EDITOR’S NOTE: A previous version of this story used the headline “The White Zone: Yeah, this race sucked.” After discussing it with Tucker, he understood this was too mean-spirited of a title. Furthermore, he rewrote several paragraphs for the same reason.
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Even IndyCar puts on lackluster races.
I’ve worked enough NTT INDYCAR SERIES races to know what makes a good race. You won’t see bumping and banging, and multiple on-track lead changes like NASCAR. And if you understand and accept that, there’s a lot of fun to have with IndyCar. Which, in my opinion, is more strategy-heavy than NASCAR.
But just like NASCAR, INDYCAR has doldrum days.
All weekend, I heard beat writers and even NBC take potshots at Formula 1 for how stale and boring its product is (and rightfully so). Now by no means was Sunday’s Firestone Grand Prix of St. Pete near the level of the Max Verstappen Invitational.
But it had some elements of it.
Josef Newgarden led 92 of 100 laps and won by a margin of roughly eight seconds. All the lead changes happened during pit stops. Three times, a driver braked wrong, overran a corner and a caution flew. In one case, Romain Grosjean clipped Linus Lundqvist in Turn 10 and put him in the tire barrier (for which, he served a pass-through penalty).
Outside of that, Sunday’s race didn’t give me much to discuss.
Look, there was a lot of good from this weekend. This race drew an insanely huge crowd, which crowded pit road, pre-race. I found it more difficult than normal to move my way through the sea of people. Furthermore, St. Pete is an amazingly intimate venue. Everything’s centralized to an excellent walking distance radius of the deadline room and once you figure out the basic layout, it’s insanely easy to navigate.
Would I come here to cover a race, again? ABSOLUTELY!
Moreover, this race was probably an outlier.
For now, however, the kickoff to the 2024 season could’ve been better.
That’s my view, for what it’s worth.
