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IndyCar
INDYCAR: Iowa Rewind
Concussion updates, what we learned from Iowa, the Golden Bowling Ball is awarded, a call for transparency and radio hosts gone wild.
In a perfect world, Will Power and Dario Franchitti would duke it out for the IndyCar championship on track, but as seen at Iowa, mistakes on pit lane are slowly starting to alter the points table. (LAT)
I’M NOT BATMAN
Team Penske’s Will Power looked a bit riled up during his post-crash TV interview in Iowa, but other than that, the Aussie didn’t appear to have any cognitive issues after the hard hit he suffered. He told SPEED.com on Monday that he was never unconscious during the accident, and despite being classified as suffering a mild-concussion, he hopes to be cleared by the IndyCar medical team ASAP so he can do a bit of road course testing on Wednesday.
HVM Racing’s Simona De Silvestro, sidelined for Iowa after the effects of her Milwaukee crash continued to linger, is in a similar position and hopes to gain clearance in the next few days to run at Toronto next week.
WHAT DID WE LEARN IN IOWA?
• Like Milwaukee, two laps of qualifying at the little Iowa bullring are possibly more exciting than a four-lap run for the pole at Indianapolis. The small degree of self-preservation that plays into most qualifying setups at Indy is altogether ignored at Iowa. From the front to the back of the grid, the this-thing-is-trying-to-kill-me factor is off the charts. Dario Franchitti, one of the more confident drivers in the field, readily admitted it took the better part of 90 minutes to stop shaking from the big adrenaline dump after his qualifying run to the pole at Milwaukee, and again at Iowa…where he only started sixth. Provided IndyCar CEO Randy Bernard implements a doubleheader at Iowa next year, I want to see two separate rounds of qualifying and for those sessions to receive the advance promotion they deserve. Setup the screen with three cameras—one overhead that tracks the car the entire time, one at eye level that zooms in on either the front or back of the car to capture the wiggles and also use the in-car camera to see the drivers sawing at the steering wheel. It’s like street course qualifying on an oval. Brilliant stuff.
• Just when I thought I had a handle on the steady growth and progress of the upstart ‘G2’ (Ganassi Racing) team that fields Graham Rahal (and Charlie Kimball), the young Ohioan had an off weekend at Iowa. He was running well towards the end of the race and might have made it just inside the top 10, but got caught out by bad timing with a pit stop/caution flag sequence and fell to 15th. A ninth or 10th was possible, but after earning three podiums from the last five races, seeing Rahal off the pace on the .875-mile track was a gentle reminder that the team isn’t quite ready to deliver at every round.
• Predicting the weather in Iowa is never an exact science, and with Saturday night’s race being colder than anyone expected, a lot of teams were forced to guess on the correct aero balance settings. Cars that went from neutral to a slight push during Friday’s warmer conditions went in the opposite direction during the race, catching out a lot of drivers who spun and crashed driving over the big bump at the apex between Turn 1 and 2. A lot of teams paid the price for having cars that went from neutral to oversteer, and some also cited the particularly hard Firestone tires as making the race more challenging than expected. From a lack of rear aero grip to an overall lack of tire grip, the window for success at Iowa for most drivers was slim, at best.
• In spite of one journalist who asked what happened to “The old Scott Dixon” after the Kiwi’s I-almost-landed-in-the-parking-lot-while-qualifying-23rd effort on Friday, the two-time series champion more than answered that question in the race. Dixon has played from behind in the championship since 2009—he’s hit a rut of sorts to start the past three seasons—yet continues to rally from far down the championship standings. It’s not like he wants to crash (or get crashed) out of a few early races each year, but since that’s become his reality, open-wheel fans have been treated to a number of stirring drives by the 30-year-old. Powering from 23rd to 3rd at Iowa was impressive, but at this point in the year, having a few races where he starts and finishes towards the front would be a welcome change of pace.
• With a driver’s spot on pit lane dictated by how he or she qualifies at the previous round, Iowa proved how being in unfamiliar territory on pit lane can be problematic. Will Power’s team seemed to have the most trouble adapting to life at the other end of the pits after they qualified 17th in Milwaukee, and were relegated near pit entrance at Iowa. Penske Racing president Tim Cindric told SPEED.com earlier in the year that he feared the exact situation of being around unfamiliar pit crews, having unfamiliar sight lines and different pit-in timing that ultimately contributed to the crash between Power and Charlie Kimball at Iowa.
