The RACER Mailbag, November 26

Welcome to the RACER Mailbag. Questions for any of RACER’s writers can be sent to mailbag@racer.com. We love hearing your comments and opinions, but letters that include a question are more likely to be published. Questions received after 3pm ET each Monday will be saved for the following week.

Q: Thinking about the commercial struggles of PREMA in the IndyCar Series, do you think PREMA might have had more success with a driver lineup that included one of the Iron Dames drivers from their sister team? From a commercial standpoint, PREMA with its current drivers is just another IndyCar team and its drivers are kind of ‘meh’ from a commercial identity standpoint. And you could see where the team would struggle commercially in the same way that JHR does. 

If one of the drivers were, say, Doriane Pin, wouldn’t PREMA have something more interesting to sell to potential sponsors? Something that enhances the team’s identity?

What am I missing?

Snarky Moose, Kansas City

MARSHALL PRUETT: I love the idea of what you’re posing, and it could work if someone like a Pin or Chloe Chambers or Lia Block had larger profiles to put in front of big sponsors. But they don’t here in the domestic confines of IndyCar. That would need to change, and quickly, along with gaining more open-wheel experience in bigger and faster cars, for IndyCar to become an option.

I had a great exchange decades ago with former Mazda executive and then-SRO entrant Jim Jordan, who received all manner of proposals from aspiring drivers who wanted Mazda to give them free cars and/or fully-paid drives in Mazda-powered machinery.

He was brutally honest in saying he wasn’t there to help people achieve their dreams or fulfill any other hope-fueled request. He was there to sell Mazdas, and if the folks asking him for Mazda’s money could give a valid answer on how they’d help Mazda sell more cars and turn a profit, he’d be open to handing over whatever it was they sought. Anything involving mights and coulds and shoulds and maybes were immediate non-starters. I think of that interaction with Jim when it comes to things like this.

Doriane is clearly talented; we knew that in sports cars well before she got to the F1 Academy with PREMA, but there’s no valid reason for a company or companies to give PREMA $9 million to run her for a season of IndyCar after she won the equivalent of an entry-level F4 championship. I hope that changes for her, and the best way to get it moving is to find backing to run Pin in USF Pro 2000 or Indy NXT.

Jamie Chadwick won the W Series title year after year – the forerunner to the F1 Academy –  was able to make it to Indy Lights, and won a race for Andretti Global before her backing disappeared. She also tested an IndyCar with Andretti and impressed the team. But now she’s a reserve driver for the Genesis Hypercar program, which makes me sad.  

Pin or any other of the F1 Academy talents would need to level up beyond F4 before IndyCar would grant a license. The commercial opportunities are the last thing to consider at this point.   

Q: With McLaren and Ford announcing their own GTP/Hypercar programs, how will that effect their respective GT3 programs? Do you see focus and personnel being moved over from the GT3 teams to try and get the prototypes off the ground? When can we expect working prototypes from those car makers?

Brandon Karsten

MP: Ford hasn’t committed to GTP, so the GTD Pro program will continue. Proton represents Ford in the non-factory LMGT3 class in WEC, so that won’t change since Ford’s establishing its own Hypercar team to run the cars in WEC. United Autosports, which is owned by McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown and Richard Dean, will run McLaren’s Hypercar program. It fields an array of LMP2s and GT3s and historic cars, and will add personnel for Hypercar. McLaren had partnered with RLL to run its GT3 car in GTD Pro. I need to check in on the testing question.

Q: So it’s just announced that Mick Schumacher will be leaving Alpine’s GTP program. It seems to the casual reader that he is an indulged young man, probably because of his name, who can’t quite figure out what he wants to be when he grows up. 

F1… opportunity lost; WEC… leaves program; IndyCar… didn’t sound quite right in post-test comments.

Do you agree? There are lots of younger and very talented drivers itching for opportunities that he has had yet somehow his name still gets tossed around.

