The race’s name may be a little contrived – who uses the metric system when it comes to measuring race distances in the U.S.? – but maybe that’s apt. Texas Motor Speedway’s track promoter Eddie Gossage has always been a bit of a maverick, someone who stands out, someone who struggles not to speak his mind, making him golden for the media and public. And to be honest, he has plenty reason to be loud and proud: TMS is a slickly operated venue with modern-looking structures yet it retains that old-school amphitheatrical feel, heightened further by the IndyCar race starting in the evening and ending at night. This is an event and track made for drama for its entire 600-kilometer, 372.823-mile, 249-lap duration.

Saturday’s Firestone 600 should be full of great racing because a) that’s what Indy cars tend to produce at TMS, and b) IndyCar has reacted to the uncharacteristically lukewarm race action from last year. It should be noted here, however, that the perceived lack of action was greatly exacerbated by 1) unimaginative TV coverage, and 2) the fact that Helio Castroneves dominated from the moment he hit the front, long before half-distance. Timing & Scoring told another story, of drivers yo-yoing up and down the leaderboard, but the fans missed out and let their feelings known.

The end result has created one of the many unknowns for this race. Who will the increased downforce levels suit best? The test in the spring was inconclusive as the winds were so strong that Team Penske, for instance, departed early believing conditions were so unrepresentative of what they’d find here this weekend, testing would be rendered meaningless. And the engine manufacturers were even more secretive than usual regarding lap speeds, not wishing to give away any info pre-Indy 500 regarding who had most top-end power. As Ryan Hunter-Reay mentions here, he’s confident there still won’t be enough downforce to create an IRL-style pack race, but no one can know for sure. Firestone has brought the same compound tires as it ran here last year, but of course the variation in downforce will affect how they behave over a stint.

As ever, the weekend schedule builds in another set of question marks that are only partially answered by data from previous years. On Friday, practice is held mid-morning, qualifying mid-afternoon and evening practice ends a half-hour before the following evening’s race is even due to start. In other words, track characteristics by the end of the race on Saturday – around 9.30 p.m. local time – will not have been encountered since the same race a year ago. With mid-afternoon promising to deliver a scorching 96 degrees, from session to session there will be major variations in ambient temp, and less so track temp.

The other big question mark is which – if either – engine manufacturer has the more powerful unit. Remarkably, I’ve heard positive and negative from drivers allied to each side, which may suggest the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

“Put it this way, they’re very close at the top end,” said one Chevrolet driver who preferred not to be named. “I think ours has better acceleration, but apart from restarts and pit-out laps under green, that’s not going to make any difference in Texas. Helio and Ryan looked pretty even at the end of Indy. They could stay in the other one’s draft and make passes happen. I think, or I hope, our downforce levels make Texas a race where it’s not power that makes the difference. It’s about looking after tires at 210mph, and playing with the balance of your car. Like in 2012.”

Finally, the extra mileage – or should that be kilometerage, Eddie? – may have an influence on the outcome of the race, of course. An extra 20 laps can complicate any gambles made on tire life and fuel consumption, but how that plays out will, as ever, depend very much on the number and duration of caution periods.

VICTORY CONTENDERS

Marco Andretti has to be one of the favorites, the only driver with the pace to be in the same ZIP code as Castroneves at Texas last year. There isn’t a braver driver out there, nor one who’s so comfortable going freestyle once the tires start to go away; his challenge will be to delay that moment as long as possible in each stint. If fuel mileage rather than tire life governs when pit stops are made, this will work well for Marco, who is doubtless still needled by coming so near and yet so far from winning Indy again.

Two of Marco’s Andretti Autosport teammates are likely to be factors, while the other is a wild card. Ryan Hunter-Reay excelled in the last couple of stints at TMS last year; James Hinchcliffe is super aggressive in wheel-to-wheel racing at 200mph-plus, and he’s got nothing to lose now that he appears to be out of the running for the championship after just seven rounds. Carlos Munoz…. well, he’s ever eager to explore the unknown but his ability to manage tires at TMS-style speeds is unproven. That’s not to say he can’t; it’s just that Fontana last year, Munoz’s only previous race experience of a banked oval in an IndyCar – was inconclusive.

Team Penske is of course strong. Will Power, now back in the lead of the championship, took pole here by 1.6mph last year, while teammate Helio Castroneves appeared to have a similar pace advantage in the race (LEFT). His fourth Texas win looked like a formality, to be honest. But I suspect there’s a good chance that this is the race where their teammate Juan Montoya makes his presence known. He looked very strong (with better fuel mileage than anyone else) at Indianapolis, so age hasn’t hurt his bravery, his ability to think while driving quick nor his ability to optimize his car according to track conditions.