• If one driver did a better job than anyone else of making the most out of an average car, avoiding the walls and finishing on the lead lap at Iowa, it was Dale Coyne Racing’s Alex Lloyd. The Artist Formerly Known as Pink Lloyd knew he had nothing for the top half of the field, and played it smart, letting attrition and adversity fall in his favor. Moving from 22nd to 13th by the end of the race was never going to grab headlines, but in five races for Coyne this year, Lloyd has done a stellar job, earning two of DCR’s three best results this season.
• As an IndyCar rookie who had never set foot on an oval prior to Indianapolis, James Jakes was a prime candidate to hit everything in sight, but that hasn’t really been the case. Jakes has lacked speed everywhere he’s raced in 2011, but for the most part, the Englishman has kept his car off the barriers, making his crash at Iowa somewhat surprising. Compared to a few rookies (and veterans) who’ve found the wall on a regular basis, Jakes’ wall banging routine in Iowa marked just his second DNF of the year and the first on an oval.
• With four consecutive finishes of 20th or worse on ovals, including two crashes (only one was his fault), Sebastian Saavedra’s season is quickly going pear-shaped. Nothing would make the young Colombian, Conquest Racing team owner Eric Bachelart, Conquest’s mechanics and his sponsors happier than a harmless run to 15th or so at Toronto.
• In the 2011 edition of the IZOD IndyCar Series, catching a case of bad luck lingers on like a nasty flu. Helio Castroneves is the highest profile driver to fall on the wrong side of good fortune again at Iowa, but Simona De Silvestro, Vitor Meira, Mike Conway, Alex Tagliani, Takuma Sato, Saavedra and Ana Beatriz are also wondering how to ditch the black cloud that keeps following them.
• The “Takuma Sato will eventually crash” storyline—one I thought was left behind in 2010--is becoming just as predictable this year. To make matters worse, the crashes are coming while Taku is running competitively, and unlike last year, no one is making light of his struggles. For some drivers, talent and success flows easily while for others, like Sato, getting past a variety of self-induced hurdles and obstacles is usually required. Simply put, at the moment, and if given the chance to fail, Sato will take it. How he and the KV Racing-Lotus team go about fixing his decision-making skills in the second-half of the season is one of IndyCar’s great unanswered questions, but provided they do get Taku pointed in the right direction, he’d have a long line of drivers waiting to congratulate him. Sato probably doesn’t know it, but he’s earned a ton of respect this year from some of the biggest names in the paddock. I’m a firm believer that most people want to see him succeed, and his pole position was a nice boost during a hard time in his life, but despite having a lot of his colleagues pulling for him, Iowa clearly illustrated how much the mental game plays in auto racing.
• Dario Franchitti has seen his car fade towards the end of the last two oval races, which would normally be a cause for concern, but he told SPEED.com there’s no need to panic. He dealt with some rather wicked understeer in his final stint at Milwaukee and had the exact opposite problem—lots of oversteer—at Iowa, but Franchitti took the blame for the loss of balance on Saturday night, saying chose to leave front wing in the car despite his engineer wanting to take some out.
• Versus commentator Bob Jenkins mistakenly called James Hinchcliffe “JR Hinchcliffe” during the Iowa race, but in hindsight, he might be on to something. A blend of Hinchcliffe's and Hildebrand's respective strengths—JR’s aggression and James' cool demeanor—would make the perfect rookie. At Iowa, Hildebrand was as a ball of energy that came close to ending his night early (and the nights of a few others) on the way to finishing fourth. Hinchcliffe was delayed in the pits, but recovered nicely to finish ninth without letting himself get too excited. Had the Canadian used a bit of the Californian’s red mist, a better finish was possible. Had JR used a bit of Hinch’s caution at Milwaukee (and a few other tracks) to avoid trouble, he would be higher than ninth in the championship standings. With a tight budget and the need to finish, Hinchcliffe has chosen to finish rather than making highlight reel passes, while Hildebrand, with a hungry team in dire need of win, has pushed like mad to make that happen. I don’t expect either driver to change their approach this year, but come 2012, and with a year of experience to draw from, IndyCar’s most promising rookies will probably mimic each other a lot more than they are now.
