The Texas Indy PPG 375 - Texas Motor Speedway Fort Worth Texas USA

A trackside report by Mark Roden

25 April 2023

01 April, Saturday: Indycar Practice and Qualifying on Day 2 of a Sprint / Indycar Race Weekend Double-Header

Indy qualifying and practice sessions were the program for the morning and first part of the afternoon.  Knowing that this would be the longest day of the weekend I started early, driving about 50 miles from the hotel in southeast Dallas to northwest Fort Worth, across what we call the “Metroplex”, and got to the track just as qualifying was getting underway. 

Texas Motor Speedway

The track is a 1.5 mile, permanent purpose-built oval track completed in 1997.  For a track a full mile shorter than Indianapolis Motor Speedway, it boasted speeds nearly as fast.  In 2001 this became a big problem, and the race was cancelled because of it.  With speeds topping 237mph, many drivers had been suffering the effects of g-forces similar to those experienced by jet fighter pilots due to high speeds and banking.  It is quite a fascinating story that is well documented in a Racer Magazine article written by Marshall Pruett in 2021.

In 2023, the Texas race is a 250-lap venture with speeds in the neighborhood of 220mph.  The venue itself is small enough that from just about anywhere in the grandstands you can see all of the track, including the backstretch and all turns.  It does not go unnoticed that the cars are turning better than 2 laps a minute even today. 

Fencing at the venue is formidable; unless you find a hole to shoot through you are going to have it in your photos.  I tried to use the precious few holes that I did find, however they were heavily guarded, and I was always told to stand clear of the fence (I was told that the reason I couldn’t access them was due to all the network TV cabling running along the fence line.  But I think we all know what the real story is here…)

When I first arrived, I came into the stands just about even with the start/finish line.  I could hear qualifying going on as I walked in, so I knew that I had missed a few of the starters.  I wanted to get some good track action coming off turn 4, so I had to make the choice to favor that over walking to the very end of the grandstands to get a few shots of them taking off from the line. 

I stayed up high for a while to get the exit of turn 4 nice and clean, and also to shoot a few pit shots without the fence in the way. 

Once I made my way to the floor, I could really feel the speed of the cars.  I sat a couple of rows up because I found that it was a bit easier to pan.  Being that close, the action is super-fast. But the real problem is that the fence is so dense that it behaves like a snoot or polarizer; the autofocus has a real problem catching the car as it comes into view, and then keeping up with it as it races across your front.  I had to switch to manual at some point just to get anything.

I did a little more work on the pit boxes, using the fence as best I could as a “prop”.  I prefer the clean shots but sometimes obstructions can actually add to the environment of the race experience, after all, that is how most people view the race.

I have been experimenting with very slow shutter speeds lately, and I expect this will continue.  It is a work in progress to develop the technique, but here are a few of the results from the effort:

As an abstract painter, I naturally want to take this one step further.  I am not sure how valuable these are as far as professional photography goes, but it is worth mentioning that I will be painting some of my work in the next few years and chances are, they will look very much like this:

I walked around a bit more trying to find some different angles.  I was also running out of time, as I needed to get back across to the southeast part of Dallas in time to make it into the infield before Sprint car qualifying started and I got stuck outside again.  I must admit, this was a bit more on my mind at this point, having enjoyed carte blanche at the dirt track the night before.  A few more parting shots through a soupy fence and I was gone for the day.

02 April, Sunday: Indycar Race Day.

Race morning was the third consecutive day at one of two different racetracks, and it came very early.  The plan was to check out of the hotel before dawn, and then drive to Fort Worth, picking up a friend who lives about 20 minutes from TMS along the way.  From there we would make it in time to take advantage of the garage passes that we purchased.  I was happy to see the timing of everything working so well, a bit of traffic, but not too much.  A long walk under the track and then the only real wait was scanning the passes so that we could get in and out. 



For some reason they consider going into the infield “leaving the speedway.”  I’m not entirely sure what that is all about, but we had to scan the passes again to get back “into” the track and the tunnel once we headed for the grandstands and our seats. 

As promised in an earlier report, I want to give an update to one of the new Indycar features for 2023.  In this photo you can see the new beefed-up attenuator. 

The newly added strength comes from a corrugation of the top of the frame.  The shape has also been modified underneath with a gentle slope to send the nose of a following car downward in the case of a rear impact.  In previous years this was horizontal.  You can see the larger LED which is used during rain events and will flash when there is a caution or red flag in the race.

For comparison I chased down a few previous year photos to give an idea of how it looked before.

I found the Corvette pace car sitting in the garage area.  It was quite nice to see it up close, so I snapped a few photos.  Here it is on the tarmac next to one of the two-seaters, just moments before leading the way onto the race course.

Once the pre-race festivities were completed, things got moving.  They had the cars in their pit boxes angled out like a Le Mans starting grid.  I’m not sure why, but it did look good as the cars left the pits and got up on to the track. 