Chris, Virginia [This letter arrived before it was confirmed that Schumacher has signed with RLL – ED]

MP: I don’t agree. What sounded off in his post-test comments? He left WEC to go to IndyCar. Strikes me as knowing exactly what he wants to do.

Bigger picture, of the last eight Formula 2 champions, half are currently competing in Formula 1. Six of the eight champions, including Mick, had a chance to race in F1. If he wasn’t driving for a terrible F1 team on debut in 2021 with a teammate in Nikita Mazepin who offered nothing other than money, I’d like to think his rookie season would have gone better, and while having Kevin Magnussen alongside him in 2022 was a positive development, the team was only eighth best out of the 10.

Hardly the two-year introduction to F1 that anyone would choose for an F2 champ, and then Haas decided he needed to infuse the team with more experience and canned Mick for Nico Hulkenberg. And Haas finished 10th and last among teams in 2023 before ditching the amusing-but-terrible Gunther Steiner as team principal, and by 2024, with the same lineup, Haas jumped to seventh with Ayao Komatsu in charge.

Seems like Schumacher got more of a raw deal than was deserved, and if I’m thinking of young drivers in need of opportunities, I can’t come up with any who’ve achieved more than Mick. Only one who’s close is Linus Lundqvist, and like Schumacher, he was dealt a bad hand, his being with IndyCar’s charter system and Ganassi’s need to drop two cars.  

Theo Pourchaire won an F2 title, also had a raw deal in IndyCar with McLaren, but never got to F1. Nyck de Vries, another F2 champ, tested for Meyer Shank and couldn’t meet the physical demands of the car, as I was told by the team. Could be others I’m forgetting.

Q: What is Tim Cindric up to these days? Any chance he comes back to racing? He always seemed like one of the good guys. I would hate to see him out of racing.

David Tucker

MP: I called and left Time a voicemail. I’ll let you know if he responds.   

Q: I followed Robin Miller for many years, in print (Mailbag), on TV (It’s a Robin Miller night! It’s a Robin Miller night!), and even had a few conversations with him in several IndyCar paddocks. The Final Word in the most recent Mailbag reminded me of something. For many years, Robin railed on TGBB. I can’t imagine it was appreciated. Now that he’s gone (and sorely missed), how does TGBB feel about him? Are bygones truly bygones?

Rick, Lisle, IL

MP: The Great Brian Barnhart and The Great Robin Miller got along just fine in the years after Brian was no longer running IndyCar. But the rift was certainly real, and once it was over – like a good rivalry story should have – there was no major attempt to dispel the animosity. I had my rough patches with Brian as well; it comes with the territory, but you grow and move on.

Q: Will the 2028 IndyCar resemble a Gen4 Formula E car?

Gordon

MP: It will not.

Q: I think the largest IndyCar stories going into 2026, from a big picture and not a day to day perspective, are what happens with Colton Herta in F2 and to PREMA’s IndyCar team.

For Colton, he’s probably somewhere in the racing of third- to eighth-best driver in IndyCar and going to one of the top F2 teams. There’s conflicting opinions, with Chris Medland saying he thinks it will be a learning year, but Pato O’Ward also pointed out that Herta is de facto representing IndyCar and only would be doing F2 to get a 2027 F1 seat, which only will happen if he succeeds. 

For PREMA, the team is presented as coming in and buying the best of everything they could get their hands on. They’re also historically one of the best junior series organizations in Europe.   

I guess what I’m getting at is, if Herta doesn’t do well next year, will non-IndyCar racing fans say “those drivers aren’t that good”? And if PREMA’S IndyCar team folds, will it say to potential investors in IndyCar teams/charters “it doesn’t matter what equipment or funding you bring, you won’t be successful”?

Will, Indy

MP: Pato’s correct. If Herta gets smoked, it won’t be a good look for IndyCar, but it’s also a potential career-killer for Colton as well, which is sobering. We know Herta is and can continue to be one of the best IndyCar drivers, but he isn’t leaving the series as its unquestioned best. If the European adventure doesn’t go well for whatever reason, I don’t know how many IndyCar teams — other than his own Andretti Global — would engage in a bidding war for his services. Hopefully, only positive things happen for Colton.