Team Penske’s Will Power looked a bit riled up during his post-crash TV interview in Iowa, but other than that, the Aussie didn’t appear to have any cognitive issues after the hard hit he suffered. He told SPEED.com on Monday that he was never unconscious during the accident, and despite being classified as suffering a mild-concussion, he hopes to be cleared by the IndyCar medical team ASAP so he can do a bit of road course testing on Wednesday.
HVM Racing’s Simona De Silvestro, sidelined for Iowa after the effects of her Milwaukee crash continued to linger, is in a similar position and hopes to gain clearance in the next few days to run at Toronto next week.
WHAT DID WE LEARN IN IOWA?
• Like Milwaukee, two laps of qualifying at the little Iowa bullring are possibly more exciting than a four-lap run for the pole at Indianapolis. The small degree of self-preservation that plays into most qualifying setups at Indy is altogether ignored at Iowa. From the front to the back of the grid, the this-thing-is-trying-to-kill-me factor is off the charts. Dario Franchitti, one of the more confident drivers in the field, readily admitted it took the better part of 90 minutes to stop shaking from the big adrenaline dump after his qualifying run to the pole at Milwaukee, and again at Iowa…where he only started sixth. Provided IndyCar CEO Randy Bernard implements a doubleheader at Iowa next year, I want to see two separate rounds of qualifying and for those sessions to receive the advance promotion they deserve. Setup the screen with three cameras—one overhead that tracks the car the entire time, one at eye level that zooms in on either the front or back of the car to capture the wiggles and also use the in-car camera to see the drivers sawing at the steering wheel. It’s like street course qualifying on an oval. Brilliant stuff.
• Just when I thought I had a handle on the steady growth and progress of the upstart ‘G2’ (Ganassi Racing) team that fields Graham Rahal (and Charlie Kimball), the young Ohioan had an off weekend at Iowa. He was running well towards the end of the race and might have made it just inside the top 10, but got caught out by bad timing with a pit stop/caution flag sequence and fell to 15th. A ninth or 10th was possible, but after earning three podiums from the last five races, seeing Rahal off the pace on the .875-mile track was a gentle reminder that the team isn’t quite ready to deliver at every round.
• Predicting the weather in Iowa is never an exact science, and with Saturday night’s race being colder than anyone expected, a lot of teams were forced to guess on the correct aero balance settings. Cars that went from neutral to a slight push during Friday’s warmer conditions went in the opposite direction during the race, catching out a lot of drivers who spun and crashed driving over the big bump at the apex between Turn 1 and 2. A lot of teams paid the price for having cars that went from neutral to oversteer, and some also cited the particularly hard Firestone tires as making the race more challenging than expected. From a lack of rear aero grip to an overall lack of tire grip, the window for success at Iowa for most drivers was slim, at best.
• In spite of one journalist who asked what happened to “The old Scott Dixon” after the Kiwi’s I-almost-landed-in-the-parking-lot-while-qualifying-23rd effort on Friday, the two-time series champion more than answered that question in the race. Dixon has played from behind in the championship since 2009—he’s hit a rut of sorts to start the past three seasons—yet continues to rally from far down the championship standings. It’s not like he wants to crash (or get crashed) out of a few early races each year, but since that’s become his reality, open-wheel fans have been treated to a number of stirring drives by the 30-year-old. Powering from 23rd to 3rd at Iowa was impressive, but at this point in the year, having a few races where he starts and finishes towards the front would be a welcome change of pace.
• With a driver’s spot on pit lane dictated by how he or she qualifies at the previous round, Iowa proved how being in unfamiliar territory on pit lane can be problematic. Will Power’s team seemed to have the most trouble adapting to life at the other end of the pits after they qualified 17th in Milwaukee, and were relegated near pit entrance at Iowa. Penske Racing president Tim Cindric told SPEED.com earlier in the year that he feared the exact situation of being around unfamiliar pit crews, having unfamiliar sight lines and different pit-in timing that ultimately contributed to the crash between Power and Charlie Kimball at Iowa.
