IndyCar: Texas Motor Speedway’s incomparable commitment to IndyCar

By Asher Fair | Jun 8, 2019

FORT WORTH, TX - AUGUST 27: Ed Carpenter driver of the #20 Fuzzy's Vodka Chevrolet leads a pack of cars during the Verizon IndyCar Series Firestone 600 at Texas Motor Speedway on August 27, 2016 in Fort Worth, Texas. (Photo by Mike Stone/Getty Images for Texas Motor Speedway) /

Texas Motor Speedway has displayed an incomparable commitment to IndyCar since the track was built in 1996 and added to the schedule back in 1997.

Not including the site of the Indianapolis 500, Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Texas Motor Speedway is the oval that has been on the IndyCar schedule for the longest.

At least one race has been contested at the four-turn, 1.44-mile (2.317-kilometer) high-banked Texas Motor Speedway oval in Fort Worth, Texas each season going all the way back to 1997. A total of 30 races have been contested at the track since then, and the 31st is scheduled to take place this evening.

Texas Motor Speedway has displayed an incomparable commitment to IndyCar during its 23 years as a track on the series schedule, as has been on display numerous times in the past, and that commitment is still on display today.

Recently, the race at the track in the 2016 season was scheduled to take place on Saturday, June 11, but due to rain, it was postponed until Sunday, June 12. It was then further delayed by about an hour as a result of high humidity that made it challenging to extract all of the water from the track from the storms the previous evening.

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Rain then caused the race to be halted on Sunday as well, and well before the halfway mark, meaning it was still not official. The race could not be contested the following day, and it very well could have been altogether canceled, especially after the massive wreck involving Josef Newgarden and Conor Daly that had just taken place.

But instead of canceling it completely, IndyCar and the track agreed on a date several months down the road, Saturday, August 27. They made it work, and what ended up being the first 78-day race in IndyCar history (and probably in any racing history) ended up featuring one of the greatest finishes in the history of all of racing.

Of course, enduring a weather-related delay or something along those lines in itself and still going strong in IndyCar may not be enough to say that a track is truly “committed” to the series.

But when you look at other tracks that have recently been on the schedule and had their races affected by rain, the way by which this two-and-a-half-month situation turned out at Texas Motor Speedway was phenomenal.

IndyCar returned to New Hampshire Motor Speedway for the first time since the 1998 season in the 2011 season. The threat of rain scared off many fans, and the race itself ended up being cut short by five laps as a result of rain. The track hasn’t been on the schedule since.

In the 2015 season, NOLA Motorsports Park hosted its first IndyCar race. Rain caused the race to become a timed race that didn’t last for nearly as many laps as it was scheduled to. The track’s first IndyCar race is still its only IndyCar race, and that likely won’t change in the near future, if ever.

When the race on the streets of Boston, Massachusetts was scratched from the 2016 schedule, IndyCar made up for it by bringing a race back to Watkins Glen International instead. The track returned to the schedule in the 2017 season, but the crowd on hand was less than impressive, largely due to the threat of rain. The series hasn’t been back to the historic venue since.

So yes, there is something to be said about the fact that Texas Motor Speedway made an extremely challenging and long-drawn-out situation work in the 2016 season and the fact that the track is still going strong in IndyCar after enduring a race that was completed after an 11-week delay. In fact, last August, the track agreed to a four-year contract extension to continue hosting IndyCar races through the 2022 season.

But this agreement is even more meaningful than it looks as far as the track’s commitment to IndyCar is concerned. Last September, a race was confirmed at Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas on the 2019 schedule.

Previously, Texas Motor Speedway president Eddie Gossage had a non-compete “radius clause” in the track’s previous IndyCar contract. As a result, no other IndyCar races were permitted to be held within a certain radius of the track, preventing a IndyCar race from being contested at Circuit of the Americas.

But that clause was scrapped from the track’s new contract with IndyCar in favor of a race at a track that many fans had longed for over the past seasons, and it still did not prevent Gossage from agreeing to continue to allow IndyCar to compete at his facility on yet another long-term contract.

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IndyCar needs more tracks like Texas Motor Speedway on its schedule, not necessarily in the form of mile and a half ovals, but as far as their commitment to the long-term future of the series is concerned. Given these instances, there have probably been several other far less publicized instances of more of the same by the track in recent years.