This weekend in car racing (June 13, 2021)

Following Indianapolis with Detroit has become a tradition, and this year that tradition has shifted to two weeks after the 500. his part-time schedule for Meyer Shank Racing doesn’t include these events, so he’ll be racing in Tony Stewart’s SRX this weekend instead.

For those who race, an Indianapolis 500 won by a part-time driver did an odd thing for the championship standings. The second year pilot Alex Palou, who finished second, now has a sovereign advantage of 36 points in the overall standings. Scott Dixon and Colton Herta, who finished outside the top 15 as the two fastest cars of the month, have fallen to second and an alarming seventh place. Patricio O’Ward and Simon Pagenaud, who finished in the top five in a race where five part-time starters filled the top ten, have moved up to third and fourth.

O’Ward will have the advantage today. He’s starting from pole for race 1 in Belle Isle and with Alexander Rossi (currently 15th) and Romain Grosjean (part-time, but currently 21st), he has a buffer of drivers outside of the current title fight directly behind him. After this weekend, half of the season’s championship points will be awarded. Anyone who wants to fight for a title knows they have to win races now.

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NASCAR – All-Star Racing
Sunday, June 13 – 8:00 p.m. ET – Fox Sports 1 – Streaming on the Fox Sports app

The NASCAR All-Star Race, a long-standing off-weekend activity in which the winners of the previous year traditionally competed against each other for a significant cash prize, lives on in a new weekend in a new format. The race is now on Texas Motor Speedway, and the funky new format offers five guaranteed warnings and no green flag lasts longer than 30 laps. The race is also testing an even lower horsepower than usual, an astonishing 510 horsepower from a series that was just under 900 in 2014 to create even closer races.

Between the stages and the spacer, the concept of this race experimentally doubles everything that has made NASCAR’s product significantly worse since 2014. All of these things were attempts to improve racing that backfired, so NASCAR continues to dig in hopes that there will be gold among them. Unlikely, but at least it’s trying something, and it might be worth a try.

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IMSA – Detroit Belle Isle
Saturday, June 12 – 5:00 p.m. ET – NBC Sports Network – Streaming on the NBC Sports app

Yes, Belle Isle hosts two IndyCar races and one IMSA race over a period of approximately 24 hours.

The IMSA race offers both DPi and GTD and thus the two best categories of today’s series. In the DPi, Kevin Magnussen starts from his first IMSA pole of his career for the Cadillac from Chip Ganassi Racing. With Magnussen on pole in the DPi and Grosjean on third place in the IndyCar, there is an outside chance that the Haas F1 teammates could become winners in their respective American series for the first time in 2020 on the same day.

As always, GTD is highly competitive. The Peregrine Racing Audi starts from pole position, but the first seven are covered by less than half a second and represent six completely different teams and manufacturers. GTLM is not officially represented in this, but the two Corvette Racing C8.Rs, which make up the entire class field in non-endurance events, will compete on a non-championship basis.

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FIA World Endurance Championship – Portimao
Sunday, June 13th – 6:00 a.m. ET – Streaming on the MotorTrend app

A delayed Le Mans is still two months away, but the battle for overall victory started months ago. Every World Endurance Championship event represents a chance for Toyota’s private driving competition to prove they can fight the tough favorites when it matters most, and this weekend is the biggest competition Toyota has seen since the debut of the LMH class earlier this year. Portimao marks the debut of Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus, the American team that built their own hypercar, the SCG 007, to dethrone the only factory in the class at Le Mans later that year.

Both groups will be disappointed with qualifying. The Toyotas start in second and third places, overtaken by the Alpine 2020 Gibson LMP1 car that has been carried over to the class for this season. The three are just under a second faster than the LMP2 front-runners, while the SCG 007 qualified two seconds behind the hypercar front-runners in the middle of this LMP2 group.

But the race lasts 8 hours and that leaves enough time to switch positions. Both Alpine and Glickenhaus hope to see a competitive pace against Toyota at Portimao, but all three manufacturers know that this series is primarily about preparing for Le Mans. In order to survive for 24 hours, a Car 8 must be able to survive with ease.

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