IndyCar has announced a change of venue for the final race of 2024, less than one month before the championship is due to begin.
The final round of the championship was due to take place on a street circuit in Nashville in September. IndyCar has raced in the city since 2021.However the series has confirmed today the race will instead take place at the Nashville Superspeedway, a 2.09-kilometre oval.
The Nashville street circuit originally replaced Laguna Seca as the venue of IndyCar’s season finale this year. The series will instead visit the Californian road circuit in June. IndyCar was due to race on a revised version of the Nashville street track with a short, simpler configuration but retaining the distinctive dash back and forth across the Korean War Veterans Memorial Bridge.
Scott Borchetta, the chairman of race sponsor Big Machine Label Group, said it had become clear it woud not be possible to use the temporary circuit partly due to construction work going on at the nearby Tennessee Titans National Football League stadium
“Once we really started digging down it over the last seven, eight weeks and trying to understand how we could make the new footprint work [we realised] that we flat-don’t have all the lots that we need to house all the teams. We don’t have room for team hospitality.
“We don’t have a very specific answer from the NFL in regard to a Titans home game that could be on September 15th: The NFL will not release their schedule until May.
“We don’t have the type of access that I’m happy to present to downtown businesses and residents as far as a proper flow through deliveries, et cetera.”
Borchetta, who took charge of running the project in December, said it had become clear to him that the plan to hold the revamped street race had become “untenable” for this year.
“Now, if we had started a year ago on all of this stuff, when I was not in a leadership position – I was simply the sponsor at that point – some of these things could have been addressed. You might say ‘it’s not for eight months’ [but] eight months is nothing with all the things that have to be done for a street race.”
“The last thing that we were going to do on my watch is fail, and that means fail to have an IndyCar race in Nashville when we’ve had that luxury to be able to do so,” he concluded.
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Euro Brun (@eurobrun)
14th February 2024, 17:57
At least they’ve made this change before the season began, and not too late in the year to make a change impossible or to affect the championship.
Slightly unbalanced season now with 6 ovals in the last of 8 races. Newgarden has to be rubbing his hands at this news.
pastaman
14th February 2024, 18:34
Made me chuckle to see the distance given in km
Coventry Climax
15th February 2024, 2:38
According to Wikipedia, it is 1 1⁄3 miles (2.145 km) long.
I alway chuckle when people use miles, PSI, Fahrenheit and other non-ISO units, or use reverse numbers to indicate wire thickness instead of just using it’s measured diameter.
MichaelN
15th February 2024, 14:07
A rare case of someone using the proper 1 1⁄3 mile figure, nice!
A lot of Brits and Americans try to sneak in some metric tomfoolery by talking about 1.333 miles as though a mile was made up of 1000 yards. It seems only fair that the people determined to use these non-standard units do so properly, with yards and feet.
Asd
15th February 2024, 16:36
I’m a European IndyCar fan and the “2.09-kilometre” only confused me.
I know what a 2-mile oval looks like and I know what a 1-mile oval looks like.
A 2km oval? I have no idea what that looks like.
UNeedAFinn2Win (@uneedafinn2win)
15th February 2024, 6:10
Its baffling to me why some still measure a long distance by how long a donkey can haul goods before it has to fart, weight by how big is a healthy number 2, small distance by the circumference of Emperor Nero’s…..krhm…appendage
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…well, you explain it then
1/10/100/1000… ad infinitum
UNeedAFinn2Win (@uneedafinn2win)
15th February 2024, 6:11
obv a reply to pastaman and coventry…
Coventry Climax
15th February 2024, 9:29
Well, I’m of the exact same opinion, love your analogies.
Anyone ever looked up how the Fahrenheit scale came about? Impossible to repeat experiment, using brine of unspecified composition? Sounds like amateurism to me. And a very big avant-la-lettre advertising mouth to get it used so widespread.
MichaelN
15th February 2024, 14:21
While the metric system is obviously far superior to the silliness that is converting the myriad of medieval conventions that make up the so-called imperial system of units, the base for these units isn’t necessarily that much more sensible (although certainly more complex to determine and -at least supposedly- universal).
Stephen H
15th February 2024, 12:41
Good, that street track was blimmin’ awful with crash-fest, caution-filled races. Good to see more of balance between street-road-ovals on the Indycar Schedule.
Mark in Florida
15th February 2024, 15:55
@Coventry Climax. Well the USA did manage to reach the moon a couple of times and maybe build a skyscraper or two in New York using donkey fart math. I don’t know it seems to work. Also I’m glad the race was changed. The Crashville race was terrible in my opinion.
Coventry Climax
16th February 2024, 9:17
You’d be amazed at the amount of ‘famous american’ bridges and other constructions and landmarks actually designed and built by europeans. Even more recently, after Katrina, the Dutch were asked for help because of their expertise with keeping water out. That’s all fine, no need for the Dutch or other europeans to feel superior, just as there’s no reason to feel superior for any other nation. In the end, we’ll have to do it all together. Unfortunately, that realisation seems to be further away than ever before, but that’s another matter.
The europeans used silly, archaic and non-metric systems as well, until not that long ago even. Things change though, and some changes, even though small, are for the better. The ISO, International(!) Standards Organisation’s set of units is one of them. Let’s face it, even the word itself, Imperial, sounds rather prehistoric.
Coventry Climax
16th February 2024, 9:25
PS 1: math and measuring are two completely different concepts
PS 2: I’d be very surprised if NASA doesn’t currently use ISO units for their measuring. What their spokespersons communicate to the American press may be a different matter.
Mark in Florida
16th February 2024, 14:49
I absolutely agree, many Europeans contributed to Americas success. My point is that the math system doesn’t matter. There is no superiority from one to another. Its how you use it.