AS a long-time fan of IndyCar racing it is extremely pleasing to see a grid of 27 cars lining up for this weekend’s Big Machine Music City Grand Prix on the streets of Nashville, a brand-new event on the IndyCar calendar.
That number is significant because outside of the Indianapolis 500 and its traditional field of 33, it’s the biggest IndyCar grid in more than a decade.
The IndyCar field is usually 24 cars but has expanded this weekend as several teams add cars, continue part-time programs or re-join the field after time away from the sport. It’s a great vote of confidence in the sport under the stewardship of The Captain, Roger Penske.
In fact, as I type this, Marshall Pruett at Racer.com has run a story suggesting that 27 or 28 cars could be the regular field for next year’s IndyCar series, which would be an enormous result.
However, it did push back into the front of my mind an issue that crops up every time someone talks about field size and that is, Does it actually matter?
You see, at no point this season have I sat down and watched an IndyCar race and thought ‘Gee, this race would be better if there were more cars.’
The series is so fantastically competitive now there are legitimately somewhere between 12-18 cars that could win a race given the right circumstances. Now, I don’t know about you, but that’s what I want from a racing series. I want depth of competition, I want the quality over quantity.
I’ve worked on some races with more than 60 cars and yet the field was so spread out, or so busy tripping over themselves, that the race wasn’t very good at all.
In fact, I’d like to think we offered proof of this concept with the Bathurst 12 Hour over a several year period.
In 2017 and 2018, the field swelled beyond 50 cars and people were thrilled – massive fields back on the Mountain once again. However, while those races were far from unexciting, they were literally ridden with Safety Car interruptions – 15 of them in 2017 and 16 the following year, including one that ultimately ended the race under a red flag.
A high percentage of those caution periods came via single car accidents that broke the flow of the race and, as they say, Safety Cars breed Safety Cars.
In 2019 and 2020, however, the field lost a lot of the slower GT4, Carrera Cup and Invitational Cars and became a grid much more heavily weighted towards the professional GT3 cars as a result.
And because of that, the 2019 race was a thriller; only 8 Safety Car periods and an average speed more than 16km/hr quicker than the year prior. 2020 got even better; just 5 interruptions and – at over four hours and 40 minutes – the longest ever green flag period in the race’s history.
Purists who bemoaned the Safety Car delighted in the purity of the race and so did most people watching, from what I could tell.
All thanks to quality over quantity.
Now, IndyCar is in a good position because the cars they are adding to the grid this weekend only enhance the depth of the competition – one of them is going to be driven by four-time and reigning Indianapolis 500 champion Helio Castroneves, for crying out loud.
What I hope they don’t slip into the trap of is field-filling cars with backmarker drivers wobbling around 5 seconds off the pace, getting in the way of the good guys and girls before unceremoniously dumping their car into a fence and bringing out yet another caution.
This I think is the ultimate balance motorsport promoters need to find these days.
Sure, you need a decent sized-grid to make sure those paying the price of admission (both on TV and at the track) get value for money and see plenty of cars going past their expensive Grandstand seat throughout the day.
It’s an issue we face in Australia every year when it comes to the Supercars grid, which will expand by one to 25 cars next year. Fortunately, that one addition is Thomas Randle – who is an enormous talent and has proven his ability to run at the pointy-end.
As such, I’d take the current 24(or 25)-car Supercars field over the 36-car grid of the early 2000s any day of the week.
It’s more competitive, closer, deeper and more professional top to tail than ever before and I am convinced that the show is better because of it, because professional motorsport is about watching the best of the best go head-to-head.
Privateers wobbling around at the back were good in their time but the sport has changed and evolved. There’s still places for them, of course – but in the professional ranks it needs to be about the depth of the grid and the competition on offer.
So, on the small sample size of what I’ve mentioned – and discounting the 12-Hour because you need more cars for a longer race – it seems somewhere between 22-30 cars is the sweet spot when it comes to field size these days.
Motorsport should be about quality over quantity which is why it’s worth remembering… like I keep having to explain to people to people… that size isn’t everything.
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