In Driver’s Eye with James Hinchcliffe, the six-time INDYCAR winner will bring you inside the mind of a racer while breaking down the nuts and bolts of the sport for fans.
As INDYCAR continues its mad dash to the season’s checkered flag, the next two stops on the calendar represent a unique challenge: brand-new street circuits.
Now, this concept isnt new for the teams and drivers in the series. Its not even new this year, after we went to Arlington, Texas, for the first time back in March. But having this many in a season â and two back-to-back in Markham, Ontario, and Washington, D.C. â is certainly outside the norm.
So naturally, you might want to know: How does a driver prepare for a brand-new, temporary street circuit?Â
The answer is the Driver In The Loop simulator, or the DIL.Â
The DIL is a frequently used and massively helpful tool for drivers and engineers alike in preparation for any race. But it has extra importance when coming to a new, temporary track.
Why do I keep emphasizing the “temporary” part? Because if youre going to a track that is new for you, but not brand new, there are other things you can look at to prepare.Â
Drivers will look at on-board videos from other motorsports series that have raced there. Engineers can look at data sets from a completely different race car, then use offsets they know â based on how that type of car performs against an INDYCAR at a track that they have both been on â to try and determine rough performance parameters.
But when its a brand-new track, the DIL simulations are the best â really, the only â tool youve got.Â
Chip Ganassi Racing and Alex Palou recently posted a video online of him doing some sim laps around the upcoming D.C. venue that gives you a sense of what this is like for the driver. Behind the wheel, it provides drivers with a general literal and figurative feel for what to expect when they won’t be on the track until race weekend.
For a new track, the online model used in the sim is built from laser scanning the roads the track will be run on and building out corner radii based on CAD files used to assemble the track. Think architectural drawings that show where each line, curb and wall is.
Part of that scan should give you a rough idea of the level of grip in each corner and also highlight things like bumps in the road. These can all vary greatly on a street track from the sim to real life, so they have to be taken with a grain of salt.
The sim is most useful for drivers getting an idea of where a new track turns left or right, for car placement in corner sequences and for the general rhythm of a track. Things like braking points and minimum speeds and gear selection should be close, but not perfect.Â
So again, you have to understand that this is a high-level introduction to the circuit. If you take what you feel in the sim as fact, it can bite you!
I remember one year ahead of going to a new track, my teammate and I did a sim day to prepare. We got comfortable and confident. But when we showed up to the real track, the grip level was so different that we had to relearn every braking point and throttle point! The whole morning of the test day was a waste because we were undoing bad habits we had built in the sim.
That level of judgment comes with experience, and INDYCAR drivers this year have already experienced this process in 2026 with the streets of Arlington. So they know a bit about what to expect from the sim’s accuracy.
Before INDYCAR tackles D.C., we have the streets of Markham o
