row," he says. "That’s pretty detrimental to a championship."

Pato O’Ward won his second IndyCar oval race at Iowa Speedway in’22. Photo: Chris Owens / IndyCar


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There’s a less obvious curveball hidden in IndyCar’s "oval season," too – hybrids. At time of writing, the series plans to roll its new hybrid engines out for Mid-Ohio, right before the schedule revs into oval mode. O’Ward says that changes the championship calcs completely.

"When you start a season, drivers and teams have got maybe one or two Joker cards, and that’s only if you’re very strong at other weekends," he says. "One DNF really is a very big blow to your championship.

"I feel like those Joker cards now can’t really be used up by the teams and drivers anymore. You have to leave those for the hybrid. You can be having a great season and then all of a sudden, if you’ve got trouble with the hybrid, it will absolutely turn your year upside down."

But the series is saving one of its biggest surprises until the very end. The recent decision to move the finale from the streets of Nashville to a 1.33-mile oval is one for the history books – the championship last ended on an oval a decade ago, when Will Power’s ninth at Fontana clinched the 2014 title. But it will also present a new kind of challenge for the title contenders. Assuming the championship goes down to the wire, they’ll head into the showdown without the benefit of years of track-specific experience and data to lean on. Even allowing for whatever testing at Nashville Superspeedway the series might lay on, it adds a new dimension to an already high-pressure weekend.

"You’ll need to have a strong car and a strong race," says O’Ward. "I have no idea how fast Nashville is, or how well it races. My hope is for the finale to be extremely exciting and for the series to crown the right champion. But I have no idea about the characteristics of the track. If it races like Indy, patience will be a virtue.

If it’s like Texas, well…get your balls out!"


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