I rooted for his former team owner Michael Andretti when he went to F1 and while his 1993 season with McLaren was filled with disappointment, there was no doubt about who we sent over there, and it was the best IndyCar driver of that time. Michael was the 1991 CART IndyCar Series champion, had 10 seasons of IndyCar experience when he went, was the owner of 27 wins, and started testing for McLaren in 1991.

When F1 went sideways for the myriad reasons that have been documented endlessly over the last four decades, he came back to IndyCar and was his same amazing self, albeit without the same front-running seats like he had through 1992.

Herta arrives there with seven seasons of IndyCar experience, a best championship result of second, and nine wins. Similar, but by no means the same as Michael. Having seen both drivers at their peak, I can say that Colton, especially in his 2019-2021 form, was positively frightening to deal with on road and street courses. If that fearsome version can make a return, he’ll be just fine.

Q: Watching WEC from Bahrain and it made me wonder if anyone has ever had as successful racing career after leaving IndyCar as Mike Conway? Jacques Villeneuve and Juan Pablo Montoya are the only two that come close, in my opinion, in last 30 years.  What say you?

Steve, Ohio 

MP: Great call on Conweezy. Helio comes to mind; never an IndyCar champion, but he did finally get the big pro title he chased for decades in IMSA DPi with Acura Team Penske. Ryan Briscoe stands out; he won a lot of races, and I also think of Sebastien Bourdais, who was active in sports cars and open-wheel at the same time and has continued to have a great career in IMSA and WEC. AJ Allmendinger, for sure, in NASCAR and Grand-Am. Geoff Brabham, who had a modest IndyCar career before making his name in IMSA. Ryan Dalziel. Jan Heylen. I’m sure I’m forgetting tons who deserve mentions.

Q: With Marco Andretti’s announcement of the end of his driving career, I have a couple of nagging questions about some famous on-air insults and the long-term aftermath.

First, Marco and Michael once furiously ragged on Eddie Cheever, blaming him for Marco’s crash at Watkins Glen. And Paul Tracy once hilariously pronounced Marco unfit for a paying driver position, with the exception of Uber. And in a similar but corporate diss, an exasperated Robby Gordon once told the post-race reporter that the Ford engine was a “pig” on the straightaway.  

In any of these dust-ups, did the combatants eventually make peace, or are they still mad at each other?  Has Marco sent Eddie a bottle of Andretti wine? Has Eddie sent Marco a bag of Rachel’s Potato Chips? Did Robby eventually buy a Raptor pickup? I gots to know.

Marwood Stout, Camarillo, CA

MP: Are they stuck in time and unable to move on and live full lives because of things that happened on a race track 20 years ago or were said 10 years ago on TV? Yes. Absolutely.

Marco retired to focus all his free time on psychotherapy to try and free himself from the mental prison created by Cheever and Tracy. Robby continues to exact his revenge on Ford by jumping Chevy-looking trucks at street racing events.

Q: Has there ever been any thought about bringing back the celebrity support race?  I know it was the promoter’s event at Long Beach, but I have reason to believe IndyCar should consider something like this on an actual road course.  Look up GP Explorer and you will understand why – apparently a bunch of influencers in F4 cars can draw a crowd bigger than any race outside the 500 this year.

Like, of course the idea sounds completely ridiculous, but the numbers don’t lie.  

Will

MP: Oof. You aren’t kidding. IndyCar has 778,000 followers on IG. GP_Explorer, which I hadn’t heard of, is at 1,100,000.

Truth is, everything you’ve raised is exactly what other series that aren’t at the top like F1 or NASCAR should be looking into. That being said, I just read this, which must have cost a fortune.

Outside of F1 and NASCAR, I’ve seen some of the influencers rock up and burn through all kinds of cash a series or manufacturer or team sets aside for their spendy hotel and spendy car for the weekend and general high-end chaperoning done in the hope of getting that influencer to post short videos that will draw their followers into the series/brand/team. As ill-fitting as some of the collaborations can be, it definitely works.

