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IndyCar
PRUETT: The Silver Vitamin
What happens when Marshall Pruett talks with Ganassi, Barnes, Rahal, Bowlby, Dixon, Bernard, and Sir Jack Brabham about the Delta Wing? Read on.
Will it work? Will it turn? Is Ben Bowlby on crack?
The answers to those questions are yes, yes, and I’d hope not.
I have never seen so much chatter – both positive and negative – about the future of the IndyCar Series as I did on Wednesday immediately after the Delta Wing launch.
Ben Bowlby’s group managed to re-write the accepted norm for the appearance of an IndyCar by simply pulling the cover off of his creation, and if you sat back and watched as a spectator, the attendees of the launch and IndyCar fans on the internet came away with two wildly different impressions.
The various forums and blogs, for the most part, have treated the Delta Wing design like a group of villagers chasing away Frankenstein with torches. One thing stood out immediately: The Delta Wing group have a huge public relations campaign ahead of them if the current fan base is going to buy into their chassis.
In a poll asking people what they dislike more – killing puppies, raising taxes, or the Delta Wing -- I fear the car would hover somewhere around second.
What we saw happen at the Chicago Auto Show was the auto racing equivalent of President Obama’s health care plan. One side believes that without the Delta Wing plan, IndyCar will crumble due to years of escalating costs and inaction. The opposition feels that if the Delta Wing plan goes into effect, the imperfect, but fully functional plan we already have will be cast aside, and IndyCar will crumble as a result.
Like the health care plan, concessions will likely have to be made on both sides if everyone is to walk away satisfied, but the question of which party will have to make the most concessions is an interesting theme to keep track of in the coming months.
A lot of questions were answered at the launch, but not nearly as many as I’d hoped, so I pinned down as many people as possible to answer a variety of items. Here are 25 different Delta Wing subjects with some commentary and answers thrown in that I think are worth exploring:
But how different is it really?
For some time, the consensus amongst fans has been that a new car is needed to replace the unsightly and decrepit Dallara. The Italian form released some rather cartoonish images of proposed 2012 cars while Swift showed a much more polished product, but I was left wondering how much change people really want? A little bit? Just enough to not look like the donkey we have right now?
The 2012 Dallaras and Swifts are different than the current Dallara, but not so much that they draw a line in history and make you forget about all you thought an IndyCar could be. They look updated, and slightly renovated, but nothing close to a complete makeover.
If the 2012 car is just a mildly evolved version of what we’ve seen in CART, ChampCar or the IndyCar Series over the past decade, can we expect to win back the throngs of fans that left during the CART/ChampCar/IndyCar days with something that looks similar to what they’ve seen before?
If people walked out of the first movie, why would anyone think they’d pay money to come back and watch the sequel?
Without a doubt, the biggest question the League needs to answer is whether the 2012 car is meant to appease the admittedly small fan base we have left, or to ignite a newfound interest amongst the masses?
Do they play it safe and keep their base, or do they swing for the fences and hope to fill the stands with new faces? With Dallara and Swift, and now Delta Wing, they have a solution to go in either direction.
A mothballed mistake
If there’s a recent case study that warns the League against playing it safe, it needs only to look at the series it digested in 2008.
ChampCar found itself in a similar situation with a long-in-the-tooth Lola chassis (designed by Ben Bowlby, ironically) that needed to be freshened. As much as I’d love to see the Panoz DP01 brought back to life, and no matter how good the car was, it failed to attract a new audience.
Everyone loved the DP01 (once its teething problems were sorted), but it didn’t translate into bigger crowds, more TV viewers, New teams, or to move them up the packed sports entertainment food chain. It was great for those inside the series, but did nothing to improve ChampCar’s place in the market. From 20 yards away, or on TV, it looked to the casual fans like a typical IndyCar, and was immediately dismissed as unremarkable.
The series was gone after one season of the DP01 being pressed into service, and while I don’t completely blame the chassis for the series’ failure, I do think that by opting for something that looked safe and familiar, they sealed their fate. At a time when something groundbreaking was needed, ChampCar’s decision to build an evolutionary chassis led to their extinction.
I’m not the first to say it, but I do firmly believe that unless the 2012 car – and no matter which car(s) are pressed into production -- causes the average person to do a double-take and spend a few minutes trying to absorb the groundbreaking shape they see in front of them, the whole 2012 exercise will be a waste of time. But it can’t be ugly.
