Edmonton’s place on the IndyCar Series circuit is guaranteed for 2010 and IRL officials are open to discussing a contract extension.
“If they want to move forward, we’re going to listen,” said IRL vice-president of public relations John Griffin, who added that IRL officials Terry Angstadt and John Lewis would be meeting with their Northlands counterparts this weekend but a new deal was unlikely to be consummated.
The IRL schedule for 2010 will be released Aug. 1 and Griffin said it will feature 17 or 18 races. That final number may well depend on whether Angstadt returns from Brazil on Friday confident that the season could start with a pair of races held a week apart in the South American country.
There will definitely be one race, in early March in Ribeirao Preto, hometown of IndyCar driver Helio Castroneves.
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Griffin also said the IRL intends to have a 50/50 split between oval tracks and road/street courses in 2010. This year’s 17-race schedule is heavy with ovals (10).
The IRL has sanctioning deals in place with nine tracks for next year: Edmonton, Toronto, Long Beach, St. Petersburg, Mid-Ohio, Chicagoland, Texas, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (for the Indy 500) and Twin Ring Motegi in Japan.
Five of those locations are either road or street courses and four are ovals. The IRL is also likely to return to a road course in Watkins Glen, N. Y., and ovals in Iowa, Kansas and Kentucky. Both Brazilian races would be street courses, giving them a base of 15 races with a 50/50 split.
There has also been talk of potential IRL races in New Hampshire, Alabama and China
Defending champion Scott Dixon is in the thick of a battle with Target Chip Ganassi teammate Dario Franchitti and Team Penske teammates Ryan Briscoe and Helio Castroneves and would like nothing more than a repeat victory here on Sunday. That would vault him back into the lead in the points standings that he surrendered when Franchitti won two weeks ago in Toronto.
Racing teams began arriving Wednesday, with most of the transporters on site at the City Centre Airport by early afternoon. The drivers and crews were finding their way to the city throughout the day and early today.
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There’ll be 23 cars competing this weekend, down from 28 in 2008 when IndyCar absorbed Champ Car. That was a high number of participants for IndyCar. With the crash of the world economy, a number of teams either abandoned the IRL or reduced the number of cars they were running.
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