So, on this specific topic, yes, copying the GP_Explorer model and putting on an all-influencer IndyCar-themed race would definitely draw a ton of attention.

My only sensitivity here is for the newer and younger journalists who are trying to come up in the sport. What if a series/manufacturer/team matched every freebie it gives to influencers with the same room/car/meal/travel for the next wave of reporters who are barely surviving while trying to build their careers?

A series/manufacturer/team will happily spend thousands of dollars per weekend on flights, hotels, meals, and whatnot on a person who parachutes in and out while the young reporter is making pennies, staying in the cheapest/worst hotels, on the cheapest/worst flights, eating garbage, and exhausting themselves to show up and cover the series or sport they love on a regular basis.  

There’s always big money to blow on three-day influencer relationships, but rarely something to help the young journalists who want to make a home in the industry. Doesn’t feel right.

Q: Hey there. IndyCar Fan Rant.

My wife wants to give IndyCar tickets to the Portland race to her employees for a Christmas exchange. Portland is our home track, I have been to every IndyCar/CART/Champ Car race there since 1986, supplied all of the beverages to the race at one point and made my wife a IndyCar fan in the process. 

She asked me the cost of grandstand tickets and pit passes. You cannot find any information on the Portland GP site. So I sent a note to your friends at Green Savoree, the promoters of the event. 

Here is their response email I received: 

Todd,

Thank you for contacting us here at the Bitnile.com IndyCar Grand Prix of Portland.  And thanks for being a faithful fan!

Tickets will go on sale sometime after the new year, but we have no target date yet.  So, that doesn’t help you with Christmas (maybe an IOU).

Make sure that you subscribed to the E-Club from our homepage so announcements go to your email address

Now, I want to be clear. My wife is so excited about IndyCar she wants to give away race tickets to people who have never been to an IndyCar race. Yet this is what I got back from the promoter.

This series has been around for decades, and has promoters that do not know how to promote. How is the series supposed to grow? 

Why is it so hard to get tickets into the fans’ hands? I can’t purchase my seats, that I have had for a very long time, until May sometime. The show is in August. 

There only so much money to be spent on purchases for entertainment, travel etc. The series will be six races deep into the season before the promoter will take my money. 

I have gone to the 24 Hours at Daytona for the last four years. I thought it was going to be a one and done, ‘check it off the bucket list’ item. Well because I can renew and purchase my same ticket package, at a discount, at the race track. I am going again in 2026. Easy. Here’s my credit card. See you next year. 

Why have I done that? I am at the race. I am all jacked up from the race and being at the track. The sites, the smells, the sound, the teams, the pits, the transporters, The people, all the things.  I want to do it again tomorrow. Take my money today. Not nine months from now when I get an email – which last year got stuck in junk mail and I was going to lose my seats because I didn’t respond fast enough. 

There has been not one piece of communication from the promoter since before or after the Portland race in August. 

Nope. Sorry. You get to wait until May. Never mind a nice Christmas/birthday or celebration gift. Just give them an IOU and tell them have a nice day. 

Now that’s some promoting. 

Todd Hutchens

MP: That’s an interesting one. Going by races that are even farther out than Portland, I just looked and tickets for NASCAR’s Championship Finale at Homestead next November are available for sale. I got an email from the Las Vegas F1 promoter on Saturday afternoon with a link to place deposits for next year’s race, which seemed like a rather motivated move: Offering tickets online for the 2026 race hours before the 2025 race took place.

Makes me think IndyCar could work towards standardizing ticket sales in a similar fashion with its various promoters. Got an email on Thursday that said tickets for the first IndyCar race of the year at St. Petersburg went on sale on Friday, and St. Pete and Portland share the same promoter in Green Savoree Racing Promotions. In early November, it was the Penske Entertainment-owned and promoted Long Beach Grand Prix, saying its tickets would go on sale on Nov. 10.

So, that’s the fifth race of the season going live with tickets 11 days before tickets for the first race went live. In my brain, that’s strange.

