IndyCar storylines to watch in 2021: Team Penske contracts, Jimmie Johnson's debut, return of Bump Day

INDIANAPOLIS – After a season dominated by schedule changes, you could simply hear in drivers’ voices during IndyCar Content Days just how refreshing it is to embark on a season that, at this point, is brimming with promise, possibility and just a dash of tension and uncertainty.

America’s open-wheel race series is chock-full of storylines on and off the track that stand to keep it fresh on the minds of race fans both domestically and globally in 2021 – from Scott Dixon’s quest to tie A.J. Foyt’s mark of seven championships and Helio Castroneves’ continued push toward a fourth Indy 500, to where IndyCar goes as it pursues its next TV deal and an elusive third engine manufacturer.

What follows are the five biggest storylines that stand to have the biggest impact on the NTT IndyCar Series as it embarks on a 17-race schedule starting Sunday (3 p.m. ET) at Barber Motorsports Park in the Birmingham, Alabama, area.

What direction will Team Penske turn?

Only twice over the past nine IndyCar offseasons (including this one) has Team Penske rolled out an identical driver lineup from year to year. Even the best teams are never satisfied with both their full-season and Indy 500-only assignments, looking for small ways to leapfrog the competition. But neither Chip Ganassi Racing nor Andretti Autosport has had the level of full-season depth and stability Roger Penske and Tim Cindric have enjoyed since the start of the 2018 season.

That very well could change, hinging on the results of the inter-team championship race in 2021. Penske and Cindric have said ad nauseum they don’t prefer four full-season entries. But when you’re given the opportunity to sign a young three-time Supercars champion to your lineup simply from another corner of your organization, you do it. But with that youthful exuberance of Scott McLaughlin comes serious pressure to his two most veteran drivers.

2021 INDYCAR SCHEDULE: Race dates, times and TV for the 17-race season

Penske’s not the kind of owner who would tempt McLaughlin out of Australia and into the States and IndyCar without giving him some amount of buffer for development. Even if the plan now is to trim back to three cars in 2022, I wouldn’t expect McLaughlin to be anywhere near a hot seat for six months.

Assuming Josef Newgarden has earned a buffer with two titles in four seasons and as the youngest of the three Penske vets, Will Power and Simon Pagenaud will do well to keep an eye on each other. Power told the media last month that he is indeed in a contract year, and Pagenaud is believed to be as well, though he declined to comment.

They’re coming off seasons in which they were never really in the title hunt in the second half. Penske hasn’t shied away from tough decisions in recent years, putting Helio Castroneves on a May-only program in 2018 after taking fourth in 2017, one spot ahead of Power and with an Indy 500 runner-up to his name. Penske did the same with Juan Pablo Montoya after 2016 when he took eighth, one year removed from tying for the championship with Scott Dixon.

What comes will be a business decision.

Will these rookies sink or swim?

IndyCar’s 2021 rookie class comes as the most decorated and most inexperienced maybe … ever. Romain Grosjean has nearly a decade in the highest-performance open-wheel cars in the world but merely a handful of IndyCar test days under his belt and an ailing, severely burnt hand still on the mend. Three-time V8 Supercars defending champ Scott McLaughlin made his debut a year ago at St. Petersbru but joins three teammates vying for championships and Indy 500 wins that can’t make for a simple transition. And seven-time NASCAR Cup Series champion Jimmie Johnson was forced to spend all offseason unlearning nearly everything that made him the legend he is in the car.

Their uniqueness, star power and international flair will undoubtedly draw eyeballs both around the globe and domestically, and for IndyCar as a racing series in a broadcast contract year, being able to take a ratings leap as a more interesting product is key to making progress in the eyes of its current broadcast partner.

Should they find ways to meet or exceed their own personal goals and our expectations of them, they could serve as examples of why other big names in international racing could someday give IndyCar a try. Not in hinting that it’s “easy” or that anyone can do it, but it starts to make IndyCar the true proving ground of racing, where the best of the best go to challenge other legends on a level playing field and where anyone with proper skill has a fighting chance.

But those three will only give IndyCar a boost and be a story as long as they’re reasonably competitive. IndyCar fans don’t need rookies to win to be interesting, but they have to be more than a cool backstory or risk becoming stale, or even worse – forgotten. And particularly for Johnson and Grosjean, a dud of a season could signal an early exit that would be unfortunate final chapters to their racing careers.

Will the Indy 500 have fans?

This seems a near certainty, but the longer this question lingers, the more it stands to draw attention away from the furious amount of on-track action the sport will see over the next three weeks (four races). IndyCar and IMS have taken a new strategy when compared to last summer’s series of news releases, tweaks and, ultimately, slashes. Mum is the word, in hopes of waiting until the last reasonable moment to mail tickets and give out-of-town fans a chance to book travel.

