Today’s theme music: “Freedumb” by Suicidal Tendencies

This week’s newsletter was supposed to be for playing catchup on various stories around the paddock that I had put aside to cover interdisciplinary excursions. We were going to get into Romain Grosjean getting spotted in a firesuit at Media Day while Prema was conspicuously absent, McLaren winning $12 million in their lawsuit against Álex Palou, Tim Cindric returning to Team Penske not even a year after his firing over the rear attenuator scandal, and more. Unfortunately, we can’t do that right now, because something much bigger and stupider has arrived. This past Friday, IndyCar announced the Freedom 250 Grand Prix of Washington, a surprise 18th race of the year in Washington, D.C. decreed by Presidential executive order and set to take place August 23rd. For the sake of American open-wheel racing as a sport and a business, I can only hope it collapses before a single car gets out on track.

Let’s start from the obvious political problem: the whole event exists as a propaganda vanity project for a fascist pedophile and his monstrous administration, which is currently kidnapping children and executing dissenters in the street. This comes with the territory of reaching the Semiquincentennial under the President we have, and it’s only going to get magnified as we get closer to the race. If IndyCar are milking this for federal money so the series can effectively run a race for free, then they’re selling out to align with all that ideology and behavior. If they pay any percentage of the bill, then they’re also suckers. Either way, the number of fans responding to the announcement by calling this race the “Epstein 250” should tell you how well this will all go over with the American public. 

However, even setting that aside, all signs point to the Freedom 250 being a gigantic logistical disaster that makes the never-run Hawaiian Super Prix look like a sane idea. Like that event, which CART tried and failed to tack on as its finale for 1999, this is a race announced the same year it’s meant to be held, which is always a bad sign, especially when it’s a street race. If you want one of these things to get off on the right foot and become a schedule mainstay, you need time to plan things out and make arrangements with the city, and that takes much longer than what the series will have to work with on this one. The contrast between the Grand Prix of Arlington, which IndyCar have gone about the right way and landed major partners like the Dallas Cowboys, Pepsi, and Toyota to ensure they return to the DFW Metroplex in style, and the slapdash approach DC is getting is night and day, and if the DC race even happens, the difference is going to be unmistakable.

I’m not just saying “if” as a defense mechanism here. There are legitimately many things that could go wrong and strangle this race in its crib. In fact, as of right now, the Hawaiian Super Prix looks infinitely better-planned just for having a track layout already decided. Meanwhile, the approach here was to announce the race first and then lock in the track afterward. This is the planning equivalent of only grabbing your parachute after you jump out of the plane. Even worse, the goal seems to be a race around the National Mall, presumably for the sheer number of monuments the cars would go by. While I understand the desire to make things scenic, a well-designed street circuit has to balance that with producing compelling racing. If they secure what amounts to a giant rectangle as their circuit, it’ll be uninspiring, to say the least. If they can’t get it, things will quickly spiral out of control as they scramble for something they can use. Remember, this city’s last big race was a sports car race in the RFK Stadium parking lot that died after one attempt because of noise complaints. If this thing gets chased out to Maryland or Virginia, it’ll be a massive egg on everyone’s face no matter what goes down.

Then there’s the sheer amount of red tape this race needs to get through in such a short time. Not only will the event and its layout need approval from the city government, they’ll also need to get approval from Congress. Given that Republicans exist to worship Trump, and that the leading Democrats in each chamber are spineless centrists who love to cave to whatever Republicans want, this may not be as big of an obstacle as it seems. However, it’s also in a zone of importance where someone principled and/or attention-starved enough could take a low-risk, high-volume stand to gum up the works. With how tight the timetable is to make all this work, a long delay might be sufficient to derail everything even if it doesn’t officially kill the bill. If construction on the street circuit takes too long to start, this is guaranteed to either get canned or get chased out to whatever place the series can salvage.  

Even if it survives all that, the teams budgeted out this season assuming there would be 17 races on the schedule, and that the weekend of the 23rd would be a much-needed breather in a grueling final stretch. Callum Ilott is already scheduled to race in IMSA’s annual GT-only event that weekend, and therefore the only one where his team there has a prayer of scoring an overall race victory. If Prema miss the Freedom 250 in their current financial state, that’s one thing, but there’s a serious possibility that even the chartered teams hire substitute pay drivers, demand immediate money from the series to subsidize the extra race participation, or even pull entries out altogether. Given the severe restrictions on advertising in the National Mall area, this is a severe financial hazard, especially for smaller teams that rely on week-to-week sponsors and now have to try to pencil in another company without even being able to display their logo. Even cars with one big year-long primary sponsor now have to go back and ask for more money, and it’s not guaranteed that they’ll get it.

And even if the race gets all the approvals right on time, look at the ingredients going into the on-track product. Firestone will not have the time to develop and manufacture a tire that best suits the track. Drivers will not have nearly the amount of time to dial the track in via simulator as usual, if there even is a sim version to run. Conditions will be miserably humid for spectators and insanely draining for the drivers, who will be in the midst of a five-week six-race gauntlet. This is a recipe for a race where nothing good happens, everybody wrecks, and somebody gets seriously hurt in the process. If that does happen, God forbid, and their championship hopes go down the toilet in the process, I won’t blame them for whatever names they call series leadership in the aftermath.

There’s simply no way around it. If the Freedom 250 actually happens, we will witness an embarrassment to the sport that makes the Thermal Grand Prix look tame. It will be garbage racing on a garbage track layout in service of a garbage administration, because that’s all it can possibly be. All the while, a series that, not even two years ago, was politically balanced enough to offer both Pride liveries on track and televised invocations before every race will give itself a self-inflicted PR black eye that will take years to heal and could seriously derail the momentum and excitement around this sport.

Given all of that, I think the best possible outcome is for the whole thing to implode and get canceled months in advance. Let it become an entry on the bottom half of iceberg charts next to the Hawaiian Super Prix, Indy Qingdao 600, and other races that never were, known only to sickos like me who love this sport enough to explore every nook and cranny of its lore. No one will miss it when it’s gone. And hopefully, when the time comes to try again for an IndyCar race in the BosWash corridor, the series will avoid the mistakes made in DC and come up with a race that’s actually worth running.