Sickos Sunday Edition - Arthur was stuck on a train and wrote this about IndyCar, I think.

Good Sunday Morning! Commish here, Arthur was traveling on a train and randomly blogged about 1700 words of thoughts. He requested this to come out on Sunday morning, and I said why not? Enjoy a long Sunday meandering read from our VP of Podcast Production, Arthur, and I will periodically post pictures of trains throughout the post.

ALL ABOARD THE BLOG ARTHUR WROTE WHILE ON A TRAIN

If there’s one thing you should know about me, it’s that I’m a numbers guy. I’ve always liked numbers. Big ones, small ones, even negative ones. I like numbers because of the things they can tell me. Well, right now, the numbers are telling me that yinz go absolutely bonkers for any sort of train-related content, so I’m going to make a resolution to write a post for yinz to read every time I ride Amtrak.

How frequently do I ride Amtrak? Don’t worry about that. I’m on the train right now, and we just passed south of Loretto, home to St. Francis University, which recently announced that they were dropping from Division I to Division III. I have to pay attention to where I am right now because I want to get some pictures out of the train window going through the horseshoe curve just before Altoona for a skeet making fun of the commercials I see during sporting events for Peyronie's Disease. Furthermore, I made sure to sit on the right side of the train just for this. There are a lot of empty seats where I am up in business class, but I don’t want to leave anything to chance. I think I’ll probably post the skeet from my personal account, though—not because I think it’s bad or anything, but because I don’t know if Commish has seen these commercials and I don’t want to have to explain them to him. We still have a little while before we get to the curve, so I’m going to keep drinking my drink (vodka and orange juice) and listening to classical music (Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3) while I write. If I’m listening to classical music, that means I mean business.

I guess that this post should have a main topic that it’s about, so I’m going to be talking today about last weekend’s NTT IndyCar Series race at the Thermal Club in California. If you didn’t watch the race, that’s fine; judging by the ratings that came out for the race, not a lot of people did. Oh, hang on, we’re at the curve. I need to take these pictures. Okay, I got them. I can’t post them yet because I don’t have reception. I’ll probably be able to connect once the train gets down to Altoona. Anyway, where was I?

I don’t really want to get into the Thermal Club. What you need to know is that it’s basically a country club but for race cars instead of golf, located in the desert in Southern California near Palm Springs. I wonder what’s worse for the environment: a desert golf course or a desert racetrack? It doesn’t matter for this post. What does matter is that IndyCar has plenty of free space in their calendar at this time of year, and the Thermal Club is willing to pay to host a race so that they can promote the club and sell more of the houses that line the track. I’m telling you this to illustrate that it’s largely a financial decision for IndyCar to hold a race here, which means that there are some less than ideal aspects of the race. It’s on the West Coast, so it has to occupy a specific time window, which happens to be the same time window that NASCAR races in every week. The track is flat with painted runoff; it reminds me more of an F1 track than the IndyCar tracks I know and love.

However, the track does have one thing going for it. It is very demanding on tires. A wise man once said, “With great tire wear comes great racing,” or something like that. When tire wear is high, cars that can better manage their tires will have a speed differential over the cars that aren’t as good at that aspect of the race. This speed differential is required to generate passing. If every car can run the optimal line at the same speed, the race is very boring to watch. The high tire fall off at Thermal Club should have made for an entertaining race.

My chief complaint that has me writing this post almost a week after the race is not with IndyCar or the Thermal Club; it’s with FOX. FOX took over IndyCar broadcasts this year from NBC, and most of what they’ve done has been very impressive, from their ads featuring drivers to their commitment to air every IndyCar race this season on broadcast television. I think they’ve demonstrated a strong commitment to trying to grow the sport and attract more casual fans to the broadcast with things like incorporating the color of each car into their graphic on the leader board and including driver head-shots wherever they possibly can.