Too strange, too different, and just plain wrong
It’s hard to argue that the Delta Wing’s looks need some attention. The car challenges everyone – me included – to accept its appearance.
It asks people to make a giant leap all at once, and as history often proves, most people are reluctant to do that in one sitting. This asks for people to go from grasping the concept of paper airplanes to digesting everything that makes the Stealth Bomber able to fly in a single afternoon, and the backlash has shown it.
“When you first see it, it’s radical, it’s different, and it changes everything,” two-time IndyCar champion Scott Dixon said. “Unfortunately, most people are afraid of change, but like everything, you have to update yourself to what’s going on. It’s 30 years ahead of itself, with nothing to bridge the gap in-between. It’s interesting to see some people are thinking outside the IndyCar box. It’s out of left field, but I think that’s cool.”
I think of the Delta Wing like a big silver vitamin. It isn’t necessarily what I’d call pretty, and it isn’t easy to digest, but it is what’s best for the present and future health of the series. It’s the ‘I know it’s good for me, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it’ IndyCar.
“Road cars of the future, and it’s already happening, will look much different,” its designer said. “They will be styled differently to achieve maximum aerodynamic efficiency, will be made of newer materials to weigh less, and will have smaller, more efficient engines. Those are the same targets we are employing here, but in the realm of motorsports. Please remember that this is not a styling exercise. This is form following function. It is a bit of a shocker, but given time, we hope that people will adjust over time. It’s still an open-wheel car, despite the backlash to the contrary. We are trying to lead for a change, rather than follow.”
If we can agree that its visuals need work (apparently, I wasn’t the only one who thought it looks like the phallic jet plane flown by SNL’s The Ambiguously Gay Duo…an IndyCar driver forwarded a photo of it to me soon after the launch), let’s move on to the other aspects of what the car represents.
One major item has been ignored by Delta Wing. Form might follow function, but the grandstands aren’t going to be filled with blind techno-geeks. Visuals matter.
Mickey Thompson’s Sears AllState streamliner from 1964 was incredibly innovative with its drag reducing shrouded wheels (just as the Delta Wing utilizes), but it was also ugly as sin.
Asking people to update their mental image of an IndyCar is one thing. Asking them to tell their eyes what they perceive as ugly is actually appealing is altogether different. Fighting human nature isn’t a battle Delta Wing needs to take on right now.
I’m all for technology and efficiency, but not at the expense of basic curb appeal. A crazy looking car that borders on fugly won’t bring the fans back. Sexiness also matters, and the Delta Wing doesn’t have an ounce of it. Shock and awe is what we need, but the good kind, not the ‘please put a bag over its head’ version.
If only the DVD player was broken on Wednesday
I was impressed by the studio photos of the Delta Wing car, and even how it looked onstage at the show, but the simulation lap they created managed to unravel things for me. Racing around on a simulated Mid-Ohio circuit, it went from being space-age to somewhat contrived. As Nigel Roebuck once described Ken Tyrrell, it was “gawky, and angular.”
If they’d left the Mid-Ohio lap out of the presentation, I think it would have helped sell the concept and to create some anticipation while people wait to see it run around the real Mid-Ohio.
I might be a simpleton, but that simulation swayed me from somewhat liking the real car to being transfixed as how bad it looked on track. It looked too much like the Ace & Gary mobile, and once I imagined seeing it race from atop a hill or from the bleachers, I became concerned about its trackside appeal.
They can handle it
A game-changer like the Delta Wing needed a much deeper list of Q&A items made available from the outset. The general sense that it was too advanced to explain all at once isn’t something I agree with. IndyCar fans tend to know the history of the cars, to appreciate the technology, and have a desire to learn more about cutting edge concepts. Assuming the finer details were best kept for a future was a public relations misstep.
“From what I’ve seen, most have now asked what we were thinking, or why we did all of the various things on the car that are different or challenge the norm,” Bowlby admitted. “Now that we’ve revealed the car, and that was the first stage in the process, we will begin to explain, piece by piece, why the car is the way that it is. We will unfold the story and I think people will understand it much better. In person, people were breath taken.”
Delta Wing’s Bill Lafontaine said he knows the car needs to be seen to be understood. “One of the things we want to do is to get the car out in front of people so they can see it and can walk around it and receive it in person. Doing it through photos or a simulation lap just doesn’t do the car justice.”