I did not take many shots on-track during the first part of the race.  What interested me the most was the angle that we had of the pit boxes.  I usually don’t have this viewpoint; I am either too far away, in another part of the course or on the inside sitting behind them (as with the St Pete GP), and at Indianapolis the only time to see it is on non-race days.  I mean, unless you have a high section race day ticket on the outside of the main straight or in turn 1 (and if you do, we need to talk…)

The race seemed relatively clean for a while, and the laps were flying by quickly.  There were a few mishaps, but for the most part it was clean, fast racing.  As far as action, Dixon took off early, then gave way to Newgarden who held the lead for a lot of the first half with O’Ward not too far behind him.  Another gaggle of drivers, Palou and Grosjean among them, seemed to stay in the slipstream up to the mid-point of the race. 

Takuma Sato tried to pass an anemic Will Power on the outside as several cars approached at the same time.  One of the cars (I think it may have been Canapino) passed on the low side and Sato had to choose between braking hard and going high.  The result was a smack to the wall.  Around the same time, Rossi hit Kirkwood as he was coming out of his pit box and had to have repairs, effectively ending his day.

At this point the leaders were in a dogfight and the pace was furious.  I kept my eyes on the pit boxes while simultaneously enjoying the action on the track.

Pato O’Ward was running down the field and had even lapped Dixon mid-race.  A caution around lap 180 caused the field to bunch up and several got their laps back. 

At this point I began to pay more attention to the track action.  I felt like I had plenty of pit photography in the can, and so now I followed this brewing battle. 

From the restart until DeFrancesco and Rahal hit the wall on lap 222, I was taking note of how many times the lead was changing.  To illustrate just how fast the action was getting, here is a shot sequence from lap 205 to lap 209, along with the time stamps from each image:

Lap 219

The restart after Sting Ray Robb’s accident had Alex Palou leading Grosjean and Herta into turn 1.  By the exit of turn 2, Grosjean had levelled up with the leader and punched through by the start/finish line at the end of the lap.

Lap 220

In my photo of the leaders crossing the line at lap 220, O’Ward is not in the shot.  There is Alex Palou on the inside, with Grosjean on the outside followed very closely by Herta and Dixon. As the lap developed, O’Ward had moved up from several car-lengths back to be right in the mix with them at the line for lap 221.  Newgarden is also making his way back into the leader spotlight.

Lap 222

Devlin DeFrancesco and Rahal got together and ended up in the wall, setting up some intense racing which turned out to be one of the fiercest IndyCar battles I have seen in a long time.  Five cars fought it out for the top spot as Newgarden, O’Ward, Grosjean, Herta, and Palou switched spaces, sometimes twice per circuit. 

Meanwhile in the pits, Dixon and Grosjean were in at the same time, as well as Rosenqvist:

One more update to the new Indycar mandates is a photo of the new wheel restraints, which I was able to get when Rahal’s car was being carried back to the garage.  I have enlarged it a bit to easily distinguish the wheel restraint cables from the wrecker straps, which are red.

From here, the racing was just insane.  The crowd was quite thin for an Indycar race (the fans in Texas favor NASCAR) but everyone who was there was really excited about what was happening.  We watched for the next few laps, and I tried to document every bit of it with my camera.  I don’t normally give a racing play-by-play (you can watch the video online) but in this case, I had the presence of mind at the time to try and capture it, and so I will share it in my report.

Lap 238 Restart / 239



O’Ward got the drop on everyone and led the field for most of the lap, but around turn 3 Palou caught him and made his move toward the start/finish line.  By the end of the lap Palou was ahead of him.

Lap 240

At the line, Palou held on to the lead, but Newgarden passed O’Ward for second.

Lap 241 / 242

In turn one Newgarden takes the lead from Palou, O’Ward sets him up on the backstretch for a pass at the line.  On the next lap he passes Palou but Newgarden maintains the lead through T2.  On the backstretch O’Ward sets him up again.  There wasn’t much daylight between them the rest of the way around to the line.  Malukas passed Palou for third.

Lap 246

Coming around at the end of lap 245, O’Ward passes Newgarden, but by the time they were in turn 2 Newgarden had started to pass him again.  It was clear that both cars were evenly matched and at this point the win would go to the one who could take the other at the line.

Lap 248

With 2 laps to go, the top two positions of O’Ward and Newgarden were taking constant jabs at each other.  Going into turn 1 Newgarden had the lead, but it looked as if O’Ward was setting him up one last time to take it at the white flag. 

Just as that was happening, Grosjean lost it and crashed, bringing out the final caution of the day, effectively ending the race with a bit less than 2 laps to go, Newgarden is the 2023 Texas PPG 375 winner.

I’ve had a bit of a break in April, in part to produce this report, but also to prepare for the upcoming trip to Indianapolis, which will include practice, qualifying and race day action for both GMR Gran Prix and Indianapolis 500 races, plus two more dirt track Sprint car evenings in Indiana.

My next reports will come from Indianapolis Motor Speedway…is it May yet?

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