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IndyCar
PRUETT: 10 Spots Of Stupidity
Marshall Pruett has had enough of IndyCar's engine penalties.
Marshall Pruett, along with most teams, drivers and fans, is wondering how long the IZOD IndyCar Series will wait to fix a really bad rule that's hurting its reputation. (Photo: Marshall Pruett)
Our friends at INDYCAR have found a way to deposit a large and growing stain on their nice, new 2012 season and it’s time to talk about it.
Before we get there, I learned about the very topic at hand the hard way the same year Rick Mears qualified for his first Indy 500.
It was late on a cold winter night in 1978 when my father, in something close to a controlled rage (“I’m so pissed off, I can’t see straight” was one of his favorite lines when in that state of mind) awoke me and my two step brothers from a deep sleep and marched us out into the garage for an impromptu interrogation.
If having the lights flipped on and being yanked out of bed wasn't enough of a shock to the system, the ice-cold cement floor made it clear that this wasn’t going to be a fun experience for at least one of us.
As the youngest—I was seven at the time—and with no recollection of having done something to trigger this late night police line-up, I knew one of my older step brothers had to be the reason behind whatever was about to take place.
My red-faced father explained that after we’d gone to bed, he went to use the new recliner chair he’d just purchased and, once he sat down, went nuclear after finding that one of the three kids standing in front of him did a Freddy Krueger impression on both armrests with a steak knife.
He went on to say that rather than punish the one he knew was at fault (my eldest step brother, at least at that point in time, was “short on character,” to put it mildly), he was going to draw from his time in the Army and give the offender five minutes to step forward and admit guilt. If no one spoke up at the end of the five minute period, he was going to march each one of us downstairs and tan our respective backsides with his belt.
Sounds like a compelling way to get the truth out of somebody, right?
Five minutes later, and with all three of us professing our innocence, Mr. Short On Character watched as I was carted downstairs, only to return crying—not so much because of the punishment (although it hurt), but because he had the power to prevent it from happening, yet stood by and watched with complete indifference.
It wasn’t a surprise; I never liked the guy, but I was amazed when he let my other step brother—his own flesh and blood—get snatched up, hauled off and returned in his own pool of tears and with a hide that had been sufficiently tenderized.
The obvious and predictable came next. When it was his turn to catch a beating, he confessed, apologized and did all he could to worm his way out of punishment. If I took solace in anything that night, it was that my dad gave it to him twice as good for letting us get put through the wringer for no reason.
From that night on, the encounter stayed with me, but not because of the frigid interrogation or the date with Old Man Pruett’s belt (that part really wasn't a big deal...child rearing came right behind the NFL as America’s favorite contact sport in the 1970s).
At the ripe age of seven, the takeaway lesson was simple and lasting: It sure is sh***y to receive harsh punishment for something that isn’t your fault.
At 41 years old, I’m now left to wonder how in the hell the IZOD IndyCar Series has come up with a set of rules that has, in essence, taken a page from my youth whenever a driver suffers an engine failure.
I’ll save you the elaborate breakdown of what Section 15, Engine Sporting Regulations happens to explain in the new rulebook, and move straight to the part in question.
With the series looking to keep engine costs down—way down—and to increase the life of each engine between rebuilds, it desired to put a mechanism to place pressure on its manufacturers to keep costs and mileage under control.
Make sure Chevrolet, Honda and Lotus don’t spent a fortune on risky performance items, make sure teams get long life out of each engine—1850 miles—and create some form of penalty if the manufacturers run afoul of those stated goals. Fair enough. Keep ‘em honest.
Unfortunately, what came out of Section 15 to apply that pressure was a complete joke.
Engine failures during a race, big or small, get a free pass. No penalty. Those are considered “approved” engine changes.
An engine change at any other time during the season (provided it can’t be fixed and put right back in the car, or comes before each engine’s 1850-mile rebuild threshold) is considered “unapproved,” and comes with a 10-spot grid position penalty for the driver whose car carried the offending powerplant.
Huh?
Help me to understand how or why Simon Pagenaud, Alex Tagliani, Oriol Servia, James Hinchcliffe and Sebastien Bourdais, the five drivers who’ve received lashings from the end of INDYCAR’s proverbial belt, would possibly need to serve a 10-spot grid penalty because something they had no control over happened to break?
Makes about as much sense as Chevy being fined if Marco Andretti launches an F-Bomb on television, Honda getting docked points if Scott Dixon receives a stop-and-go penalty, or Lotus' trackside engineers being banned for two races if one of its driver brings out a red flag.
If any of those scenarios make sense to you, I’m guessing you also had a hand in writing Section 15, Engine Sporting Regulations…
Granted, if it could be proved that a driver did something intentional to harm the engine, I'm all for a penalty (which is included in Section 15), but with hard rev limiters in place, electronic shifting and a drive-by-wire throttle, it would be damned hard to point the finger at a driver when his or her engine throws a leg out of bed.
The 10-spot penalty was copied, more or less, from a similar rule originally used in Formula One, which makes things worse, in my book. I love F1—always have—but parroting a rule simply because F1 uses it was the first mistake INDYCAR made. A lot of great ideas come out of F1, but as its new stepped noses have shown, over-thinking the regulations can also have cringe-worthy results.
