Tag: IndyCar

2012 IndyCar Preview – Pt 1. All Change

The 2012 IZOD IndyCar Series season promises to be the most exciting in years. The reintroduction of engine competition alongside a brand new chassis will shake things up, even if the cream rises to the top as it surely will, these added variables will make the racing unpredictable. Add in shaken-up driver line-ups throughout the field (save the top runners) and the series has plenty of what racing fans crave: Unknowns.

A New Car

Much has been written about the Dallara DW12 IndyCar.

From the negatives (and my, IndyCar fans are the best in the world at being negative): It is too heavy at the rear. The sidepods are too big. It looks ugly from several angles. It isn’t different enough to the old car. It is too different to the old car. The engines sound more dull and are too quiet.

To the positives: From different angles it looks very good. The teams have done a fantastic job creating liveries and attracting sponsors. Despite fears of a 17 or 18 car grid we have an entry of 26 cars at St. Pete with more promised later. The engine isn’t as piercingly loud as the last one.

Both are part and parcel of a new chassis and engine package. You will never please everyone. And frankly some of the complaints are those you SHOULD hear when a new car comes in. Not everyone will like it straight away: I didn’t. Yet after weeks of winter testing I really do think it looks more like an IndyCar than the previous chassis did. Okay so yes, it is quite big for an open-wheel car. If it races well nobody will care.

That is the real question. Will it race well? Or will the car be too aero-dependent as most modern open wheel series cars around the world are these days? We hope to find out this Sunday, but we won’t have all the answers as St. Pete is as much a reflection of IndyCar pace as Albert Park is to F1 – in that it isn’t, really. We can get an idea but we won’t really know until the 2nd round.

Engines

At last! Engine competition! And a real shake-up in power plants this season. The last-gen Honda engine was built by Ilmor, but they’ve moved over to welcome-returnees Chevrolet. As a result the Chevys have been pace-setters in winter testing and in St. Pete practice sessions, aided significantly by being the engine of choice of Team Penske.

Honda are still present but this time are built in-house by HPD in California, you’ll recognise the name if you follow sportscar racing as they put together some of the quickest LMP1 and LMP2 car/engine combos at last week’s 12 Hours of Sebring . They also built the Honda engines in the CART era. These people know what they are doing. Honda have been just as competitive in testing as Chevy, again helped by having the series’ other top team, Chip Ganassi Racing, in their camp.

The third manufacturer is Lotus, with engines built by Engine Developments Ltd (known by everyone as Judd, after their founder). Lotus joined the party some months after Honda and Chevy and so have struggled to keep pace with their competitors, releasing their first engine some time later, taking to the track later, and having far fewer cars testing as they worked to build enough engines in time for the first race. One thing that has been reported is the good reliability of the engine, if true this could help them massively. What hasn’t helped was the complete radio silence from Lotus and Judd over the off-season, added to money troubles attributed to the Lotus Group. Will they still be around by the end of 2012, beginning 2013? Quite honestly so many people expected them not to appear in testing let alone show up supplying 5 cars at race 1 as they have, I think they’ll still be here.

Tracks

16 races make up this year’s schedule compared to 17 last year, yet there are several changes to note.

Gone are New Hampshire Motor Speedway, Twin-Ring Motegi, Kentucky Speedway and Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Controversially these are all oval tracks (however Motegi was switched to the road course last year after earthquake damage) and there are concerns that the replacements are not all ovals – the schedule is no longer balanced as a true test of versatility. There is truth to that and I hope the balance tips back again, even if only slightly. New Hampshire and Kentucky are great IndyCar tracks but drew abysmal ‘crowds’. Motegi has been replaced by an event in China (again controversially). Las Vegas is gone for reasons which should be obvious.

Add in the return of two tracks of old:  Detroit Belle Isle, Auto Club Speedway (a.k.a. Fontana). I’m no fan of Belle Isle, I think I’ve yet to see a good IndyCar/CART race there. ALMS managed to put on a good show but only because the mix of faster and slower classes affected the race. Fontana is a modern classic but there will always be concerns about it after the death of Greg Moore in 1999 (albeit the issue that killed him has long been resolved) but more particularly after Dan Wheldon last year – if the pack racing still exists this year should the series return to a big, fast oval? If the cars are more spread out, yet crucially are still able to pass, then let’s see it.

The retention of two troubled events should be celebrated by everybody. The Milwaukee Mile is a storied racetrack with a history stretching back a hundred years, not to mention it always puts on a great race – a personal favourite. Baltimore’s inaugural race alongside ALMS drew a huge crowd and both races were tense yet fun throughout, it really deserves another shot. It could easily be the ‘Long Beach of the Eastern US’.

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The first race is this weekend at St Petersburg, Florida. It starts at about 6pm BST – IndyCar is never exact with starts – but do tune in from 5.30pm to see the pre-race show as there will surely be tributes to Dan Wheldon, who lived in this city. The green flag will be waved by Holly Wheldon, sister of Dan.

