Had the World Cup Final not gone into extra time, the NTT IndyCar Series likely would have gotten Sunday's Borchetta Bourbon Music City Grand Prix underway as scheduled.
However, the rain and lightning that followed at Nashville Superspeedway would have resulted in the race being stopped and ultimately put on hold until Monday anyway, so perhaps it's a blessing in disguise that neither Spain nor Argentina could score in the first 90 minutes, even though IndyCar will now miss out on the World Cup Final lead-in they had hoped would boost viewership on Fox.
As a result of the inclement weather, IndyCar made the decision to postpone the race until Monday at 3:00 p.m. ET, with Fox still set to provide live coverage.
The other major change announced is that the race around the four-turn, 1.333-mile (2.145-kilometer) Lebanon, Tennessee oval is set to be shortened from 300 laps to 225 laps, reducing its distance by 100 miles. It would have been the longest non-Indy 500 race since 2018 (Pocono Raceway) had it run as planned.
The decision to shorten the race was made due to the prediction for excessive heat throughout Monday afternoon.
IndyCar sees first oval race postponed since 2016
As far as the postponement itself, no such delay has happened in the series since 2018, when the April road course race at Barber Motorsports Park was pushed back from a Sunday to a Monday.
And it surprisingly hasn't happened on an oval since 2016, when the August race at Pocono was also a complete rainout.
Given how poor some of the weather forecasts have been for oval races over the years (specifically the Indy 500, pretty much every year), it's amazing that it's been almost a decade since the series was unable to run an oval race as scheduled.
That Pocono race, of course, preceded the resumption of the infamous 11-week Texas Motor Speedway race, which was postponed from a Saturday to a Sunday in June and then stopped due to rain once it actually began that Sunday, leading to the remainder of the race being rescheduled for a Saturday night in late August.
Beyond that, IndyCar hadn't seen an oval rainout until now.
Andretti Global's Kyle Kirkwood is set to lead the field to the green flag on Monday afternoon after taking the pole position with the fastest two-lap average speed in Saturday's qualifying session. He is set to share the front row with reigning Nashville winner Josef Newgarden of Team Penske.
Kirkwood also started on pole at Nashville in 2024, the first season with an IndyCar race at the track sicne 2008, before finishing fourth.
Fox is set to provide live coverage of the Borchetta Bourbon Music City Grand Prix from Nasvhille Superspeedway beginning at 3:00 p.m. ET this afternoon, so begin a free trial of FuboTV now and don't miss any of the action from the season's 12th overall race and fourth oval race!