Fans of Chip Ganassi Racing have had a thin time this season, but Scott Dixon, Tony Kanaan and Ryan Briscoe have all won here in the past – in other words, they know what a good racecar needs to feel like, and can therefore use this experience to quickly hone setups in that Friday half-hour evening practice session. You can’t put too high a price on that. They also lie eighth, 12th and 13th in the championship currently and have extra motivation to take chances, yet they’re all smart enough not to do anything dumb.

Yet it’s their teammate, Charlie Kimball, who perhaps offers the most intriguing prospect and gets my vote as dark horse. No one who watched the season closer at Fontana last year can have failed to be impressed with how CK kept himself at the forefront all evening and, without his engine failure, was the man most likely to push Power all the way to the end. With that memory fresh in mind, and with a confidence-building podium finish last weekend, he appears to lack nothing as a potential race winner.

PODIUM POSSIBLES

Josef Newgarden fans have reason to be optimistic. His battle with Hinchcliffe for eighth last year was one of the highlights of the closing stages of the race, and remember he had qualified seventh, so there was nothing lucky about the fact that he was able to beat drivers like Takuma Sato, Simon Pagenaud and Justin Wilson to the checkered flag. Sarah Fisher Hartman Racing clearly had a good setup, and the progress the team has made since then has been quite astonishing, considering it usually has only one car’s data to utilize. Given Newgy’s misfortunes so far this year, there will be many supposedly unbiased observers keeping their fingers crossed for Josef and his race engineer, Jeremy Milless. The kid is a potential star on any type of track.

Schmidt Peterson Hamilton Motorsport is another team whose results this year have not always reflected its competitiveness, and that’s also a phrase that could be applied to its oval performances for the past couple seasons. Resident star Simon Pagenaud took to oval racing pretty much from the word go when he came into IndyCar in 2012, and yet he’s not yet known as a hotshoe on left-turn-only tracks. Well, watch this space. He was very quick in Fontana last year after an early setback, and he adapted to Texas a year earlier, too.

For reasons we can’t go into on the record, there was a severe technical gaffe that prevented Justin Wilson showing his best in qualifying at TMS last year: you hopefully won’t be surprised to learn that it was not lack of talent that left him 12mph slower than pole time, and 5mph off his Dale Coyne Racing teammate. The 2012 Texas winner was thus only learning how his car should have felt by the second practice, and then had to play catch-up the whole race, which of course meant he had to use more tire life than his rivals. In other words, it was a big fat mess. That’s not going to happen again, you can be sure. Race engineer Michael Cannon found a very quick setup for E.J. Viso last year, and he can do the same working with Wilson.

By the same token, Wilson’s engineer from last year Bill Pappas can work well with Graham Rahal, who nearly won this race in 2012. If he’s at his confident best, Rahal will flourish once his fine car control is required as tires reach the end of their life in each stint. I hope his Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing machine is carrying one of the onboard cameras.

ALSO LOOK FOR…

• The battle of the super-brave rookies, Mikhail Aleshin and Jack Hawksworth. Aleshin has teammate Pagenaud’s feedback to work from as a handy guide, but can he tread the fine line between aggression and playing the long game? The Hawk is flying solo for Bryan Herta Autosport, but 1) BHA sat on pole here in 2012 and 2) being a one-car team doesn’t seem to have hurt the pace of Union Jack* at all.
• Big cheers for Takuma Sato should he stick AJ Foyt Racing’s car into a position of prominence. Foyt is a racing icon, an American legend, but one who is also proudly Texan. Everyone who’s ever driven for him has felt the support of local fans at Texas Motor Speedway, but Sato’s done more than that – he’s driven the No. 14 to Victory Lane, so there is a great deal of affection for the little Japanese guy with the ever-ready smile.
• Another Texan racing legend on site. This blindsided us somewhat, but apparently Jim McElreath will be one of the honorary starters. The 86-year-old, from Arlington – just 20 minutes up the road from TMS – was only recently in hospital, but he’s scheduled to wave the green flag for the start of the Firestone 600. McElreath scored five Indy car wins in his career, including the 1970 Ontario 500 for none other than Foyt. If you see him, grab his autograph. This is a guy who finished third in his first ever Indy car race, who six times finished top six in the Indy 500, and who is also in the Sprint Car Hall of Fame.

*Hawksworth’s nickname is courtesy of Robin Miller, predictably.