Q: F1 and IndyCar both mandate, through tire choice rules, that races have at least one pit stop in them. My question is, if this rule were not in place, would either series be able to actually run a race on a single tire, the whole duration?  Let’s keep ovals out of the question, and also take refueling out of IndyCar.  Would it be possible to make the hard tire in either series last all of Spa? All of Mid-Ohio?

This makes me wonder if we have sprint series that are kept from being sprint races due to a rule, as opposed to ‘races too long to run without a pit stop’.  If so, we could simply make races longer, but I’m sure that has its problems as well. This is not endurance racing, after all.

The race at Qatar will have, in effect, two mandatory pit stops. It will be quite interesting to see how this unfolds.

Bill Jurasz, Austin, TX

MP: Of course. Firestone can make tires to last as long as needed. If the need is 1h50m at Mid-Ohio, teams will get rock-like rubber that barely degrades and barely grips the track and the thick hides that don’t shed rubber will run hot as the carcass retains heat and the performance will suck. But yes, it’s something Firestone could do. The real question is why they’d want to, and whether anyone would want to watch another IndyCar race after Mid-Ohio.

CHRIS MEDLAND: The issue comes at specific tracks on the calendar. Qatar is the perfect example, where the tire wear is the concern from Pirelli and they had some tires that were out of rubber by the end of the race, with the construction exposed. Even the hardest tire couldn’t do the full race distance there unless you crawled round, because the high-speed corners and abrasive tarmac wear the tire out too much.

If you had to, at many circuits the answer would be yes but that would lead to some very slow speeds. The problem can become wear, and somewhere like Spa would actually likely be OK as it’s not the most abrasive track surface, so if you went slow enough you could keep enough rubber on the tire.

Look at Las Vegas – Kimi Antonelli effectively did the whole race on a set of hard tires (and easily could have given his pace at the end) with low wear levels and degradation because temperatures were so low, the track surface was smooth and there are so few high-speed corners.

Q: As we approach a wild finish to the F1 title race, it’s all coming down to… Spain. You read that right. Remember when Max and George came together (to put it mildly), resulting in a penalty for Max that dropped him out of the points? Exactly how many points did he lose in that moment? It’s quite possible that one fit of frustration from Max will cost him the title.

Clinton, St. Joseph, MO

CM: Clinton, you are spot-on. I have been sitting on that as a talking point for a while now, waiting to see if Max got close enough for it to make a difference. But in Spain he lost nine points, as he would have finished fifth if he let Russell past without issue, but instead was relegated to 10th by his penalty.

I’m sure there are small moments some other people might argue over, but for me it’s the only time I truly think everyone agrees Max didn’t get the maximum possible result from a race this season, and it could still prove hugely costly. Right now he would be sitting 15 points adrift of Lando Norris, and nine clear of Oscar Piastri, had he not picked up that penalty.

Q: Did McLaren just say they were thrown out of the race over scratches one-tenth and two-tenths of one millimeter deep? Exactly what performance advantage is gained by scratches that shallow? Do officials even know the purpose of a skid plate plank?

B. Vail

CM: The McLarens were disqualified because the plank was worn beyond the legal limit to the tune of 0.12mm on Lando Norris’ car and 0.24mm on Oscar Piastri’s. The legal limit of the depth of the plank when fitted is 10mm, and post-race that is allowed to drop to 9mm, allowing for some wear to happen during a race, but only 1mm and not excessive amounts.

The reason the rule exists is to stop teams running their cars too low. The ground effect regulations put a huge premium on getting the floor as close to the ground as possible to gain performance – with each millimeter closed to the track having a significant impact – but if the car is running too low, then the floor can stall and all of that performance can be lost instantly.

The plank is used to monitor how low a car is being run, so all teams have to meet the wear requirements. A team not meeting it suggests they ran the car lower than anyone else in order to gain performance, and that they went too low on their ride height.

So it’s not about how deep the scratches are, but the fact they represent a car being run at a level the FIA deems to be too low (you have to draw the line somewhere in the rules), and that comes with a clear performance advantage due to the extra downforce generated by the floor at lower levels.

