Tag: IndyCar

IndyCar Series

2012 IndyCar Preview – Pt 2. Teams

Teams

Chip Ganassi Racing
Engine: Honda;
Drivers: Dario Franchitti, Scott Dixon, Graham Rahal, Charlie Kimball;

The champion team is obviously among the title favourites again. Franchitti and Dixon are the best pairing in the series and it will be a major struggle to beat them. I still put Dario ahead of Scott but the car changes this year could easily swing in the Kiwi’s favour.
The second, satellite team will do will with Rahal and I hope Kimball shows improvements too. Both should thrive with a second solid season without needing to chase a race seat.

Team Penske
Engine: Chevrolet;
Drivers: Will Power, Helio Castroneves, Ryan Briscoe;

Power has emerged as the best of the trio over a season, he’s almost unbeatable on road and street courses and is always improving on ovals. So much so, Will is my tip for the title this year. Word from testing is that this car suits Helio and Ryan more than the last one did in recent years, could we see the Helio of old at Indy (and elsewhere)? Will Briscoe finally again show the talent which got him a drive at this team in the first place? I hope so.

Andretti Autosport
Engine: Chevrolet;
Drivers: Marco Andretti, Ryan Hunter-Reay, James Hinchcliffe;

A drop from 4 cars to 3 this year for Michael’s team. The big-name star is gone and Hinch moves across from Newman/Haas (who shockingly aren’t in the series this year) to take the vacant seat, which was originally earmarked for Wheldon. Perhaps the focus on 3 cars and the drop of the constant attention of the media on a single driver, will help the team recapture the form it lost some time ago. RHR should be the fastest driver but don’t count out the others.

KV Racing Technologies
Engine: Chevrolet;
Drivers; Tony Kanaan, Rubens Barrichello, EJ Viso;

If the Andretti team moves out of the media spotlight this year, this team moves into it. Sato is out but Barrichello is in, and there’s no doubt Rubens is the bigger name particularly since the series already has a strong following in Brazil. How will he transition from F1? I think it’ll be a mixed season for him.. much like his F1 seasons. I’m amazed that he’s so well-loved outside the F1 paddock as much as in it – if he scores a win expect everyone to go wild! Kanaan drove very well last year and seemed to enjoy himself more to boot, I hope the addition of his experienced friend helps him. Signs are that it may have helped Viso who seems to have calmed down a lot already, as mentioned elsewhere on this blog his drive in the 12 Hours was very mature. Good things could come to KV this year, a far cry from 2010’s crashfest.

AJ Foyt Enterprises
Engine: Honda;
Driver: Mike Conway;

Conway moves from Andretti to Foyt. A match made in heaven or a baptism of fire? I can’t call it. I know Conway is always quick on the city street courses and there are plenty of those this year, the team has a reputation though of preferring ovals. Fair? Not sure. They’re gradually getting better everywhere.

Panther Racing
Engine: Chevrolet;
Driver: JR Hildebrand;

Very good all-round driver, but an oval-specific team still looking to up their game elsewhere, much like Foyt. They are always making progress in that regard and this could be the year they make that leap forwards.

Lotus-Dragon Racing
Engine: Lotus;
Drivers: Sebastien Bourdais, Katherine Legge;

This deal seemed promised for some time yet only seemed to fully come together this week when an engine finally appeared for Seb on Thursday. A good team though, they should be among the top Lotus teams. Where that puts them in the overall field is another matter. Interesting to see Bourdais back in open wheelers, he would win races (maybe the title) if he were with a top Honda/Chevy team. Legge hasn’t been in an open wheel car for years and wasn’t stellar in DTM, so has lots to learn/relearn and lots to prove. She has a lot of respect among fans and the paddock but I wonder if that’s more due to surviving a horrible crash at Road America than actual talent. We’ll see.

Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing
Engine: Honda;
Driver: Takuma Sato;

Great to see Rahal’s team back in IndyCar, and doing it without compromising the ALMS programme. Taku’s landed on his feet with RLL and I really think he’ll do well here. I am a big fan of both the man and his talent and I’d love it if he won a race, he just needs to stop bloody crashing! Could Bobby and his team be the people to knock it out of him?

