IndyCar Ends Its Season Sunday on a Blind Downhill Turn

The Corkscrew at Laguna Seca is braked uphill and turned downhill. A loaded truck faces the same trade on any grade.

IndyCar closes its season Sunday, and the corner everyone will be talking about is one you cannot see into.

The Mission Foods Grand Prix of Monterey runs Sunday, September 6 at 2:30 PM Eastern at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca, in Monterey, California. Alex Palou won it in 2025.

The Corkscrew, in plain terms

Laguna Seca has eleven turns, and one of them has its own name. The Corkscrew, at Turns 8 and 8A, is a blind crest that drops away hard the moment the car goes over it. A driver commits to the entry before the exit is visible, and the road falls out from under the car while it is already turning.

That is the whole difficulty in one sentence: you brake for it uphill and you turn in it downhill.

Why a truck driver should care about a race corner

Because the physics do not change with the vehicle. What makes the Corkscrew hard is what makes a downhill grade with a curve at the bottom hard on a loaded truck: weight moves forward and down, and the tires that were doing the steering start doing the stopping instead.

On a race car the mass is low and the brakes are enormous. On a loaded truck the mass is high, it is stacked well above the axles, and there is a trailer behind that keeps pushing after you have decided to slow down. Same forces, an entirely different margin.

The three things that grade does to a loaded truck

• It moves the load forward. Weight transfers off the drives and onto the steers, which is the opposite of what you want when you also need those steers to turn.
• It heats the brakes on the way down, not at the bottom. By the time you arrive at the corner, the brakes have already spent what they had. Heat is cumulative on a grade; it does not reset at the curve.
• It finds every bit of play in the front end. A steer axle that is slightly out, a bushing with movement, a kingpin with wear — none of it shows up on flat interstate. All of it shows up when the front is loaded and turning at the same time.

What the calendar says, and what it does not

One thing worth being precise about: this piece is not going to tell you who arrives leading the championship. The series publishes its standings on a page that does not hand the table over to a plain reader, and a points position quoted from memory is worth nothing. What is verified is the race, the place, the time and that Palou took it last year.

That is also the honest way to follow any series from a truck: the schedule is a fact, the result is a fact, and everything in between is somebody's opinion until Sunday afternoon.

What racers do that translates directly

The technique in that corner is to get the slowing done before the crest and go over it already at the speed you intend to carry. Braking while the road drops away is what gets a car in trouble, because the tires lose load at the exact moment they are asked to do the most.

That is the same instruction every mountain-grade sign gives a truck: pick your gear and your speed at the top. Not halfway down, when the only tool left is the brakes and they are already hot.

The season ends here

Laguna Seca is the last date on the 2026 IndyCar calendar, which means Sunday is the last chance for everyone in the paddock to change how the year reads. Final rounds tend to produce decisions that nobody would take in June.

And there is a reason a road course closes it out rather than an oval. On an oval, speed is the whole conversation. On a circuit with eleven turns and real elevation, the conversation is about braking points and where the weight is sitting when the car turns — which is the part of racing that actually has something to say to a driver whose vehicle weighs forty tons.

If your own front end feels vague going into a downhill curve, that is not a driving style you have to live with. The free multi-point inspection covers the steer axle, the suspension and the brakes: The Truck Savers, no appointment.

Original source

INDYCAR — 2026 schedule, Mission Foods Grand Prix of Monterey