Yesterday, the Rexall Edmonton Indy announced a 23-car field for next weekend’s race.
With Toronto Indy winner Dario Franchitti to race Edmonton for the first time, the star count goes up. But there will be four fewer cars in the race this year than last year.
There were 18, 18 and 17 cars in the three Edmonton Champ Car races in 2005, 2006 and 2007, respectively.
The total went way up to 27 last year for the first Rexall race in the merged IndyCar series. Then the worst economic depression of our lifetime hit and there was concern the car counts would be back in the teens.
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But nobody here is going to complain about a 23-car field.
It was the same last year as a dozen races ran with fewer than the 27 which were on the grid here.
Edmonton may be a long haul for the teams to get here but it’s not causing a car count problem.
The Rexall race has the cars. And it has the stars.
There are six Indy 500 wins in the race, three of them authored by this year’s Indy 500 winner Helio Castroneves and one each by Franchitti, Dan Wheldon and Scott Dixon.
As for Danica, it’s been hard to count her as a star when she isn’t turning left. But all of a sudden ...
Last year, the Champ Car road racers had all sorts of problems with the ovals and the IRL circle racers were nowhere near as dominating when they hit the summer stretch of the season and the twisty tracks.
She won on an oval in Japan, was third in the Indy 500 and had nine other oval top six finishes since the merger. She’s been brutal on road courses with seven races in the last two years finishing 10th or worse.
The opposite of her from the Champ Car series side has been former Edmonton race winner Justin Wilson.
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The Englishman has won an IndyCar race in each of the last two years. Both have been on multi-turn road courses where he’s also been on two other podiums and had seven top 10 finishes.
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