NASCAR drivers want to test their skills on the Indianapolis oval after 3 years on the street circuit

“I love this track and I’ve seen a lot more laps on the oval than I’ve driven,” said Cindric, the son of Team Penske President Tim Cindric. “You know, I haven’t been to the Brickyard 400 myself, so I’m definitely excited to see what it’s like and I definitely want to drive the right way around the track.”

It won’t be a completely new experience for Cindric.

He started two Xfinity races at the oval before becoming a full-time Cup driver in 2022. But even the 25-year-old rising star realizes that winning on the street course, as he did in the 2021 Xfinity race at Indy, wasn’t the same.

Cindric is hardly an exception. He was one of 10 drivers who drove their first official Cup-level laps in the only practice session on Friday. Qualifying is scheduled for Saturday afternoon and the race is scheduled for Sunday.

Like many other drivers, Cindric and many others felt the change was long overdue.

“Even when I won here in 2020, it was on the track and to me, I was still kissing the same rocks, I was still climbing the same fence, I was still inside Indianapolis Motor Speedway and I was a winner here,” Chase Briscoe said. “But I mean, it definitely means a little bit more when it’s on the oval. When you think about the history of Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the history is on the oval. It’s not on the track.”

The series and track organization have spent decades looking for ways to recapture the large crowds that attended the first Brickyard race in 1994, and which only began to dwindle after the 2008 race was marred by tire wear.

They changed the dates, moving it to September and even making it the final race before the playoff before moving it to July. During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, they added an IndyCars to the weekend schedule, creating a rare double feature of America’s top two racing series in one place, and they used the Xfinity race as a test run on a street course.

A year later, all three series were on the street circuit and the complaints never really went away. So the decision makers heeded the calls and returned to the oval — minus the open-wheel cars — to the delight of many.

“I don’t think anyone ever thought of it as a crown jewel race, so it’s returning to that status,” said Brad Keselowski, whose 2018 win makes him the most recent Indy oval winner in the field. “I think that’s huge for our sport and it means a lot to me as a driver and I assume it means a lot to the other drivers as well. So, it’s a welcome return. For me, it’s really special to win this race and have your name on that crown jewel list.”

Whether racing on the oval track will benefit ticket sales is still unclear. However, there were some drivers, such as Keselowski, who felt that the short training session in these newer Cup cars behaved more like IndyCars on the track.

That clearly won’t be the only difference on Sunday. The pit lane could be busier, strategies will change and even Michael McDowell acknowledged he would have a significantly better chance of defending his 2023 race win — on the street circuit.

Still, most believe that a change of course is the right decision.

“I think it’s a great opportunity to get back to that tradition,” Tyler Reddick said after setting the fastest lap in practice at 182.582 mph. “This is a really tough race and there was a clamor to try something different. But I think it’s just the nature of Indianapolis, it craves perfection. If you want to win the race, you can’t make any mistakes.”

Reddick is third in the standings, 15 points behind Chase Elliott, with five races remaining before the playoffs begin.

But for Cindric, who spent his youth riding alongside some of the best racers in history and around one of the most famous circuits in the world, nothing compares to what he’s experiencing for the first time this weekend.

“My earliest memories of racing are at this track, where I saw more cars on this track than anywhere else — on both sides of my family,” he said. “So from that standpoint, when I think about racing, this is what I think about.”

AP Auto Racing: https://apnews.com/hub/auto-racing