This isn’t the first time an IndyCar has made people uncomfortable
IndyCar fans are smart and they know what they like. If the Delta Wing is to win in the court of public opinion, Bowlby and Co. will have to explain and answer all of the aspects of the car that question what we’ve known an IndyCar to be since John Cooper showed up at Indy in 1961 with the engine mounted at the wrong end.
As the Delta Wings are surely aware, Cooper’s first IndyCar was met with the same concern.
Will it work? Will it turn? Has John Cooper been indulging in the liquor cabinet?
The rear-engine revolution angered just about everybody (except for the people that ushered it in), left the old guard – the drivers and owners – railing against the silly European car that they said would never succeed at Indy, and started the clock on the roadster manufacturers needing to join the revolution or risk being left by the wayside.
The Cooper was a threat – to people’s livelihoods and to the generation of cars and conventions that had been made redundant overnight. It was a forget everything you’ve ever known car, just like the first Miller or roadster to race at the Speedway.
I can’t say if the Delta Wing is one of those cars, but it has the potential to be the first Cooper-esque car to run at the Brickyard since John F. Kennedy was in office. I’m all for honoring history, but I’m less fond of seeing our sport repeat it decade after decade.
Everything we’ve seen since the Cooper T54 raced at Indy – the McLarens, the Eagles, the Coyotes, the Lolas, the Marchs, the Reynards, the GForces, and the Dallaras – all carry a lineage back to 1961. Wings have sprouted, Gurney flaps have emerged, slicks have appeared, and electronics have become commonplace, but the basic layout of the cars we’ll see at the 2010 Indy 500 will have 48-year-old roots.
Should we let those roots grow into year 49 and year 50, or should we pull up those roots and plant something new – in the same spirit that Cooper did so long ago?
Speaking with Sir Jack Brabham, he made it clear that as much as the Delta Wing is a departure from the current IndyCar spec, it would have to go a lot farther to completely break his Cooper’s mold.
“The Delta Wing car appears to be rear-engined like all the old Indy cars and has a radical body. I think the Cooper was more radical because of the engine in the rear and proved to be superior in the corners as I could pass the other cars there. Of course they had twice the speed and power down the straight. As every racing car since has been rear-engined since, the Delta Wing can hardly be called radical.”
For some, the Delta Wing goes too far. For others, like Sir Jack, it still has a long way to go if it’s to re-write history.
Amazing.
The answers to those questions are yes, yes, and I’d hope not.
I have never seen so much chatter – both positive and negative – about the future of the IndyCar Series as I did on Wednesday immediately after the Delta Wing launch.
Ben Bowlby’s group managed to re-write the accepted norm for the appearance of an IndyCar by simply pulling the cover off of his creation, and if you sat back and watched as a spectator, the attendees of the launch and IndyCar fans on the internet came away with two wildly different impressions.
The various forums and blogs, for the most part, have treated the Delta Wing design like a group of villagers chasing away Frankenstein with torches. One thing stood out immediately: The Delta Wing group have a huge public relations campaign ahead of them if the current fan base is going to buy into their chassis.
In a poll asking people what they dislike more – killing puppies, raising taxes, or the Delta Wing -- I fear the car would hover somewhere around second.
What we saw happen at the Chicago Auto Show was the auto racing equivalent of President Obama’s health care plan. One side believes that without the Delta Wing plan, IndyCar will crumble due to years of escalating costs and inaction. The opposition feels that if the Delta Wing plan goes into effect, the imperfect, but fully functional plan we already have will be cast aside, and IndyCar will crumble as a result.
Like the health care plan, concessions will likely have to be made on both sides if everyone is to walk away satisfied, but the question of which party will have to make the most concessions is an interesting theme to keep track of in the coming months.
A lot of questions were answered at the launch, but not nearly as many as I’d hoped, so I pinned down as many people as possible to answer a variety of items. Here are 25 different Delta Wing subjects with some commentary and answers thrown in that I think are worth exploring:
But how different is it really?
For some time, the consensus amongst fans has been that a new car is needed to replace the unsightly and decrepit Dallara. The Italian form released some rather cartoonish images of proposed 2012 cars while Swift showed a much more polished product, but I was left wondering how much change people really want? A little bit? Just enough to not look like the donkey we have right now?
The 2012 Dallaras and Swifts are different than the current Dallara, but not so much that they draw a line in history and make you forget about all you thought an IndyCar could be. They look updated, and slightly renovated, but nothing close to a complete makeover.
