Frankly, it doesn’t even sound like the name of a racetrack.
When the Thermal Club – a private country club not far from Palm Springs, Calif. that features 48 trackside villas, a sushi restaurant and on-site car salesmen in addition to the 2.9-mile ribbon of desert asphalt – was announced as the site of the NTT IndyCar Series’ 2023 preseason test, many had questions about whether the automotive oasis of the uber-wealthy would be suitable or appropriate for use by one of the country’s premier racing series.
The drivers and teams had a different, and more immediately pressing concern: how to maximize two days of testing on a track which nobody has ever driven in an IndyCar. Adding an additional dimension of difficulty, they have to make do without most of the tools they would usually use for the task. It’s not as though anyone can just boot up iRacing and drop in on a laser-scanned replica of the Thermal Club.
Speaking to media, including Frontstretch from the Palm Springs convention center, Chip Ganassi Racing’s Marcus Ericsson explained: “It’s kind of back to the old-school way of learning racetracks before we had simulators. Maybe there is some simulator where you can find this track, I don’t know, but I haven’t found it…”
The defending Indy 500 winner won’t be tackling the Thermal Club sight unseen. At least, not exactly:
“I went back to how I did it 15 years ago,” said Ericsson. “[I] looked at the track map and found some onboard clips on YouTube [of] some old Ferrari dude driving around. I’m just watching that and trying to picture how an IndyCar would run on it”
“Ferrari dude” gave Ericsson some introduction to the layout, as he explained:
“Some parts of Portland [International Raceway] I would say is closest to this track, but [Thermal] has a lot of slow first-gear corners… at the end of the lap there’s a quite fast complex as well.”
Though it may not offer the same relevance as, say, the test scheduled for September at IndyCar race venue WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca, Ericsson is still confident his No. 8 team can learn something from testing at Thermal: “In general, if we find stuff here that works I’m hoping it’s going to be able to translate …”
“I think the closest [track] we’ve raced at is probably CoTA, with the kind of smooth F1-style layout,” offered fellow Swede and Arrow McLaren driver Felix Rosenqvist. “Maybe this one is a bit…
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