Usually these posts are almost exclusively centered on the battle to win the IndyCar championship, but Scott Dixon has made that a lot less exciting to write about this season. Assuming the Mid Ohio doubleheader gets scheduled for September like is planned, we will have five more races this season to enjoy. Dixon currently has a 96 point lead in the points standings and our projections give him a 99.9% chance of winning the 2020 IndyCar Championship. The only other driver with a slim chance of winning is Josef Newgarden, who has about a 1 in 1000 chance of pulling off a miraculous late season challenge to Dixon.
Read More »Sector Heatmap: Indianapolis 500 Practice 2
After day number two of practice for the Indianapolis 500, here is the sector heatmap of all drivers’ top times around the 2.5 mile superspeedway.
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State of the Championship: Who Benefits if IndyCar Adds More Races?
Yesterday IndyCar announced that the series will not race at Portland or Laguna Seca this season due to the coronavirus. In their places, IndyCar will add a doubleheader at Mid Ohio next week and a second race at the Indianapolis road course in October. Despite the cancellations and additions, the schedule winds back up at 14 races long for now, the shortest season in over a decade.
Read More »Do Cautions Really Breed More Cautions?
Anyone who has watched a bit of IndyCar racing on TV has probably heard an announcer say something to this effect after a caution period at one time or another: “You know what they say, cautions breed cautions.” It’s unclear who “they” are in this sentence, but we can take it to be the conventional wisdom in racing. The announcers are saying that after a caution flag has been thrown, it’s more likely there will be another caution during the ensuing restart from the caution period. Some explanations for this are that the cars are all bunched up together, some cars will have come to pit while others didn’t, and it’s a prime overtaking opportunity. c
Read More »State of the Championship: Dixon Out to an Early Lead, Power Needs Help
With the IndyCar season shortened in 2020, every race becomes more important for drivers looking to win the championship. Mechanical failures and crashes are more costly and might even take drivers out of the championship hunt completely. With the first race of the season complete, The Single Seater’s championship projection model is now live. I’ve already talked about a few of the updates to this year’s model here, so this article will walk through how it sees the championship race panning out with 13 races remaining.
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