After watching all three new IndyCar ads, featuring Josef Newgarden, Alex Palou, and Pato O'Ward, air on Fox during Super Bowl LIX, it's hard to find anybody who isn't excited about the upcoming 2025 season for America's premier open-wheel racing series.
The fact that Fox have acquired the broadcast rights to the NTT IndyCar Series is one of the many positives that have dominated the headlines in the buildup to the upcoming campaign, a season which is set to see three-peat attempts for both the series championship and the Indy 500.
But there are still a number of things to have reservations about ahead of race number one on the 17-race schedule.
Here are three big concerns.
The series' integrity
The integrity of the series was called into question last year when it took a fluke system outage during a morning warm-up session to discover that Team Penske had cheated in the opening round of the season – six weeks prior.
Both Josef Newgarden and Scott McLaughlin had illegally utilized the push-to-pass overtake button following a restart during the season opener on the streets of St. Petersburg, and they finished in first and third place, respectively.
While the drivers' stories of not knowing they were committing any sort of an infraction checked out, the fact that nobody in the organization apparently had any idea of what was going on is laughable (especially after Newgarden's radio message to his team in Long Beach). And on that note, so was the ensuing slap-on-the-wrist punishment.
Ever since Roger Penske took over as the owner of the series in 2019, there have been questions about the potential conflict of interest. The fact that this scandal unfolded, and nearly went undetected, was a slap in the face to every other owner on the grid, and it was a slap in the face to every non-Penske driver on the grid. Every single one of them.
When it comes to the rulebook in any racing series, teams will take advantage of any leeway they can find. They will find and take advantage of any loopholes they can, and in some cases, cause the rulebook to be rewritten to prevent such tactics in the future. It's part of the sport, and it's part of the competition.
But this wasn't that. This was a situation in which the team totally ignored the parameters set forth by IndyCar and gained an advantage because of it. This wasn't a case of gray area.
On paper, it shouldn't matter who the culprit was. But that unavoidable fact that it was the series owner's team made it that much more controversial. And had it not been discovered a month and a half later, who knows what would have happened next?
Huge crashes
The Indy cars themselves are as safe as they have ever been. But over the past few seasons, there has seemingly been a significant uptick in gnarly crashes, including several that have turned ugly after a relatively innocuous-looking start.
Kyle Kirkwood's Indy 500 crash two years ago is one of those examples, when he clipped Felix Rosenqvist's spinning car, flipped upside down, and crashed cockpit first into the SAFER barrier. And that's not even mentioning the flight his tire took, clearing the catch fence and thankfully avoiding any human beings when it landed.
Later in the year, Simon Pagenaud's apparent career-ending crash at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, caused by a brake failure, was one of the worst single-car road course crashes anybody has seen. The car barrel rolled nine times before coming to a stop, and the 2019 Indy 500 winner hasn't returned to the series since.
At Iowa Speedway in 2024, Sting Ray Robb barely touched the rear of Alexander Rossi's car, and it sent Robb's car airborne before flipping and barrel rolling twice. The domino effect resulted in contact betweeen Rossi's car and Ed Carpenter's car, plus a spin from Kirkwood's car, and Carpenter's car ended up being launched on top of Kirkwood's.
From a slight tap – and on a short oval, no less – it looked like a video game with wonky physics.
Then the following weekend, on the streets of Toronto, in what is generally a lower speed turn one, Pato O'Ward spun out. But the yellow flag wasn't displayed (which we'll touch more on below) and with several cars coming in hot behind him, Santino Ferrucci ended up being launched into the catch fence, cockpit-first.
Wow. Here I thought such massive wrecks could only happen on big ovals that nobody wants to go back to...
Again, IndyCar is as safe as it has ever been. The aeroscreen has certainly played a role in that, along with the many other safety innovations the sport has implemented. But relatively harmless-looking incidents turning into harrowing crashes has become somewhat of a disturbing theme as of late.
Race control's timing of cautions
If an on-track situation is dangerous, the caution flag needs to come out. Period. This ties into both the series' integrity aspect and the safety aspect discussed above.
IndyCar has tried to allow the pit sequences to play out on road courses when they feel that a caution flag can wait. But this turned into a massive controversy when they held the yellow for more than a minute at Laguna Seca after Marcus Armstrong stalled following contact with Christian Lundgaard, just so Newgarden could make a pit stop without losing extra ground.
How was the stalled car more dangerous after a full minute than it was one minute prior?
The garbage that is so often spewed about "letting the pit sequence play out" is just that: garbage. Strategy is part of the sport. Sometimes things go your way, and sometimes they don't.
Newgarden had been running nowhere near the front of the field all day. But because IndyCar let him effectively make a free pit stop, throwing the caution flag while he was in the pits and thus slowing everybody else down, he came out in second place. Race leader Alex Palou could not believe such a call was made, and he made his frustration known on the radio (before winning anyway).
Rather than call races like they see them, race control has seemingly picked up this inappropriate habit of inserting themselves into the strategy element of the event. They are calling races based on what they feel the right strategy should be, rather than letting teams either reap the benefits of making the correct call or pay the price for making the wrong one.
Quite frankly, it's wrong, regardless of who benefits. If you really want to let the pit sequence play out, let each team's pit sequence play out depending on the flow of the race, not race control's ill-timed decisions. They are manipulating races by supposedly trying not to manipulate races.
Then there is the whole safety aspect of it. After Laguna Seca, a lot of people thought such a call would be more of a one-off, given the fact that this was the final race before the new hybrid systems were implemented. With the new hybrids, drivers are now able to manually restart their stalled cars.
We can't say for sure that that's why IndyCar held the yellow after the aforementioned O'Ward spin in Toronto, but nearly eight seconds passed after O'Ward spun before Ferrucci found himself flying into the fence.
I know we all kept hearing last year about how "cool" the new manual hybrid restarter is, but it obviously wasn't cool enough to prevent a nasty wreck that race control could have prevented by simply doing their jobs, hybrid or no hybrid.
It's this simple: if a car is stalled on the race track, especially if there are other cars near it at any point, the caution flag needs to fly.
Tune in to Fox at 12:00 p.m. ET on Sunday, March 2 for the live broadcast of the Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg from the streets of St. Petersburg, Florida. Begin a free trial of FuboTV now and don't miss any of the action!