Ganassi embraces the unknown as IndyCar debuts Markham street course

INDIANAPOLIS — There’s no breathing easy with a 110-point lead in the NTT INDYCAR Series standings.

The series heads to two new venues the next two weeks as part of the frenetic six-races-over-five-weeks close to the season. It makes for a flat-out push to the finish, even for Alex Palou and the No. 10 DHL Chip Ganassi Racing team.

Palou, who is seeking a fourth consecutive series title, didn’t even get his first glimpse of this week’s 2.19-mile, 12-turn circuit in Markham, Ontario until he tested earlier this week on the Honda simulator.

The Ontario Honda Dealers Indy at Markham on Sunday is the first of two consecutive visits to new venues on this year's IndyCar schedule. The race in the Toronto suburbs is ahead of next week’s Freedom 250 extravaganza in Washington, D.C.

"It's a challenge for the drivers, but also for the teams. We have no references. We have great tools with the simulator. At Honda, they do an incredible job for us,” Palou said. “But it's never the same as knowing the track, knowing every bump, knowing how much you can push the car.”

It’s the same for his No. 10 team, which is hoping to win the debut race at the new Canadian location. Palou was second in 2023 when the race was held on the streets of downtown Toronto.

The race was moved for this year to suburban Markham, where Honda’s Canadian headquarters are based, primarily because of scheduling and venue conflicts. The new location has pushed Chip Ganassi Racing’s personnel hard in this foot-to-the-floor push to the end of the season.

The bulk of the work falls on the engineers who must learn the next two tracks from simulations and create setups they believe will suit the circuits, as well as mechanics who had to change the setups on the cars from setting for the road course at Portland International Raceway last week to back-to-back street course setups.

“The team, they can get ideas of how to set up the car, but it's never the same,” Palou said. “It's going to be a big challenge for everyone in the paddock. I think this team has been excelling lately whenever there's a big challenge like that or new challenge, so I'm excited.”

Palou and the No. 10 team finished second at Arlington this year in the first race of three new IndyCar venues this season.

What makes the next two different is that they are back-to-back, in the midst of a push for Palou’s fifth championship in six seasons, and come after last week’s race at Portland, which required a red-eye home Sunday evening. Now it’s wheels-up out of Indianapolis at 6 a.m. on Thursday and straight to the track for four days of work that culminates with Sunday's race.

CGR won at Portland last week for Palou’s sixth win of the season, and second straight. The victory gave him a 110-point lead over Kyle Kirkwood in the standings. No one is even talking about the championship, though, as the focus is purely on the challenges of the next two weeks and the hard push to the finish.

CGR is looking forward to the fight.

“I’ve always been a fan of street racing, ever since Long Beach started,” said managing director Mike Hull. Long Beach first hosted Indy cars in 1984 and Formula 1 in 1975.

“I’ve always really enjoyed that because it comes down to the driver. The team is certainly a large and significant part of it, but the driver has to get it done on a street race. There’s no forgiveness there. I love street racing, I love what it’s all about and Toronto is a terrific place, massive motorsports audience there, they come out for the races, they enjoy motor racing and it’s going to be really exciting there.

“It’s not easy, today maybe we are a little spoiled that we have artificial simulators that the drivers are in. They are full-scale simulators, the difference is they have a reset button. You don’t have a reset button on a street course – when you hit the concrete, you can’t reset your program.”

Scott Dixon, CGR’s six-time IndyCar champion, only knows the circuit that ran through downtown Toronto and the atmosphere surrounding that city race.

He’s not concerned about missing the vibes often felt at Toronto because of the effort being put forth on Markham.

“I think Markham, as far as that city, is really embracing the race and putting a lot of infrastructure and a lot of money into the event, and that’s really important,” Dixon, driver of the No. 9 PNC Bank Honda, said. “What’s really key is having good partners willing to do all that for the longevity of the race.”

But the venue itself? Dixon said ahead of this week that he’d seen the drone footage of Markham and vaguely thought he accidentally might have once driven the course backward on the simulator.

“I think everybody is excited for a new track and the layout looks pretty fun,” Dixon said. “It has a pretty interesting corner, especially that 180-degree turn, or even more I think it is, maybe more, because it kind of wraps back on itself. It should be fun.

When Kyffin Simpson and the No. 8 Sunoco LP team arrive at Markham on Thursday, it will be Simpson's first time seeing the track. He had a breakthrough on the Toronto street course last year when he started 13th and finished third for his first career IndyCar podium.

Now he heads into this weekend coming off his sixth top-10 finish of the season hoping to get back on another podium in Canada. But Simpson is aware he will be learning on the fly starting with the track walk.

"We still have a lot to learn and figure out about it -- I don't even know what direction the track really goes," Simpson said before he'd been on the simulator this week. "I don't know what the streets look like, I don't know what the area looks like, I know nothing about it. We really have a lot to learn.

"The engineers do most of the prep: they run so many simulations and make a lot of predictions on what they think the track is going to be like. They'll have their guess, but sometimes they are wrong. It's not an easy thing to figure out and you really only know once you get there. For me personally, I just want to get out on track and figure it out as we go."

The three-day Markham weekend begins with a Friday practice session at 3:05 p.m. E.T., followed by a second session Saturday at 10:05 a.m. Qualifying is at 2:25 p.m. Saturday.

Sunday begins with a morning warmup at 8:40 a.m. and the race begins at 12:22 p.m.