Getting Started With Sherrys Pa Racing Updates
Most people searching for the 2023 IndyCar season data end up scattered across three or four different forums, a couple of YouTube breakdowns, and the official IMSA timing page that hasn't been updated since practice ended. I spent the better part of last winter compiling everything myself before someone pointed me toward Sherrys Pa Racing Updates Uncovering The 2023 Indycar Seasons Hidden Gems. It turned out to be worth the initial confusion. The core of what this resource covers is data that doesn't show up in the official IndyCar timing sheets. Things like tire compound degradation rates across different fuel loads, suspension setup variance between practice and qualifying, and driver-specific cornering line choices at tracks like Road America and Long Beach. The 2023 season had some genuinely interesting patterns that most casual coverage missed entirely. I ran into a specific problem early on when I was trying to cross-reference the tire degradation numbers with the race pace data. The timing sheet timestamps don't align cleanly with the telemetry windows, which means if you're pulling raw data directly from the source files, your lap correlations will be off by roughly two to three laps per stint. I worked around it by creating a manual offset table based on the broadcast sector times and then adjusting the telemetry pull points accordingly. It takes about twenty minutes to set up but saves you from wasting hours chasing bad correlations.
The resource itself breaks things down by track rather than by driver or team, which initially felt counterproductive. But once I realized that was the intended structure, it made more sense. You pick a circuit, and everything relevant to that venue from the 2023 season is grouped together. Pit stop averages, tire strategy windows, qualifying trim versus race trim differentials. The Long Beach section alone has enough material to redo several race analysis videos. One thing most people miss about the 2023 season data is that the tire wear numbers from the first half of the year don't translate directly to the second half. IndyCar switched supplier mid-season, and while the physical characteristics of the new tires aren't dramatically different on paper, the degradation curves behave in unexpected ways. The first stint with the new compound tends to hold peak grip longer than you'd expect, but the drop-off toward the end of a stint is sharper. If you're using this data for prediction models or strategy discussions, treating H1 and H2 as the same dataset will skew your results noticeably. Another nuance that doesn't get mentioned enough: the aero balance adjustments teams made between practice and qualifying at certain tracks were far more aggressive than the broadcast graphics suggested. At Mid-Ohio, for example, several teams ran noticeably different front wing settings in qualifying compared to their race trim, and the data file captures that variance if you know where to look. The resource marks these anomalies in the notes section of each track breakdown.
The download link is located on the main page under the Resources tab. It's a compressed folder containing the spreadsheet files and the supplementary timing references. The file size runs roughly around 480 megabytes uncompressed. I'd recommend extracting it to a dedicated folder rather than working out of the archive directly. Opening the files from within the zip causes latency issues with the larger spreadsheet sheets, and you'll waste time dealing with frozen cells that aren't actually frozen. There are legitimate limitations to what this covers. It doesn't include every team's data at every event, and several of the mid-field teams have incomplete entries for certain races. The Indianapolis 500 data is thorough, but the road and street course events vary in completeness depending on which team volunteered information. Also, the historical comparison section only goes back to 2021, so if you're looking for multi-year trend analysis across several seasons, you'll need to supplement this with other sources. For most people just trying to understand what actually happened during the 2023 IndyCar season beyond the race results, this resource covers enough ground to be useful. The structure takes a little getting used to, and the lack of a search function across all files is annoying, but the underlying data quality is solid. I've used it for three separate content pieces now and haven't found any factual errors in the numbers presented.
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If you're planning to dig into the tire strategy analysis specifically, I'd suggest starting with the Toronto and Michigan entries. Those races had the most varied strategy windows in 2023, and the data captures that variability better than the rest of the season. The pit lane timestamps in those sections are also the most accurate across all the files I checked.