If the 2012 car is just a mildly evolved version of what we’ve seen in CART, ChampCar or the IndyCar Series over the past decade, can we expect to win back the throngs of fans that left during the CART/ChampCar/IndyCar days with something that looks similar to what they’ve seen before?
If people walked out of the first movie, why would anyone think they’d pay money to come back and watch the sequel?
Without a doubt, the biggest question the League needs to answer is whether the 2012 car is meant to appease the admittedly small fan base we have left, or to ignite a newfound interest amongst the masses?
Do they play it safe and keep their base, or do they swing for the fences and hope to fill the stands with new faces? With Dallara and Swift, and now Delta Wing, they have a solution to go in either direction.
A mothballed mistake
If there’s a recent case study that warns the League against playing it safe, it needs only to look at the series it digested in 2008.
ChampCar found itself in a similar situation with a long-in-the-tooth Lola chassis (designed by Ben Bowlby, ironically) that needed to be freshened. As much as I’d love to see the Panoz DP01 brought back to life, and no matter how good the car was, it failed to attract a new audience.
Everyone loved the DP01 (once its teething problems were sorted), but it didn’t translate into bigger crowds, more TV viewers, New teams, or to move them up the packed sports entertainment food chain. It was great for those inside the series, but did nothing to improve ChampCar’s place in the market. From 20 yards away, or on TV, it looked to the casual fans like a typical IndyCar, and was immediately dismissed as unremarkable.
The series was gone after one season of the DP01 being pressed into service, and while I don’t completely blame the chassis for the series’ failure, I do think that by opting for something that looked safe and familiar, they sealed their fate. At a time when something groundbreaking was needed, ChampCar’s decision to build an evolutionary chassis led to their extinction.
I’m not the first to say it, but I do firmly believe that unless the 2012 car – and no matter which car(s) are pressed into production -- causes the average person to do a double-take and spend a few minutes trying to absorb the groundbreaking shape they see in front of them, the whole 2012 exercise will be a waste of time. But it can’t be ugly.
Too strange, too different, and just plain wrong
It’s hard to argue that the Delta Wing’s looks need some attention. The car challenges everyone – me included – to accept its appearance.
It asks people to make a giant leap all at once, and as history often proves, most people are reluctant to do that in one sitting. This asks for people to go from grasping the concept of paper airplanes to digesting everything that makes the Stealth Bomber able to fly in a single afternoon, and the backlash has shown it.
“When you first see it, it’s radical, it’s different, and it changes everything,” two-time IndyCar champion Scott Dixon said. “Unfortunately, most people are afraid of change, but like everything, you have to update yourself to what’s going on. It’s 30 years ahead of itself, with nothing to bridge the gap in-between. It’s interesting to see some people are thinking outside the IndyCar box. It’s out of left field, but I think that’s cool.”
I think of the Delta Wing like a big silver vitamin. It isn’t necessarily what I’d call pretty, and it isn’t easy to digest, but it is what’s best for the present and future health of the series. It’s the ‘I know it’s good for me, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it’ IndyCar.
“Road cars of the future, and it’s already happening, will look much different,” its designer said. “They will be styled differently to achieve maximum aerodynamic efficiency, will be made of newer materials to weigh less, and will have smaller, more efficient engines. Those are the same targets we are employing here, but in the realm of motorsports. Please remember that this is not a styling exercise. This is form following function. It is a bit of a shocker, but given time, we hope that people will adjust over time. It’s still an open-wheel car, despite the backlash to the contrary. We are trying to lead for a change, rather than follow.”
If we can agree that its visuals need work (apparently, I wasn’t the only one who thought it looks like the phallic jet plane flown by SNL’s The Ambiguously Gay Duo…an IndyCar driver forwarded a photo of it to me soon after the launch), let’s move on to the other aspects of what the car represents.
One major item has been ignored by Delta Wing. Form might follow function, but the grandstands aren’t going to be filled with blind techno-geeks. Visuals matter.
Mickey Thompson’s Sears AllState streamliner from 1964 was incredibly innovative with its drag reducing shrouded wheels (just as the Delta Wing utilizes), but it was also ugly as sin.
Asking people to update their mental image of an IndyCar is one thing. Asking them to tell their eyes what they perceive as ugly is actually appealing is altogether different. Fighting human nature isn’t a battle Delta Wing needs to take on right now.
