25-car IndyCar field ready for a tight squeeze in Toronto

The last time the NTT IndyCar Series visited Toronto, it raced with 22 cars that were jam-packed onto the street circuit’s pit lane complex in 2019.

After missing the last two years of racing north of the border due to COVID-related hurdles, IndyCar returns to Canada this weekend with an upsized field thanks to accommodations made by the event’s race promoter on a newly-expanded pit row.

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“We’ll have 25 cars there and we were able to work with the Green Savoree Race Promotions team to lengthen pit road there so the 25 cars will have 35-foot boxes,” IndyCar president Jay Frye told RACER. “Which is not perfect; we like to have them at 40-foot boxes, but we can still operate at 35. We've had to do a couple of different things and were able to Band Aid it for this year with the increased car count, because we weren’t going to turn anybody away that’s a full-time entry, and we have to thank Green Savoree for making some investments to reconfigure things to fit everyone in.”

Although the plans are still in the works, IndyCar and GSRP have designs on a bigger overhaul to pit lane that would allow for close to 30 cars to take part in the event.

“We think there's a pretty good plan going forward that is going to take some different ideas to make it work, but that’s something we're already looking at for the future,” Frye said. “We'll hopefully be able to implement something like that for 2023, because we're already talking about car count for ’23 and we think we’ll need it.”