IndyCar: Top 5 strangest races since 2010
By Asher Fair
#4 – 2016 Firestone 600
On Friday, June 10, 2016, Carlos Munoz earned his first career IndyCar pole position. He was set to start the 248-lap Firestone 600 at Texas Motor Speedway the following night, but rain postponed the race to Sunday, June 12.
On Sunday, June 12, Munoz led the field to the green flag at the four-turn, 1.455-mile (2.342-kilometer) Texas Motor Speedway oval in Fort Worth, Texas. With James Hinchcliffe as the race leader since he had not yet made a pit stop, the caution flag came out on lap 42 as a result of one of the nastiest wrecks that have taken place this decade. Josef Newgarden and Conor Daly were involved in it.
Here is a video of this nasty wreck.
At this point, the rain started to fall again, and the caution flag stayed out for 32 laps before the race was red flagged at the end of lap 73.
It was then announced that the race would be resumed on lap 74, but not the following day. In fact, it was not even set to be resumed in the month of June, and not even in the month of July. Instead, it was scheduled to be resumed on the night of Saturday, August 27. So it was.
After Hinchcliffe dominated the race from the effective “pole position”, as all cars started with the same amount of fuel despite their fuel situations from the first 73 laps of the race in June, and had a lead over the driver in second place by roughly half of a lap, a wreck involving Scott Dixon and Ed Carpenter brought out the caution flag from lap 213 to lap 220.
Just four laps later, a wreck involving Carpenter, Helio Castroneves and Max Chilton brought out the caution flag for another six laps, and just two laps later, a wreck involving Mikhail Aleshin and Jack Hawksworth brought out what ended up being the race’s final caution flag for eight laps.