Dale Coyne Racing
Engine: Honda;
Drivers: Justin Wilson, James Jakes;

Wilson returns to Coyne after a couple of years at DRR but I’m not sure why, they aren’t the fastest out there. He probably didn’t want a Lotus! He managed to get a win at Watkins Glen in 2009 so who knows, maybe he’ll do better than I expect. I don’t consider Jakes to be a hot talent and that opinion dates back to his GP2 days where he qualified well but couldn’t seem to race. He didn’t prove me wrong in IndyCar last year and will need to work hard to convince me this year.

Ed Carpenter Racing
Engine: Chevrolet;
Driver: Ed Carpenter;

I have a lot of respect for Ed for making this move. I never really liked him, what with his family connections to Tony George and the fact he raced for TG’s team. I gained that respect when he drove for the underdog Sarah Fisher Racing team and was still competive on ovals. Always an oval driver first, he and the team decided to tackle select road courses even though he was invariably at the back. He’s been improving throughout. He’s now set up his own team and will run the entire season in a year with a bigger road/street course focus. The only question mark I have is how well he will do as a one-car team with nobody to show him the road course ropes, away from ovals he needs an experienced team-mate.

Lotus-DRR
Engine: Lotus;
Driver: Oriol Servia;

A good upper-midfield team, a very good underappreciated driver, a potentially uncompetive engine. Also a drop from several cars to just one although that probably wouldn’t worry Oriol. May well become the leading Lotus team and the team’s results will hinge on the performance of that engine.

Sarah Fisher Hartman Racing
Engine: Honda;
Driver: Josef Newgarden;

A rookie in a one-car team in a season with new cars and engines. A talented rookie yes, and one I really think should have stuck to the F1 ladder. But even so… I don’t see how this will work well. And yet, in the first two practice sessions in St. Pete he was in the top 12. Remarkable. Want an underdog? You’ve got one.

Schmidt-Hamilton Motorsports
Engine: Honda;
Driver: Simon Pagenaud;

It is about time Pagenaud got back into open-wheel. He had a stellar debut in Champ Car 5 years ago, before showing his worth in a variety of top sportscars including Peugeot, with whom he finished 2nd at Le Mans last year (alongside Bourdais). He also won the 2010 ALMS title with Highcroft and David Brabham.

Lotus-HVM Racing
Engine: Lotus;
Driver: Simona de Silvestro;

Simona is a real talent who like so many others could use a team-mate to learn from, sadly this is a one-car effort again potentially hampered by the engine. She’ll show good results when she can but unfortunately results this year may look worse than they could’ve been.

Bryan Herta Autosport w/Curb-Agajanian
Engine: Lotus;
Driver: Alex Tagliani;

Tags is a decent driver but he doesn’t seem to ultimately ‘have it’, he’s been at upper-midfield level for years and can’t seem to make that last jump. BHA won the Indy 500 last year but then disappeared until the final two rounds whilst they went away to act as official test team for the new Dallara. As a result they have a lot of data of the car in its early stages which is probably redundant now, the car has evolved so much and the other teams have had plenty of testing to learn it for themselves. Midfield among Lotus runners, occasionally top among them and most likely so at Indy.

Others

Paul Tracy and his legion of fans were hoping to have one last full-season deal as a farewell tour before retirement, and a full-season ride would’ve enabled him to put in more competitive performances than his patchy recent career suggested. Sadly this hasn’t transpired and he seems destined to end his career scratching around for a drive wherever he can, which is not the way a champion should go.

Michael Shank Racing couldn’t secure a deal in time, largely thanks to Dragon getting the TEAM money from the sanctioning body, but are hopeful of appearing later in the year. RLLR have another car coming from Indy onwards for Luca Filippi. Expect several deals to come together for Indy alone and, hopefully, for a few entries beyond that.

I don’t get the sense we’ll see a merry-go-round of drivers this year which makes the series look that much more professional.

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’.

* *

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.