The Washington, D.C. IndyCar street circuit is short and terrible

My immediate reaction to the presidential decree that there shall be a Freedom 250 IndyCar race on the streets of Washington, D.C. is on the record: I doubt it’s going to happen. I don’t think IndyCar had any choice but to agree to give it a go — and I believe Roger Penske is firmly supportive of it, anyway — but they will look like fools when it either doesn’t come to pass or is an unmitigated disaster, and that’s just IndyCar’s fate.

Well, the first concrete step towards doing it is complete, and it’s a humiliating compromise. The circuit layout has been revealed, and rather than the promised glorious four-mile run between the U.S. Supreme Court building, the Lincoln Memorial, and back along the National Mall, it’s a 1.66-mile tootle around in front of the Capitol with seven turns, three of which are 90 degrees, and only one of which is to the right.

The minuscule course should make it easier to pave over Washington’s world-famously decrepit street surfaces, but someone in Washington will have to actually do that in order for it to happen, and that seems like a big ask. As for the racing, well, I hope you like slow corners. They should be easier to handle than normal, though, because the longest straight is a quarter mile shorter than the typical IndyCar street course, so the cars will never be going terribly fast.

So what are the bureaucratic-nightmare reasons this circuit is so compromised and the race is deeply unlikely to happen at all? Well, they’re all things we knew immediately: Racing on the proposed course would require an act of Congress to override a ban on commercial advertising, which would take a million years and probably a whole lobbying team to accomplish, there are laws in place to protect historic buildings from loud sounds and vibrations that would be hard to get around (not that I’d expect the current administration to care overly much about destroying historic things), and, well, they just can’t shut down that much city and build that much barrier in time.

I am moving my Freedom 250 doomsday clock hands five minutes closer to midnight.