In F1, the entire purpose of the plank is to monitor ride heights and car legality. They were introduced in 1994 after the deaths of Ayrton Senna and Roland Ratzenberger at Imola, with one of the theories behind the cause of Senna’s crash being the car’s floor stalling as his car was running low (perhaps due to lower tire pressures after an early Safety Car restart).

Q: With all the text and email information coming to light about the executives of NASCAR feelings about fans and teams, when are we as paying customers of their sport as well as other motor sports going to matter?  NAS-T-CAR as it should be known, could care less about the fans and more about money, (good job Michael Jordan, you have shown what some fans have thought all along).

When is it going to be enough? Stands are fairly empty, and ticket costs have gone through the roof, for events that in some cases are less than enjoyable anymore (TV rating should show that).

When are NASCAR and IndyCar going to get back to their roots? Spec cars are not entertaining the fans; it used to mean something when automotive makers would represent their products in racing events. To go back to the days of David Pearson, Richard Petty, Donnie Allison, Dale Earnhardt, A.J. Foyt, Unsers, Shaw, Andretti,  you ran what you brought to the track, what you built in the garage out back, or under the tree out back (Wood Brothers), not a shallow shell of something that is decaled to resemble a car, or that is so old it is considered vintage. 

Ingenuity, creativity, and just good, down home, hard work is what made the sport of motorsports, and it has been lost by the sanctioning bodies of today.  

When will NASCAR and Roger Penske understand that fans do not want cookie cutter vehicles? Let race teams, drivers, engineers, automotive suppliers, Innovate, create, build, and race. If your product does not work, does not compete, try, try again and try harder, don’t cry that it is an unfair advantage, so they change the rules, or restrict the competition. Race on Sunday, sell on Monday. It is tough to say the cars you see on track are what you can buy off the showrooms floor, or the case of IndyCar, the products raced today (12-15 years old), are not in the vehicles you can buy today or next year.

To all promotors, automotive companies, racetrack owners, and race series, please bring the motor sports arenas and competition back to what they were intended for.  Make the sport entertaining, not theatrical; it has never intended to be theatrics, other than the heated disagreements and on track activates.    

So go on let them throw helmets, yell at each other, throw punches, beat on their transmission with a screw driver and hammer on pit lane, build the turbo ‘Beast’, strap an air plane wing to the decklid, a stock block dream, electronic fuel injection or direct fuel injection, a diesel fueled engine, or a hybrid system that is relatable to the vehicles on the road. Not some kids micro science fair project, but a race vehicle that resembles the vehicles that we all drive today, with parts and pieces designed and tested at the race track for tomorrow.

So, to all my fellow fans, stop supporting a bunch of people who don’t care about the fans. The little guys who pay for them to call us rednecks, fans that can’t read, fans that don’t care, or will never know the difference. We do know the difference and it is time to say goodbye, until you can bring the sport back to it’s roots, back to competition that is not manipulated and back to something that can have a meaning and can be supported.

A Fan, Indiana 

MP: I hear you, and I spend a lot of my free time living in a world of nostalgia with the various periods of racing I love most across all kinds of series. There are great lessons to take from the past, but going backwards makes no sense to me. With the context of time and age, I’m always left asking which roots, exactly, should IndyCar go back to? The answer is wholly subjective and usually refers to the time where the person saying a thing ‘needs to go back’ was the point when they were a kid who fell in love with that thing.

So if you’re 100, the roots of IndyCar were front-engine Millers. If you’re 80, it was probably post-WWII jalopies and roadsters, and so on. And if you’re 20 or 25, it was likely a Dallara DW12 with a manufacturer aero kit. If we want to take IndyCar back to the truest of roots, it’s race day at Indy in 1911.

On the tech side, I can’t think of anything in the IndyCar world I grew up in from the CART era to today where the cars were genuinely relevant to the auto industry. Same for decades prior. Probably the most impactful piece of modern technology, and I don’t know exactly which series used it first, is TPMS – the tire pressure monitoring system – that’s been around for decades in IndyCar, F1, IMSA, etc.  

