Road courses host two of the three races remaining in the Cup regular season, but the tracks in question have little in common beyond turning left and right. That’s good news for road course racers like Chase Elliott, Michael McDowell and Daniel Suárez — drivers still looking for their first win of the season. The two tracks’ disparate natures decrease the chances of one driver winning both races.
Purpose-built road courses versus rovals
The NASCAR Cup Series ran the same two road courses — Sonoma and Watkins Glen — every year from 1989-2017.
Watkins Glen is one of the oldest road courses in the country, having hosted top-tier racing since the 1940s. The New York track has run everything from weekend amateur outings to F1 Grand Prix.
The very first automobile races ran through town and city streets, drawing huge crowds thrilled by the proximity to speeding cars. Unfortunately, those races also caused many accidents, some of which killed drivers and a spectator.
Racing enthusiasts constructed courses that combined the twisty roads and sharp corners of street racing with plenty of space to separate cars and fans.
These purpose-built road courses like Sonoma, COTA and Watkins Glen take advantage of the natural topography. For example, Road America is situated in the Kettle Moraine area of Wisconsin, where glaciers created gentle rises (moraines) and dips (kettles).
These elevation changes increase the degree of difficulty for drivers. Going uphill into a turn means the driver must set up their entry before they can see the turn. A driver headed downhill into a turn must brake much earlier than if they were approaching a flat turn.
A new type of road course entered the NASCAR lexicon when Charlotte Motor Speedway switched its 2018 fall race from the 1.5-mile oval to a hybrid road course/oval layout they dubbed the ‘Roval.’ The term ‘roval’ came to mean any road course utilizing part of the oval track it’s built inside.
Rovals have much less elevation change other than that the oval track banking provides. Because rovals have to fit inside another track, they often feature very tight turns in rapid succession.
The Indy road course versus Watkins Glen
Different rovals utilize different fractions of their parent tracks. Daytona, for example, includes most of the 2.5-mile oval, with an infield detour extending the course length to 3.61 miles.
The Indianapolis road course utilizes much less of its 2.5-mile oval: just the frontstretch and a small chute between oval Turns 1 and 2. Note that the road course runs in the opposite direction from the oval. Oval Turns 1 and 2 are on the right side of the diagram below.
The majority of Indy’s 2.439-mile road course cuts through the infield. The 14 turns include multiple sharp corners that require heavy braking — and offer great opportunities for passing. Nine turns are right-hand and five left-hand.
Next week, the Cup Series runs Watkins Glen’s “short circuit” with the inner loop chicane, as shown below.
Not all series run the inner loop, which is why most track maps don’t number the turns that comprise it. That leaves Watkins Glen with seven turns: five right and two left.
This configuration yields a 2.450-mile track length, almost the same length as the Indy road course. But the length is about the only thing they have in common.
At Watkins Glen, cars drop 70 feet — about 9 stories — between start-finish and the apex of Turn 1. They drop another 20 feet into Turn 2 and then climb back up 80 feet in elevation to Turn 3.
Indianapolis also starts with a sharp right-hand turn, but without the elevation changes. Drivers traverse six turns before they reach the second straightaway. They then must contend with a sharp left turn on their way back to the oval track.
The long straightaways and fewer numbers of turns makes Watkins Glen a much faster track. Last year, the pole speed at Watkins Glen was 125.147 mph. The Indy road course pole speed was 99.378 mph.
The Chaos Factor
Caution statistics mask how different racing is at these two tracks. In 2022, Watkins Glen had five cautions for 11 laps. The Indianapolis road course race that year had five cautions for 15 laps.
But only five drivers failed to finish the last two Watkins Glen races. Compare that to the 19 drivers who didn’t finish the last two Indianapolis road course races.
The larger number of DNFs make a surprise winner more likely at Indianapolis than at Watkins Glen. Although polesitter Tyler Reddick won the Indianapolis road course race in 2022, the polesitter in 2021, William Byron, finished 33rd after being eliminated by a crash. Eighth-place starter A.J. Allmendinger went on to win the race.
In the last two races at Watkins Glen, Kyle Larson won from the pole in 2022 and from fourth in 2021.
Because contact and mishaps often don’t cause cautions on road courses, DNFs aren’t drivers’ only concern. From my review of spins, accidents and minor contact in the 2022 races:
- Five non-caution incidents involved 10 cars at Watkins Glen.
- Sixteen non-caution incidents involved 32 cars at Indianapolis.
NASCAR will attempt to minimize the carnage at Indy this week (2.30 p.m. ET, NBC) by moving the restart zone further back from the start-finish line. The extra distance should allow drivers to spread out enough that they don’t create a bottleneck when they enter turn 1.
But given the number of drivers desperate for a win and a playoff berth, this measure is unlikely to entirely mitigate the carnage at the Indy road course.
