INDYCAR: Gil De Ferran Submits 2014 Indy Lights Bid

IndyCar

INDYCAR: Gil De Ferran Submits 2014 Indy Lights Bid

With a strong background in the technical and engineering side of the sport, Gil de Ferran’s desire to construct racing cars has been a lifelong goal.

Marshall Pruett | Posted September 01, 2012

Gil de Ferran, designer Nathan Ulrich and a group of respected industry insiders have come together to submit a 2014 indy Lights chassis proposal. (Photo: de Ferran Motorsports)

If you’ve been following my series on the intriguing and at-times unexpected names that are pursuing the contract to build the next-generation Firestone Indy Lights Series car, adding two-time CART champion, 2003 Indy 500 winner and former IndyCar and ALMS team owner Gil de Ferran to the mix shouldn’t be a surprise.

With a strong background in the technical and engineering side of the sport, de Ferran’s desire to construct racing cars has been a lifelong goal.

“Yes, I have been working on a bid for the Indy Lights contract,” he said, “and I guess I’m trying to achieve one of my childhood dreams of which was to produce racing cars. There’s been a lot of research, a lot of studies to try to understand what we believe an Indy Lights car needed to be. The bid was put together under the Motorsports Engineering banner, which is the same company that used to run the sports cars.”

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Compared to a traditional racing car manufacturer, de Ferran has approached the Indy Lights opportunity from an outsider’s perspective. Rather than establish a manufacturing facility and attempt to bring the majority of the resources in-house, he’s brought a number of parties together to develop the concept.

Gil de Ferran. (Photo: LAT)

“The way I approached it was simple,” he said. “I know the business this season is tight. So you've got to make sure you keep your overhead very much under control. But at the same time, you’ve got to tap into the best that the industry has to offer, both within motorsports and outside of motorsports. So I got to know an American designer here a couple of years ago—Nathan Ulrich—as I was working with him on a different project.

“He’s a very experienced mechanical designer. He’s done a lot of projects, both within motorsports and outside of motorsports. Most of it consult and design. He designed a Formula Ford 2-liter car, the Radon, for example, which is absolutely stunning. That's how I got to know him. It looked like more of a Formula One car than a Formula Ford car…so I wanted to meet the guy.”

De Ferran has also reached out to a number of his colleagues from his time as a driver and as the sporting director for the former Honda Formula One program to form his team.

“We are also in collaboration with Ray Leto and his group, TotalSim, who are in charge of aerodynamic development,” he explained. “And a few other key players in the industry like (Honda F1 and Indy car designer) Malcolm Oastler and (safety expert) Dr. Steve Olvey are here because for me, the biggest priority is safety. I viewed the fact that we really don’t have regulations to adhere to, as a major opportunity to reach very, very high safety standards of safety.

“We want to meet and exceed the highest safety standards knows, Formula One, and otherwise for this car. In a sense, we've designed the concept from the driver's compartment outwards. That was a key priority for us in terms of design.”

Looking at the renderings, de Ferran’s concept is the only 2014 car I’ve seen with full anti-interlocking bodywork protecting the front and rear wheels. It features another unique detail in the high sidepods that add more crushable structure around the driver.

The de Ferran car features many current and forward-looking design elements. (Photo: de Ferran Motorsports)

The de Ferran-led group has also placed its emphasis on creating an advanced chassis that possibly goes beyond what most teams and drivers would expect from an Indy Lights car.

“I’ll tell you another thing about the project,” he said. “We are not proposing some cheap piece of s***, I can tell you that right now. We are proposing a very modern and groundbreaking car and very, very high performance. Performance-wise, it's very close to an Indy car. And because we think for Indy Lights to be successful we really need to push the envelope. It's always easy to do something very cheap and low performance. But that's almost like a bit of a cop-out.

“I am pushing the envelope in terms of performance and safety as much as we can. I would like the new generation of Indy Lights cars to be better than all the competing formulas around the world, basically. A car with more features, quicker overall, safer and more cost-effective. How can we make this thing so that when people drive it they go: ‘Oh my God, this thing is amazing!’? And from all the studies we did, I think we can do that.”

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