I’m all for technology and efficiency, but not at the expense of basic curb appeal. A crazy looking car that borders on fugly won’t bring the fans back. Sexiness also matters, and the Delta Wing doesn’t have an ounce of it. Shock and awe is what we need, but the good kind, not the ‘please put a bag over its head’ version.
If only the DVD player was broken on Wednesday
I was impressed by the studio photos of the Delta Wing car, and even how it looked onstage at the show, but the simulation lap they created managed to unravel things for me. Racing around on a simulated Mid-Ohio circuit, it went from being space-age to somewhat contrived. As Nigel Roebuck once described Ken Tyrrell, it was “gawky, and angular.”
If they’d left the Mid-Ohio lap out of the presentation, I think it would have helped sell the concept and to create some anticipation while people wait to see it run around the real Mid-Ohio.
I might be a simpleton, but that simulation swayed me from somewhat liking the real car to being transfixed as how bad it looked on track. It looked too much like the Ace & Gary mobile, and once I imagined seeing it race from atop a hill or from the bleachers, I became concerned about its trackside appeal.
They can handle it
A game-changer like the Delta Wing needed a much deeper list of Q&A items made available from the outset. The general sense that it was too advanced to explain all at once isn’t something I agree with. IndyCar fans tend to know the history of the cars, to appreciate the technology, and have a desire to learn more about cutting edge concepts. Assuming the finer details were best kept for a future was a public relations misstep.
“From what I’ve seen, most have now asked what we were thinking, or why we did all of the various things on the car that are different or challenge the norm,” Bowlby admitted. “Now that we’ve revealed the car, and that was the first stage in the process, we will begin to explain, piece by piece, why the car is the way that it is. We will unfold the story and I think people will understand it much better. In person, people were breath taken.”
Delta Wing’s Bill Lafontaine said he knows the car needs to be seen to be understood. “One of the things we want to do is to get the car out in front of people so they can see it and can walk around it and receive it in person. Doing it through photos or a simulation lap just doesn’t do the car justice.”
This isn’t the first time an IndyCar has made people uncomfortable
IndyCar fans are smart and they know what they like. If the Delta Wing is to win in the court of public opinion, Bowlby and Co. will have to explain and answer all of the aspects of the car that question what we’ve known an IndyCar to be since John Cooper showed up at Indy in 1961 with the engine mounted at the wrong end.
As the Delta Wings are surely aware, Cooper’s first IndyCar was met with the same concern.
Will it work? Will it turn? Has John Cooper been indulging in the liquor cabinet?
The rear-engine revolution angered just about everybody (except for the people that ushered it in), left the old guard – the drivers and owners – railing against the silly European car that they said would never succeed at Indy, and started the clock on the roadster manufacturers needing to join the revolution or risk being left by the wayside.
The Cooper was a threat – to people’s livelihoods and to the generation of cars and conventions that had been made redundant overnight. It was a forget everything you’ve ever known car, just like the first Miller or roadster to race at the Speedway.
I can’t say if the Delta Wing is one of those cars, but it has the potential to be the first Cooper-esque car to run at the Brickyard since John F. Kennedy was in office. I’m all for honoring history, but I’m less fond of seeing our sport repeat it decade after decade.
Everything we’ve seen since the Cooper T54 raced at Indy – the McLarens, the Eagles, the Coyotes, the Lolas, the Marchs, the Reynards, the GForces, and the Dallaras – all carry a lineage back to 1961. Wings have sprouted, Gurney flaps have emerged, slicks have appeared, and electronics have become commonplace, but the basic layout of the cars we’ll see at the 2010 Indy 500 will have 48-year-old roots.
Should we let those roots grow into year 49 and year 50, or should we pull up those roots and plant something new – in the same spirit that Cooper did so long ago?
Speaking with Sir Jack Brabham, he made it clear that as much as the Delta Wing is a departure from the current IndyCar spec, it would have to go a lot farther to completely break his Cooper’s mold.
“The Delta Wing car appears to be rear-engined like all the old Indy cars and has a radical body. I think the Cooper was more radical because of the engine in the rear and proved to be superior in the corners as I could pass the other cars there. Of course they had twice the speed and power down the straight. As every racing car since has been rear-engined since, the Delta Wing can hardly be called radical.”
For some, the Delta Wing goes too far. For others, like Sir Jack, it still has a long way to go if it’s to re-write history.
Amazing.
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