INDYCAR: Series Moves Texas Open Test To May 7th

IndyCar

INDYCAR: Series Moves Texas Open Test To May 7th

Heeding to the wishes of its entrants, the IZOD IndyCar Series has pushed back its open 1.5-mile oval test to May 7th--after the first four road/street races.

Marshall Pruett | Posted March 02, 2012

With the open test at Texas scheduled 10 days before the season-opening race, and with so few spares available to recover from a crash, the series wisely moved the test to May. (Photo: LAT)

INDYCAR informed its teams on Friday that the planned March 13th oval test at the 1.5-mile Texas oval has been pushed back to May 7th after a significant portion of the paddock raised concerns over its timing, and critical shortage of spare parts from chassis supplier Dallara.

The March test, which the series intended to use more than a half-dozen cars on track at the same time to test another round of aero options to reduce pack racing, caused major concerns due to its close proximity to first race of the season at St. Petersburg.

With practice set to start on just 10 days later on March 23rd, and an unproven 1.5-mile aero specification (plus the recent spate of engine failures in testing), teams deemed the risks to be too high--especially with most of their spare chassis being delivered with major components missing--to recover from a multi-car crash.

Any accidents during the Texas test would have likely reduced the car count for St. Petersburg, which the series acknowledged.

With a stretch of four races from March 25th to April 29th, INDYCAR slotted in the new Texas date for the week after teams return from Brazil, affording Dallara additional time to build its spares inventory.

In place of the Texas test on the 13th, INDYCAR has given approval for teams to shift that open test slot to Barber Motorsports Park in Alabama.

Marshall Pruett is SPEED.com's Auto Racing Editor, covering IndyCar and sports cars. He also contributes to Road & Track and Racecar Engineering. Follow him @MarshallPruett on Twitter.