It’s a location that most IndyCar fans won’t be familiar with, though IndyCar in its former ‘Champ Car’ guise raced at the former Arlington Downs Raceway dirt oval from 1947 to 1950.
Very little has been glimpsed into the new 4.3km, anticlockwise, 14-turn street course, which races past the home of the Dallas Cowboys NFL team.
This week, Honda released an onboard simulation of the course, though even that came with a caveat.
“For a place like this that’s brand-new, you don’t have a full surface scan,” Ed Carpenter Racing driver Alexander Rossi explained of the simulated lap.
“You only have essentially a GPS scan with walls kind of placed around the perimeter.
“Both Honda and Chevy have kind of the same track model, so you don’t have any sort of the bumps modelled or grip differential depending on surfaces.
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“I think it’s a great tool to at least know what corner comes next – but in terms of brake points and grip levels, how fast you can actually go, the line, where bumps are, that sort of thing, everyone will be figuring that out together kind of starting from zero.”
Rossi’s teammate Christian Rasmussen said there is little you can do to prepare for a new circuit.
Simulation time is also limited, given the inherent inaccuracies of what is essentially guesswork.
“I think it’s a little bit probably less than we usually do,” said Rasmussen of simulation time.
“Just because we don’t have that track scan yet. Without all of the bumps and undulations of the track, it’s not really precise enough.
“Once you kind of get the layout of the actual track, there’s not really much more you can find there before we get a proper scan.
“The layout looks really cool. It’s hard to really know what to expect before you’ve actually hit the track.
“Like we were talking about earlier, without really having 100 percent scans of what the track’s going to feel like with bumps and so on.
“I think we have an exciting weekend ahead, for sure.”
Drivers will have one practice session on Saturday (AEDT) and another on Sunday before qualifying for Monday’s race.
As for a form guide, Rossi said the playfield will be level for the “first 20 minutes” but the cream will ultimately rise to the top.
“By the time you get to qualifying, there are still the teams that are superior on street courses,” he explained.
“It’s not like the wet, for example, where a driver can overcome a pace deficit that’s inherent between cars or teams.
“Like I said, it will be an equaliser in the very beginning, but then everyone will get the most out of their car and it will be back to the normal order of operations, I would assume.”
Rasmussen added: “I think where you’ll see I think the teams that are usually very strong on street courses will probably be also strong here just because their packages are that good and kind of translates across different tracks.”
Monday’s race is a 70-lap affair and gets underway at 4:17am AEDT with coverage live and exclusively on Stan Sport.
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