However, FOX’s new graphics have omitted other information, information that was easily communicated with NBC’s old graphics. On road and street courses, Firestone brings two different tire compounds. There are the harder black primary tires and the softer red alternate tires. NBC would use the colors to indicate on their leader board which tire each car was on. FOX will flash the current tire on screen every so often, but it’s so much more helpful when it’s always up there.

It’s also not enough to just show what tires each car is on. IndyCar teams have a finite amount of tires each weekend. In the case of the race at Thermal, each team got four sets of alternate tires and six sets of primary tires. IndyCar rules say that each team must use one brand-new set of primaries and one brand-new set of alternates in each race, but with the race at Thermal requiring three stops, that left two tire stints up to the teams. The alternate tire was the preferred tire, but teams that advanced in qualifying had no new sets beyond the one set they were required to run, and the teams that didn’t advance only had one new set, meaning that every team had at least one stint they had to figure out how to run on a suboptimal tire. The difference between new and used tires is not always consistent from track to track, but at Thermal it appeared that used alternate tires were able to provide a similar pace advantage as the new alternates but degraded far more quickly.

This set up an exciting final stint where some cars were on used alternate tires that faded hard at the end, while other cars were on tires that lasted longer. In the closing laps, numerous cars caught and passed cars who had the used alternates on. Unfortunately, FOX only focused on one of these situations, and granted it was the pass for the win, but I would have still liked to see the rest of them. Àlex Palou made the race-winning pass on Pato O’Ward with ten laps to go in the race. Once he had the lead, there was very little chance of O’Ward retaking it on worse tires. During those ten laps, Colton Herta and Felix Rosenqvist passed Kyle Kirkwood, Will Power and Marcus Armstrong passed both Kyle Kirkwood and Alexander Rossi, Scott Dixon passed Graham Rahal, and Christian Ramussen passed Josef Newgarden. I wish FOX had been able to give this racing a little more shine.

The biggest selling point of IndyCar, in my opinion, is the quality of racing, not just at the front of the field, but throughout the entire field. On road and street courses, passes typically don’t just happen. They are set up by pace differential, caused by differences in car setup, fuel strategy, and tires. This means that many passes in IndyCar are foreseeable. I hope that FOX is able to learn to do a better job of foreseeing this action, because these positions matter. Every position in IndyCar pays points, so every pass matters, and IndyCar doesn’t have a system like NASCAR where only the win counts towards the championship in the regular season. IndyCar has a season-long championship where every point matters. In 2015, Scott Dixon and Juan Pablo Montoya tied for the championship, with Dixon winning the tiebreaker.

All I ask of FOX is to show me the tire situation for each car and show me when action is happening through the field. Actually, I have one more ask. Last year, IndyCar put in a lot of work to add hybrid capabilities to their cars. The cars can generate and store energy and then deploy it for an added power boost. IndyCar did this at a pretty significant cost to the teams and the series, and last season NBC showcased it with graphics showing the hybrid being charged and deployed. This season, FOX hasn’t really shown any hybrid graphics, begging the question, was it really worth it for teams to have spent so much money developing it? As a fan, I’m not wedded to the hybrid, but it seems odd to not feature it on graphics after only half a season of use.

That’s it for my complaining about FOX, but while I’m talking about FOX, let me leave you with one last thing completely unrelated to IndyCar. FOX’s men's college basketball postseason tournament, the College Basketball Crown, still has yet to start. It won’t even have started by the time I begin my next trip on Amtrak.

Amtrak is a fun way to travel. My train keeps arriving at stations early, so we have to wait longer to depart on time. It’s better than being late, I guess. Well, I’m going to stop writing now and see if I can talk Commish into publishing this. Plus, I want to use my computer to manage football, and I have some things downloaded to my iPad from my Apple TV+ subscription. The shows and movies that weren’t zeitgeist-y enough for me to watch when they actually came out, like the show where Idris Elba is on a plane that gets hijacked. I forget what it’s called.