And yes, I’d love to have the old tech back with a variety of engine types and different chassis and tire suppliers. Those were indeed the good old days. I just need to understand how we’re going to boycott our way to bringing them back. Until that happens, we have memories, books, magazines, and YouTube to conjure the past.

KELLY CRANDALL: I don’t think it’s accurate to say the fans don’t matter, because NASCAR listens and sees far more than people give them credit for. But that doesn’t mean they’ll always do what the fans want. And let’s not kid ourselves: it’s not just NASCAR that makes private comments about people in the sport or race fans. It would disappoint a lot of people if those comments ever came out as to what folks really thought about the other side of the catch fence.

Yes, the grandstands aren’t as full as they once were, and that happens. Interest fades, and the sport is no longer at the heights it reached in the 1990s and 2000s. There is a lack of interest as the sport evolves. I can’t comment on ticket costs because that is not my area of expertise. 

As for going back to the sport’s roots, I’m not sure what that means. NASCAR has brought back North Wilkesboro and Rockingham. Darlington has its two races back after that mistake in the early 2000s. Bowman Gray is on the schedule. 

But no, it’s never going to be run what you brung or the ingenuity of what it once was. It’s a business, and things have evolved. I do agree that drivers should be able to show more emotion, whether that is throwing helmets or elsewhere. There are great personalities in this sport that are stifled by sponsors and the fear of NASCAR penalties.

The sport will never be what it once was; things have changed. But I do think everything is cyclical, and we’ve seen things go away and come back time and time again. We’ll see if that keeps happening.

Q: I read that Project 91 will race in the NASCAR Cup Series on 2026. Who will drive that car?

Chris Fiegler, Latham, NY 

KC: Justin Marks did say to bet on it coming back in 2026, per the Sports Business Journal, but that’s as far as he elaborated. It comes down to what sponsorship deal they put together with a partner, and that will decide who drives it. There have been no announcements about races or drivers.

Q: With Steve Phelps remarks about Richard Childress recently made public as part of the lawsuit, how long will it be before the two of them sit down for a nice meal at Childress Vineyard’s Bistro restaurant along with a bottle of Childress’s signature wine?

David, Waxhaw NC

KC: Steve Phelps reportedly reached out to Richard Childress recently after it became clear the messages would go public. But no word on how that connection went. Richard Childress Racing released a statement on Monday regarding the matter.

THE FINAL WORD

From Robin Miller’s Mailbag, 25 November, 2020

Q: I’m sure that all the Jimmie Johnson questions must seem kinda repetitive at this point, so I’ll attempt to make this one somewhat different. We’ve seen what feels like a full heat race worth of IndyCar and open-wheel drivers switching to NASCAR full-time. Between Tony Stewart, Robby Gordon, Sam Hornish Jr., John Andretti, Danica, JPM, hell I think Dario even made the switch briefly, it feels like this has always been a one-way street. Who was the last person to go the opposite way – into – for more than just a one-off race? Could this be seen as an indication that IndyCar is catching back up to NASCAR in terms of nationwide popularity, or do you view this to be a one-off?

Michael in Brownsburg

ROBIN MILLER: I guess we’d have to go all the way back to 1971, when Cale Yarborough ran the USAC championship trail full-time with Gene White and Lloyd Ruby as his teammate. Cale finished fifth at Trenton and Michigan and wound up 16th in the point standings and drew rave reviews. “Put that boy in a good car and he’d be right up there,” said ‘ol Rube. Donnie Allison also ran four times for A.J. Foyt that season and scored a sixth at Indianapolis. Lee Roy Yarbrough damn near won the inaugural California 500 in 1970, finished third at Trenton in 1971 and was a two-time Indy 500 starter — qualifying eighth in 1969 – as just a part-timer. But J.J.’s move doesn’t signal anything except a stock-car champion who wants to try something else and has the financial security, savvy and balls to step outside his comfort zone.