Whatever the answer is, some segment of the fan base won’t be happy – heck, there may be some who think that given rising case numbers, positivity rates and two high-profile deaths believed to be related to Indianapolis hosting the Final Four that hosting anyone in the grandstands for the May 30 500-mile race is too many. It’s the elephant in the room quickly ballooning to dinosaur-size the closer we get to May.

How will Bump Day’s return affect teams’ viability?

Pandemic aside, the lead-up to last year’s Indianapolis 500 lacked a particular tension familiar not only to the Greatest Spectacle in Racing but a staple in college and professional sports at-large: the prospect of elimination.

For much of the race’s 104-year history, the idea a team, driver, sponsor and crew could prepare and field a car for qualifying, investing today at minimum hundreds of thousands of dollars, and not receive so much as a participation trophy for their troubles brings some years more suspension than the race itself. When you hear 2019 Indy 500, do you first think of Simon Pagenaud and Alexander Rossi’s down-to-the-wire battle or Fernando Alonso and McLaren’s failure to qualify? It may be an even split.

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And for 2021, after a year when the paddock reached 33 cars only by the skin of its teeth, bumping is back. 32 cars have been made official, with two more waiting on driver confirmations and another for a sponsor/engine partner news release. And Michael Andretti said last week that his team is far down the road in looking at a sixth entry, which would give us 36 cars for 33 spots.

It’s a testament to the series’ slow, but steady, growth that IndyCar should have three one-off entries – two of them brand-new entities altogether – to go with additional cars for the 500 from Meyer Shank Racing and A.J. Foyt Racing, compared to a year ago, and one more full-time entry in the series.

But when you have such a highly regarded race, where likely three cars and drivers will be severely disappointed come May 23, who those bumped entries are could have lasting implications. Coyne drivers (and rookies) Pietro Fittipaldi and Cody Ware were slowest during last week’s IMS oval test. Should one (or even both) of them miss the race, does that force team partner Rick Ware to seriously reconsider his foray into the sport that brings some NASCAR flavor, new eyeballs and a new part-time owner into the fold?

If it’s Dalton Kellett, what does that mean for his future in the sport, having already had a rough go of it as a rookie without a finish inside the top 19? What kind of anvil would that be dropping on debut teams like Paretta Autosport or Top Gun Racing – admitting that, with Team Penske technical support and Roger Penske’s blessing, the former likely wouldn’t disappear? How about a part-time team that already had to scale back from 2020 to 2021 in Dreyer and Reinbold Racing?

And if it happens to be an established driver and team, where do they go from here? Each of the last two times the 500 has had bumping (2018 and 2019) a major face in the sport missed the race (James Hinchcliffe and Fernando Alonso). Whoever it is will face severe scrutiny or an uphill battle to return in 2022.

What is IndyCar’s TV future?

IndyCar has enjoyed two years of steady ratings growth since linking up with NBC on a full-time basis starting in 2019. But that initial trial run is coming to an end. It seems as if the two have only had a cup of coffee together – one year filled with enough schedule changes to make a decent-length novel chapter will do that – but Mark Miles, Roger Penske and NBC executives will soon meet at the bargaining table to try to keep the pair together.

NBC came in with a life vest for IndyCar at a time when the series lacked an identity in the broadcast space. ABC was jazzed to have the Indy 500, but the couple of races it held on to seemed more like an afterthought – a forced concession to broadcast the Greatest Spectacle in Racing. And what are you going to do when you’re NBC and your best race on network TV can’t draw 50% of the 500? IndyCar was the product of two estranged parents, neither with enough interest to go around.

To get NBC’s full investment was invigorating. To get that again, perhaps for a longer time frame, would be a great vote of confidence. NBC is retiring NBC Sports and splitting that content between USA Network (which is in narrowly more U.S. households than NBCSN currently) and its Peacock streaming service come 2022.

In 2021, IndyCar will have a record nine of 17 races on network TV. If it ends up with any fewer than eight for 2022, I’d consider it a step back for the series. NBC will have to place some IndyCar races on streaming to give the most dedicated fans just enough reason to pull the plug and pay $4.99/month to subscribe and boost NBC’s revenue. But IndyCar is still a growing sport in comparison to the rest.

You do your significant growth on network, and NBC has already given us reason to believe they’ve begun cutting costs on IndyCar broadcasts, quietly pulling Paul Tracy from the booth for 10 races this season while cutting back on a couple of pit reporters for some races. We’ll know if NBC officials believes in the future of IndyCar not only if they come back, but where they slot the series next season – if they see potential, or if they’ve resigned to having reached the peak.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: IndyCar 2021: Team Penske, Jimmie Johnson, Indy 500 key top stories