It’s been a long month since the IndyCar series rolled out of California and the Streets of Long Beach on April 14 and now it’s time to tackle the fourth different twisty track of the season with the IndyCar Grand Prix of Indianapolis.
This will mark the third time in 2019 that the series has visited a permanent road course and all bets are off as to who will win.
Live coverage from Indianapolis begins Friday at 9 a.m. ET with Practice 1 exclusively on NBC Sports Gold’s IndyCar Pass, followed by Practice 2 at 12:30 p.m. ET. Coverage continues with qualifying live on NBCSN and INDYCAR Pass on Friday at 4:30 p.m. ET. IndyCar Pass will stream warm-up on Saturday at 11:15 a.m. ET prior to race coverage on Saturday at 3 p.m. ET on NBC.
In five editions of this race, there have been only two winners, but neither Will Power nor Simon Pagenaud have taken the checkers yet in 2019. In fact, four races have produced four different winners.
- Power and Pagenaud have been equally matched in this race with top-10s in all but one event and three top-fives apiece. Power has an average finish of 6.0 with Pagenaud sitting at 7.8, so this week’s race within the race will be of who finishes better.
- In one of only two IndyCar starts last year, Helio Castroneves finished sixth and kept a perfect record of top-10s in this race alive. In fact, sixth is the worst he’s finished on this track. Castroneves is the only perfect driver in the Indy GP.
- Scott Dixon comes close to being perfect in regard to top-10s. After finishing 15th in his first attempt in 2014, he posted back-to-back top-10s the next two years. He was even better in the last two starts with runner-up finishes to Will Power in 2017 and 2018. Winless so far in 2019, Can Dixon become the first driver other than Power or Pagenaud to win this race and the fifth different winner of the season?
- If Dixon fails to win, the odds are certainly in his favor to finish among the top five. Dating back to last year’s second-place finish in this race, Dixon has finished fifth or better in all but this year’s Circuit of the Americas race.
- Points leader Josef Newgarden is the only driver this year with a perfect record of top-fives and he has finished better than he started every week - coming from as far back as 16th at Barber Motorsports Park. No matter where he qualifies, expect Newgarden to challenge for the lead.
More than 100 hours of IndyCar action begins this weekend with live coverage of the Grand Prix from Indianapolis Motor Speedway at 3 p.m. on NBC. This will be the first NTT IndyCar race to be broadcast on NBC.
NBC Sports’ month-long coverage from Indianapolis includes extensive practice, qualifying and race programming across NBC, NBCSN, NBCSports.com and NBC Sports Gold’s INDYCAR Pass.