re: 2022 IndyCar Season Thread - Last Race: Laguna Seca 9/11 3:00 PM ET (NBC)

(Qualifying results in the previous post.)

So who’s going to win the race? Amazingly, the top 7 guys in the championship qualified in the top 7 positions; they are clearly the class of the field. The pressure to assert their championship campaigns with just 3 races left is huge.

Josef Newgarden (starting P3) has 3 wins at Gateway, including the last two races held here. Pole sitter Will Power, Scott Dixon (starting P6), and Takuma Sato (starting P8) all have 1 win. These are the only Gateway winners in the field.

During the post-qualifying interviews, Colton Herta mentioned how hard it is to formulate a race strategy at Gateway (and other short ovals), because the undercut works great if there are no yellows in the pit window. At the end of the stint the car is going so much slower than at the beginning of the stint, that pitting early for fresh tires can give you a great advantage. The problem is that a green-flag pit stop puts you a lap down from the field. So if a yellow comes out before the other leaders have pitted, they can pit during the yellow and still stay ahead of all of the cars that pitted under green.

The overcut worked to perfection in 2019 when Takuma Sato, Tony Kanaan, Ed Carpenter, and Josef Newgarden all stayed out as long as they could during a pit window, and when Sébastien Bourdais crashed on lap 192 of 248, those 4 guys then controlled the race. But at first, all of the announcers, including ex racers Paul Tracy and maybe Townsend Bell, thought the yellow flag was bad for these 4 guys. Somehow they all forgot that everyone else was a lap down because they pitted during green at a short track. This caused confusion for a few minutes until they finally realized how the overcut gamble paid off. Sato led the rest of the way and blipped Carpenter at the line for the first and only short oval win of his career.


Note that the original schedule was for the race broadcast to start at 6:00 pm ET and the green flag to fall at about 6:30 pm ET, but because of weather concerns, they have moved up the race start.

Broadcast starts at 6:00 pm ET on the USA Network (and the Peacock app)

Green flag is at 6:01 pm ET