NTT IndyCar Series: Bommarito Automotive Group 500 Preview

Will Power at Gateway Motorsports Park. © [Andy Clary / Spacesuit Media]

by Paul Gohde

The Bommarito Automotive Group’s successful promotion of Indy car racing at Gateway Motorsports Park over the past two years has brought life back to oval track racing at the facility that overlooks the famed St. Louis Arch. As the final oval race on the 2019 schedule, the round-track specialists have their final chance Saturday night to gain ground on winning the series’ NTT IndyCar Series’ championship.

Race Facts: Gateway’s Darlington-shaped oval measures 1.25-miles with narrow turns banked between 11-degrees (Turns 1-2) and 9-degrees (Turns 3-4). The high-speed race will run for 248 laps/310 miles. The first open-wheel race was held here in 1997 with CART and later IRL  sanctioned events continuing until 2003 when sagging attendance ended open-wheel racing until IndyCar brought it back in 2017. Track records include: Qualifying-2017, Will Power, Two laps, 47.4579 seconds/189.642 mph. Race-2018, Power, 1:59:30.197/155.644 mph. No driver has ever won here twice. Only Josef Newgarden and Power have visited victory lane among current drivers. Team Penske has five wins in the nine races held.

2018 Gateway Race: Will Power narrowly beat pole-winner Scott Dixon to score his third win of the season for Team Penske. He won by just 1.311seconds after giving up a seven second lead  following a fuel stop with 18 laps to go. Power led 90 of the final 98 laps. His win came after finishing last a year earlier due to an early race crash.

2019 So Far: Josef Newgarden, the 2018 NTT series champion, continues leading the points chase with 535. Alexander Rossi is second with 500, followed by Simon Pagenaud (-40), Dixon (-52) and Power (-128)…Pagenaud leads the series’ oval track points with 212. Newgarden trails with 202, Rossi has 163 and Power 154…Honda leads Chevrolet by 79 points for the Engine Manufacturers championship.

The Field: Twenty-two cars are entered for Gateway, with Ed Carpenter making his final driver appearance for 2019. Trevor Carlin’s two cars are entered for Conor Daly and Charlie Kimball this weekend.

Notes: Michael Andretti won the 1999 CART race at Gateway after starting 11^th…Some are saying that a return of the IndyCar Series to Pocono may not happen after three years of major in-race incidents. Tracks that are being mentioned as possible 2020 schedule additions include returns to Richmond and Watkins Glen with a “dreamer’s double header race with NASCAR Cup cars” floating around in the minds of some…Former Indy car driver Gil de Ferran, who is scheduled to lead McLaren’s return to the IndyCar series in 2020, finished third at Gateway behind winner Helio Castroneves in 2003…TV: NBCSN, Qualifying, Friday, 6:15 p.m. ET Live…Race, Saturday, 8:45 p.m. ET Live.

Our Take: If the four series’ points leaders can get through Gateway unscathed Saturday night, road course races at Portland and Laguna Seca will decide the 2019 championship. With just six oval races on the schedule (including the Indy 500 which some say is an outlier, and not a true oval) it’s not impossible to think that the future of Indy cars on oval tracks could follow board tracks and dirt miles into history. The NTT IndyCar Series is certainly the only major open-wheel series in existence that features 30% of its events on paved ovals. Other than the historic Indianapolis 500, do we really need oval tracks on the schedule? We can think of at least five road courses in the U.S., Canada, Mexico and South America that could host a series’ race. Add in a return to Australia and the schedule could reach 20 or more. With safety concerns at Pocono leading the conversation, a road course, plus Indy 500 series deserves some conversation.

Final Words: Takuma Sato (No. 30 Mi-Jack/Panasonic Honda): “We have a good car on ovals this year…particularly on short ovals. St. Louis is a great, unique track. Turns 1-2 have a lot more banking but Turns 3-4 are flatter. You can make a very good exit from Turns 3 and 4 (and) there are tons of overtaking opportunities going into Turn 1.”

Next Race: Sunday, September 1, 2019 – Portland International Raceway

Paul Gohde

Paul Gohde heard the sound of race cars early in his life.

Growing up in suburban Milwaukee, just north of Wisconsin State Fair Park in the 1950’s, Paul had no idea what “that noise” was all about that he heard several times a year. Finally, through prodding by friends of his parents, he was taken to several Thursday night modified stock car races on the old quarter-mile dirt track that was in the infield of the one-mile oval -and he was hooked.

The first Milwaukee Mile event that he attended was the 1959 Rex Mays Classic won by Johnny Thomson in the pink Racing Associates lay-down Offy built by the legendary Lujie Lesovsky. After the 100-miler Gohde got the winner’s autograph in the pits, something he couldn’t do when he saw Hank Aaron hit a home run at County Stadium, and, again, he was hooked.

Paul began attending the Indianapolis 500 in 1961, and saw A. J. Foyt’s first Indy win. He began covering races in 1965 for Racing Wheels newspaper in Vancouver, WA as a reporter/photographer and his first credentialed race was Jim Clark’s historic Indy win.Paul has also done reporting, columns and photography for Midwest Racing News since the mid-sixties, with the 1967 Hoosier 100 being his first big race to report for them.

He is a retired middle-grade teacher, an avid collector of vintage racing memorabilia, and a tour guide at Miller Park. Paul loves to explore abandoned race tracks both here and in Europe, with the Brooklands track in Weybridge England being his favorite. Married to Paula, they have three adult children and two cats.

Paul loves the diversity of all types of racing, “a factor that got me hooked in the first place.”

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