Marco gives a few suggestions for next year...

The IndyCar Series debut at Iowa Speedway was not quite a thing of beauty, and while a good crowd was in place, there are some items that need to be addressed before next year's event.

The main complaint was a lack of passing toward the front, both on the race track and the highway to the facility. Reports are already starting to come in that it took over three hours to get from Des Moines to the racetrack in Newton, a distance of roughly 30 miles.

Lines of cars were still approaching the parking lots as the green flag waved at 12:25pm local time, a delay of 15 minutes from the originally-slated start time.

Traffic was moving slowly in to the facility in the early morning, backing up nearly on to Interstate 80 at just 8:30am. Even at that early hour, the drive took 25 minutes from the nearby city of Newton, a distance of just four miles from the hotels to the infield.

With nearly every seat occupied and thousands in the overflow standing areas, the focus of the announced crowd of 35,838 was on the track, where passing was equally as difficult.

IndyCar Series officials confirmed that they will evaluate the on-track product and may make adjustments to encourage more passing. Adding to the difficulty were unseasonably cool temperatures in just the low 70's that allowed the Firestone tires to provide even more grip than was expected. They had planned for the normal Iowa summer temps in the 90's, and had brought a hard compound tire.

With tires not wearing and everyone required to use the high downforce short oval wings, the bottom line never got slippery and passing was limited - though Vitor Meira made a couple of thrilling moves to get toward the front.

"In my opinion, we need to sit down, and I'm sure Brian Barnhardt (IRL President for competition) and the IndyCar Series guys are going to make changes to the specification. I'd like to see some more in between the super speedway package and the short oval package," said race winner Dario Franchitti.

Second place finisher, Marco Andretti, agreed. "If it was up to me, I would want less downforce because I would want to make it so maybe there is no limit in qualifying. (Go) to where you can put the wings down and it will make it not just easy flat-out. The speed will be quicker, but I think it will be, you know, less packed."

Andretti then joked because of all the accidents caused by overly aggressive restarts: "Well, it wasn't very packed today."

ORS / CAPSIS International