See Part 2 of this preview for a run-down of the teams and drivers who will start the season.

2012 Race Schedules

For the last two seasons I’ve created race schedules for use in Google Calendar, iCal, Outlook and any other compatible diary system. 2012 is no exception and I can now announce the calendars for the year ahead are now, mostly, complete!

IWTMR Motorsport Calendar for May 2012 (click for Large)

If you want to track some of your favourite series and events, just load your selection of racing categories into your calendar so that you can make plans to watch live or set the DVR – and hopefully never miss another race!

Please go to the Calendar page for futher details and updates.

Dan Wheldon 1978-2011

Dan Wheldon's Indy 500 helmet at the 2011 Goodwood Festival of Speed - P.Wotton

Dan Wheldon last night passed away as a result of injuries sustained in a multi-car accident at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

Career

Dan finished 2nd in the 1998 Formula Ford Festival at Brands Hatch and raced for the 1998 series championship (beaten by Jenson Button), before heading to the US where he finished 2nd in the 2000 Atlantics series and 2nd in the 2001 Indy Lights series, where he learned how to race on ovals.

Shortly thereafter he graduated to the IRL, what is now the IndyCar Series, where by 2004 he was winning races and in 2005 he became champion with Andretti-Green, winning the Indy 500 along the way. Despite his road course background in Europe he became renowned as a specialist on oval courses.

He switched to Target Chip Ganassi for a 3-year stint, scoring more race wins, before a moving to Panther Racing in 2009 where he was able to score 4 podiums over two years in the by-now midpack team. Out of a drive after 2010 he embarked on a part-season with Bryan Herta Autosport (partnered with Sam Schmidt Motorsport) in 2011, winning his second Indy 500 at the very last corner despite it being his first race start of the year. He was also entrusted with the initial development work on the 2012 Dallara IndyCar, before any other driver got his hands on it.

Ironically and tragically he was killed in the final race for the old, outdated, less safe IndyCar, in which he was competing at the behest of the IndyCar Series as part of a bid to win $2.5 million dollars each for himself and a fan.

However I am not going to use this opportunity to bash Dallara for the safety of the old car. There is a time and a place for that and it is not now. It may not have been a great car and there are difficult questions to be answered about its suitablity at this age on this track but the reality is 15 of them were damaged (most of them heavily), 3 of them got airborne and yet only one driver suffered serious injury. That is one too many but it could still have been 3 or 4 times worse.

That is no consolation to the family and friends of Dan Wheldon, and the tight-knit IndyCar community. Part of the reason IndyCar is tight-knit is because of the enduring spirit of Greg Moore in the late 90s who made it his business to be rivals on the track and friends off it, and who was tragically killed in strikingly similar circumstances in 1999. Dan Wheldon took the same attitude to his racing and was friends with many of his competitors, particularly the senior drivers such as Kanaan and Franchitti. Indeed, I don’t know anyone who could remain an enemy of Dan Wheldon for very long.

I am sad that it took this event for him to become famous in his home country and I hope he takes his rightful place among the legends of the sport.

The drivers of the undamaged cars chose to run 5 laps at Las Vegas in tribute to Dan, 3-abreast just as at the start of the Indy 500, the race that made his name.

I leave you with the closing words of what was a very professional and respectful ABC broadcast.

“Many people ask me why I always sign off ‘Till we meet again’. Because ‘Goodbye’ is always so final. Goodbye, Dan Wheldon.” – Marty Reid, ABC/ESPN.

IndyCar hits Las Vegas

In the best bit of pre-race build-up I’ve seen in a long time, the IndyCar Series took their impressively large field of 34 cars entered in this week’s Las Vegas round and drove them up and down ‘the strip’ in Las Vegas, complete with the legend that is Mario Andretti leading the way in his two-seater IndyCar (with some pop star I don’t know in the passenger seat).

What a fantastic idea!

IndyCar released this great video, complete with interviews, on their official YouTube channel:

And unbelievably the Daily Mail website based here in the UK as a nice spread of big pictures on the event, as well as a video of the action which you can see here.

Kudos to the IZOD IndyCar Series for becoming the first racing series to not only do a street demo in Las Vegas but also run their entire grid at once in it, AND rope in Mario Andretti and famous non-racing names!

I have never seen IndyCar-related promo activation of this level, this beats the stuff Red Bull, Renault and McLaren get up to with their F1 demos and those are very good indeed. I am impressed. They are making the Las Vegas season finale an Event with a capital E. So many of their races have lacked Event status, the series just pitching up in a town and expecting people to show up. I am so glad to see this turning around.

Combine this with the recent Baltimore event as well as existing successes like Toronto and of course the Indy 500 itself, the series looks set for a positive future. I’m also pleased they are able to do this for an oval race outside of Indy. I hope it shows with crowds appearing in the stands on Sunday. More big events please, Mr Bernard.