After doing a bit of digging, I found out that shortly after the new 2012 chassis and engine concept was announced in mid-2010, the series began thinking of adopting the F1 engine change penalty rule, and once it had its engine manufacturers in place, both sides agreed on what we have now.
Forgetting its F1 origins for a moment, why am I not shocked that a roundtable...dominated by engine manufacturers...agrees to an engine rule that penalizes the drivers and teams, rather than the makers of the engines? I genuinely laugh every time I think about how this probably went down:
INDYCAR: “OK, group, how do we want to handle things when your engines blow up before they reach the minimum mileage we’ve stated? Penalizing you guys would be too obvious, so let’s say we stick it to the drivers by, I don’t know, say…10 grid positions?”
MANUFACTURERS: “BRILLIANT! We couldn’t have come up with a better plan if we’d tried!”
INDYCAR: “Well that was surprisingly easy. Next!”
It’s a bit like letting your kids vote on what’s for dinner every night, isn’t it? Unless you provide some boundaries, buckle in for a steady diet of pizza and ice cream.
Moving forward, the solution to bring the penalty and pressure point back to reality is quite simple.
First and foremost, car companies enter a series to win the Manufacturers’ title. Sure, they also want to win the biggest race in the series, but the bragging rights from beating the other manufacturers is what drives the decision to spend millions to compete. It’s the PR home run every manufacturer seeks—a long off-season of ads touting their IndyCar championship, in this case.
If you want to apply pressure to keep IndyCar’s manufacturers towing the line on engine reliability, start by docking manufacturer points.
And trust me; Chevrolet, Honda and Lotus don’t need a silly rule in Section 15 to make them try to comply with the engine life framework set out by the series. But the current penalty, which has no direct impact on the manufacturers, will never serve its intended purpose.
Budgets are ridiculously tight for the three manufacturers, and the dozen or more engine failures they’ve collectively experienced have been hard to handle, but if there’s a way to get their CEOs and CFOs to add a few more dollars to the R&D budget, it’s only going to happen when the Manufacturers’ title starts to slip away.
If INDYCAR insists on keeping this silly penalty for 2012, make the shift now to lopping off a third or half of the Manufacturers’ points from every round where a failure is experienced. The series awards points to the top car for each manufacturer in the race, with nine points for the win, six for second and four for third.
Chevrolet heads into Long Beach leading the points with 18 to Honda’s 12 and Lotus’ eight, but that order could change quickly if one manufacturer hits a rough patch for two or three consecutive races. There’s a bit of a grey area in regards to testing, but the series sees that as being all-inclusive. James Hinchcliffe’s engine broke Monday after just a few laps at Sonoma, so how should that be treated? Should it be attached to Barber since it happened before Long Beach?
Even better, should we even be having this discussion?
Before we get there, I learned about the very topic at hand the hard way the same year Rick Mears qualified for his first Indy 500.
It was late on a cold winter night in 1978 when my father, in something close to a controlled rage (“I’m so pissed off, I can’t see straight” was one of his favorite lines when in that state of mind) awoke me and my two step brothers from a deep sleep and marched us out into the garage for an impromptu interrogation.
If having the lights flipped on and being yanked out of bed wasn't enough of a shock to the system, the ice-cold cement floor made it clear that this wasn’t going to be a fun experience for at least one of us.
As the youngest—I was seven at the time—and with no recollection of having done something to trigger this late night police line-up, I knew one of my older step brothers had to be the reason behind whatever was about to take place.
My red-faced father explained that after we’d gone to bed, he went to use the new recliner chair he’d just purchased and, once he sat down, went nuclear after finding that one of the three kids standing in front of him did a Freddy Krueger impression on both armrests with a steak knife.
He went on to say that rather than punish the one he knew was at fault (my eldest step brother, at least at that point in time, was “short on character,” to put it mildly), he was going to draw from his time in the Army and give the offender five minutes to step forward and admit guilt. If no one spoke up at the end of the five minute period, he was going to march each one of us downstairs and tan our respective backsides with his belt.
Sounds like a compelling way to get the truth out of somebody, right?
Five minutes later, and with all three of us professing our innocence, Mr. Short On Character watched as I was carted downstairs, only to return crying—not so much because of the punishment (although it hurt), but because he had the power to prevent it from happening, yet stood by and watched with complete indifference.
It wasn’t a surprise; I never liked the guy, but I was amazed when he let my other step brother—his own flesh and blood—get snatched up, hauled off and returned in his own pool of tears and with a hide that had been sufficiently tenderized.
The obvious and predictable came next. When it was his turn to catch a beating, he confessed, apologized and did all he could to worm his way out of punishment. If I took solace in anything that night, it was that my dad gave it to him twice as good for letting us get put through the wringer for no reason.
From that night on, the encounter stayed with me, but not because of the frigid interrogation or the date with Old Man Pruett’s belt (that part really wasn't a big deal...child rearing came right behind the NFL as America’s favorite contact sport in the 1970s).