• If one driver did a better job than anyone else of making the most out of an average car, avoiding the walls and finishing on the lead lap at Iowa, it was Dale Coyne Racing’s Alex Lloyd. The Artist Formerly Known as Pink Lloyd knew he had nothing for the top half of the field, and played it smart, letting attrition and adversity fall in his favor. Moving from 22nd to 13th by the end of the race was never going to grab headlines, but in five races for Coyne this year, Lloyd has done a stellar job, earning two of DCR’s three best results this season.
• As an IndyCar rookie who had never set foot on an oval prior to Indianapolis, James Jakes was a prime candidate to hit everything in sight, but that hasn’t really been the case. Jakes has lacked speed everywhere he’s raced in 2011, but for the most part, the Englishman has kept his car off the barriers, making his crash at Iowa somewhat surprising. Compared to a few rookies (and veterans) who’ve found the wall on a regular basis, Jakes’ wall banging routine in Iowa marked just his second DNF of the year and the first on an oval.
• With four consecutive finishes of 20th or worse on ovals, including two crashes (only one was his fault), Sebastian Saavedra’s season is quickly going pear-shaped. Nothing would make the young Colombian, Conquest Racing team owner Eric Bachelart, Conquest’s mechanics and his sponsors happier than a harmless run to 15th or so at Toronto.
• In the 2011 edition of the IZOD IndyCar Series, catching a case of bad luck lingers on like a nasty flu. Helio Castroneves is the highest profile driver to fall on the wrong side of good fortune again at Iowa, but Simona De Silvestro, Vitor Meira, Mike Conway, Alex Tagliani, Takuma Sato, Saavedra and Ana Beatriz are also wondering how to ditch the black cloud that keeps following them.
• The “Takuma Sato will eventually crash” storyline—one I thought was left behind in 2010--is becoming just as predictable this year. To make matters worse, the crashes are coming while Taku is running competitively, and unlike last year, no one is making light of his struggles. For some drivers, talent and success flows easily while for others, like Sato, getting past a variety of self-induced hurdles and obstacles is usually required. Simply put, at the moment, and if given the chance to fail, Sato will take it. How he and the KV Racing-Lotus team go about fixing his decision-making skills in the second-half of the season is one of IndyCar’s great unanswered questions, but provided they do get Taku pointed in the right direction, he’d have a long line of drivers waiting to congratulate him. Sato probably doesn’t know it, but he’s earned a ton of respect this year from some of the biggest names in the paddock. I’m a firm believer that most people want to see him succeed, and his pole position was a nice boost during a hard time in his life, but despite having a lot of his colleagues pulling for him, Iowa clearly illustrated how much the mental game plays in auto racing.
• Dario Franchitti has seen his car fade towards the end of the last two oval races, which would normally be a cause for concern, but he told SPEED.com there’s no need to panic. He dealt with some rather wicked understeer in his final stint at Milwaukee and had the exact opposite problem—lots of oversteer—at Iowa, but Franchitti took the blame for the loss of balance on Saturday night, saying chose to leave front wing in the car despite his engineer wanting to take some out.
• Versus commentator Bob Jenkins mistakenly called James Hinchcliffe “JR Hinchcliffe” during the Iowa race, but in hindsight, he might be on to something. A blend of Hinchcliffe's and Hildebrand's respective strengths—JR’s aggression and James' cool demeanor—would make the perfect rookie. At Iowa, Hildebrand was as a ball of energy that came close to ending his night early (and the nights of a few others) on the way to finishing fourth. Hinchcliffe was delayed in the pits, but recovered nicely to finish ninth without letting himself get too excited. Had the Canadian used a bit of the Californian’s red mist, a better finish was possible. Had JR used a bit of Hinch’s caution at Milwaukee (and a few other tracks) to avoid trouble, he would be higher than ninth in the championship standings. With a tight budget and the need to finish, Hinchcliffe has chosen to finish rather than making highlight reel passes, while Hildebrand, with a hungry team in dire need of win, has pushed like mad to make that happen. I don’t expect either driver to change their approach this year, but come 2012, and with a year of experience to draw from, IndyCar’s most promising rookies will probably mimic each other a lot more than they are now.
INDYCAR BRAZIL
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