If you ask The CW, it’s 100 Days to Indy, but the drivers and teams of the NTT IndyCar Series know that, really, it’s three days to Barber. This Sunday’s (April 30) Children’s of Alabama Indy Grand Prix from Barber Motorsports Park will be the fourth race of the 2023 IndyCar season, and the first of seven races this year held on a permanent road course.
Like Circuit Gilles Villeneuve or Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez, Barber is one of those few racetracks named after a person – although unlike most of them, it isn’t named in honor of a driver whose life was cut tragically short. Rather, Barber Motorsports Park is named for its founder, billionaire businessman, record-setting motorcycle collector and arachnid statuary enthusiast George Barber, who funded the creation of the undulating ribbon of asphalt just east of Birmingham and is, thankfully, still with us.
For the full history of the “Augusta National of Motorsports,” check out Tom Blackburn’s Inside IndyCar from earlier this week, but the short of it is: big names win at Barber.
Former champions Will Power, Josef Newgarden and Simon Pagenaud have all got Barber trophies somewhere in their cabinets, and Alex Palou scored his first career IndyCar win at the venue in 2021 en route to his first career championship. The only non-champions to win in Alabama? Helio Castroneves, Takuma Sato and Pato O’Ward. This isn’t a week to bet on the underdogs.
For 90 laps, 26 newly-minted reality television stars (plus Dancing with the Stars winner Castroneves) will have to tackle a challenging 17-turn, 2.38-mile layout that, despite opening in 2003, has a definitively old-school feel about it.
A deceptively quick first corner leads into the spectacularly long banked right-hander of turns 2 and 3. Before they know it, drivers arrive at the best passing opportunity on the track: the downhill braking zone into turn 5. Keep an eye on this not-quite-hairpin during pit cycles, as drivers on cold Firestones are sitting ducks to rivals behind.
The complex at turns 7 and 8 (7, 7a and 8, if you want to be pedantic about it), with its sudden elevation changes and beefy curbs, is lying in wait to trip up any driver who thinks they’re falling into a rhythm, as Callum Illott discovered in 2022, bringing a solid top-10 run to an end.
A word to the wise: get your passing done in the first half of the lap, as the narrow surface and roller-coaster-like elevation…
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