NTT IndyCar Series · Season 2026
The 2026 Predictions Board
RaceIQ Indy forecasts every round of the NTT IndyCar Series — all 18 races, from the streets of St. Petersburg to the season finale, with the Indianapolis 500 in the middle — and projects the title fight to the last lap of the year. It’s built on the same MotorsportVerse core that powers RaceIQ F1, tuned for what makes American open-wheel racing different.
How it works
Curated data → Model → Forecast
IndyCar results
Race classifications, grids and championship standings — fifteen seasons of hand-verified history, updated after every checkered flag.
The model
A surface-aware driver model — every driver carries separate oval and road/street form, because the two reward different things. A per-driver retirement hazard rides along, and it re-trains as the season unfolds.
Race forecast
Probabilities for win, podium, top six and top ten for every driver — calibrated on the season's real results.
Ovals and road courses are different sports
An IndyCar season splits almost evenly between ovals, permanent road courses and temporary street circuits — and the same driver is rarely equally good at all of them. The model’s signature is a dual rating: every driver carries one score for oval racing and another for road and street racing, because walk-forward testing showed the split genuinely beats a single blended number. A forecast at Milwaukee and a forecast at Barber start from different reads of the same field.
The Indianapolis 500 is its own event
The 500 runs the traditional 33-car field — bigger than a normal weekend, with one-off entries who show up only for May. The forecast covers the full field, and the race page flags the crown jewel explicitly. There is no double-points twist in 2026: the 500 pays like any other round, and the model scores it that way.
A championship without playoffs
IndyCar still crowns its champion the classic way: most points after the last race wins. That makes the title forecast a clean simulation — every remaining round is raced thousands of times, and the standings page shows each driver’s title odds, projected points range, and whether they are still mathematically alive. No resets, no eliminations — just the season-long math.
Retirements are part of the forecast
Open-wheel cars touch wheels and find walls. The model carries a per-driver retirement hazard for every race — higher in oval traffic, lower on the permanent road courses — and folds it into every finishing-position range. That’s why a favourite can lead the win market and still show a wide projected range: a DNF is always on the table.
Built on hand-verified history
There is no public IndyCar data feed, so this project inverts the usual pipeline: fifteen seasons of race results were hand-curated and checked against official standings, and that committed archive is the ground truth the model learns from. Live updates land only after strict validation — a bad scrape can’t silently poison a forecast.
What the numbers mean
For each race you get a win and podium probability per driver, an expected finishing range rather than a single guess, a DNF risk, and a confidence read. For the season, the championship view shows each driver’s title odds — and who is still mathematically alive for the championship.
Honest about accuracy
Every forecast is made using only what was known before the round — no peeking at the result — and scored against what actually happened on the accuracy dashboard. Probabilities are calibrated on real IndyCar results, separately for ovals, road courses and street circuits — and the dashboard shows the model’s health warnings as openly as its wins.
How to use this site
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Part of MotorsportVerse
RaceIQ Indy is one project in the MotorsportVerse ecosystem — a shared, open-source core for forecasting any racing series. The same machinery runs RaceIQ F1; IndyCar adds only what the championship genuinely needs — the oval/road split, the DNF hazard, and the 500’s 33-car field.
Disclaimer
This site is a personal project published for educational and entertainment purposes. Forecasts are model outputs and should not be used for betting or any form of gambling. The project is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to INDYCAR or any team.