[Westheim]

F1 and Indycar are open-wheel racing series with purpose-built race cars with an open cockpit, front and rear wings, and the wheels sticking out at the four corners. NASCAR pretends it's a stock car racing series, but there's nothing stock about those cars, they're more like touring cars with a highly regulated car frame and sheet metal silhouette that is made to look like a Ford or Chevy with some decals.

F1 is the pinnacle of motorsports as far as racing at purpose-built asphalt race tracks is concerned (so we exclude rallying and other more exotic ventures at this point). Everybody wants to drive in F1, and if they claim they don't want to drive in F1, they're lying. This is especially true for Indycar drivers. Note how F1 washouts always fail downwards to Indycar (or Formula E, f.e.), but the reverse is not true.

NASCAR is not really the same type of racing as F1/Indy and there hasn't been any meaningful overlap where drivers went back and forth between series since about the late 70s. Single gimmick races in NASCAR's #91 Trackhouse car by f.e. Kimi Räikkönen as in recent years don't count as "meaningful".

NASCAR is mostly racing on ovals; until recently all but two of the NASCAR Cup schedule were oval races, but recently they added a few more road course events (like this Mexico race, which is new on the calendar), and for a few years they have had a street race in Chicago, where the racing is awful and the weather is usually too.

Indycar has a rather balanced mix between oval races (like the Indy 500), road courses and street races, ever willing to give way to the foolish desire to let open-wheel cars slam into unprotected concrete barriers and send wheels and other debris flying into crowds. Never mind the injury risk.

F1 until the mid-2000s only had one street race in Monaco, but since then has given in to this stupidity as well and gradually added more street courses (Singapore, Baku, Vegas...) and events in glorified parking lots (Sochi (pre-'22), Miami, Vegas...). Decades-long series organizer Bernie Ecclestone selling out to the US shills of Liberty Media has only accelerated the brain rot in that regard.

Funnily, among the three circuits in question here, it's Indycar that's driving on the oval this weekend at what used to be called Gateway Motorsports Park. It's a 1.25-mile, egg-shaped oval across the river from St. Louis, within sight of the Arch.

NASCAR goes to Mexico City, where F1 also has an event in the fall. They use a bastardized version of the 2.7-mile GP circuit. The facility as built included an oval, but as far as I know you can't drive on that anymore as it was partially overbuilt. Fun Fact: the circuit is named Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez after a pair of racing brothers from the 1960s, both of whom died young and in their race cars. The younger one was killed at this very race track, while the older one burned to death in a crash at the Norisring, about 50 miles from my place.

F1 races at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, also named for a race car driver that died in his race car. That 2.7-mile circuit was initially cobbled together out of roads on an artificial island constructed for Expo '67 in Montreal (where the Montreal Expos also got their name), but has been much refined over the years and is now one of the more technical circuits on the schedule. It's perhaps most famous for the final chicane, which has the "Wall of Champions" on the outside, so called because a number of F1 world champions have crashed out of races through hard contact with that wall.