At the ripe age of seven, the takeaway lesson was simple and lasting: It sure is sh***y to receive harsh punishment for something that isn’t your fault.
At 41 years old, I’m now left to wonder how in the hell the IZOD IndyCar Series has come up with a set of rules that has, in essence, taken a page from my youth whenever a driver suffers an engine failure.
I’ll save you the elaborate breakdown of what Section 15, Engine Sporting Regulations happens to explain in the new rulebook, and move straight to the part in question.
With the series looking to keep engine costs down—way down—and to increase the life of each engine between rebuilds, it desired to put a mechanism to place pressure on its manufacturers to keep costs and mileage under control.
Make sure Chevrolet, Honda and Lotus don’t spent a fortune on risky performance items, make sure teams get long life out of each engine—1850 miles—and create some form of penalty if the manufacturers run afoul of those stated goals. Fair enough. Keep ‘em honest.
Unfortunately, what came out of Section 15 to apply that pressure was a complete joke.
Engine failures during a race, big or small, get a free pass. No penalty. Those are considered “approved” engine changes.
An engine change at any other time during the season (provided it can’t be fixed and put right back in the car, or comes before each engine’s 1850-mile rebuild threshold) is considered “unapproved,” and comes with a 10-spot grid position penalty for the driver whose car carried the offending powerplant.
Huh?
Help me to understand how or why Simon Pagenaud, Alex Tagliani, Oriol Servia, James Hinchcliffe and Sebastien Bourdais, the five drivers who’ve received lashings from the end of INDYCAR’s proverbial belt, would possibly need to serve a 10-spot grid penalty because something they had no control over happened to break?
Makes about as much sense as Chevy being fined if Marco Andretti launches an F-Bomb on television, Honda getting docked points if Scott Dixon receives a stop-and-go penalty, or Lotus' trackside engineers being banned for two races if one of its driver brings out a red flag.
If any of those scenarios make sense to you, I’m guessing you also had a hand in writing Section 15, Engine Sporting Regulations…
Granted, if it could be proved that a driver did something intentional to harm the engine, I'm all for a penalty (which is included in Section 15), but with hard rev limiters in place, electronic shifting and a drive-by-wire throttle, it would be damned hard to point the finger at a driver when his or her engine throws a leg out of bed.
The 10-spot penalty was copied, more or less, from a similar rule originally used in Formula One, which makes things worse, in my book. I love F1—always have—but parroting a rule simply because F1 uses it was the first mistake INDYCAR made. A lot of great ideas come out of F1, but as its new stepped noses have shown, over-thinking the regulations can also have cringe-worthy results.
After doing a bit of digging, I found out that shortly after the new 2012 chassis and engine concept was announced in mid-2010, the series began thinking of adopting the F1 engine change penalty rule, and once it had its engine manufacturers in place, both sides agreed on what we have now.
Forgetting its F1 origins for a moment, why am I not shocked that a roundtable...dominated by engine manufacturers...agrees to an engine rule that penalizes the drivers and teams, rather than the makers of the engines? I genuinely laugh every time I think about how this probably went down:
INDYCAR: “OK, group, how do we want to handle things when your engines blow up before they reach the minimum mileage we’ve stated? Penalizing you guys would be too obvious, so let’s say we stick it to the drivers by, I don’t know, say…10 grid positions?”
MANUFACTURERS: “BRILLIANT! We couldn’t have come up with a better plan if we’d tried!”
INDYCAR: “Well that was surprisingly easy. Next!”
It’s a bit like letting your kids vote on what’s for dinner every night, isn’t it? Unless you provide some boundaries, buckle in for a steady diet of pizza and ice cream.
Moving forward, the solution to bring the penalty and pressure point back to reality is quite simple.
First and foremost, car companies enter a series to win the Manufacturers’ title. Sure, they also want to win the biggest race in the series, but the bragging rights from beating the other manufacturers is what drives the decision to spend millions to compete. It’s the PR home run every manufacturer seeks—a long off-season of ads touting their IndyCar championship, in this case.
If you want to apply pressure to keep IndyCar’s manufacturers towing the line on engine reliability, start by docking manufacturer points.
And trust me; Chevrolet, Honda and Lotus don’t need a silly rule in Section 15 to make them try to comply with the engine life framework set out by the series. But the current penalty, which has no direct impact on the manufacturers, will never serve its intended purpose.
Budgets are ridiculously tight for the three manufacturers, and the dozen or more engine failures they’ve collectively experienced have been hard to handle, but if there’s a way to get their CEOs and CFOs to add a few more dollars to the R&D budget, it’s only going to happen when the Manufacturers’ title starts to slip away.
If INDYCAR insists on keeping this silly penalty for 2012, make the shift now to lopping off a third or half of the Manufacturers’ points from every round where a failure is experienced. The series awards points to the top car for each manufacturer in the race, with nine points for the win, six for second and four for third.
Chevrolet heads into Long Beach leading the points with 18 to Honda’s 12 and Lotus’ eight, but that order could change quickly if one manufacturer hits a rough patch for two or three consecutive races. There’s a bit of a grey area in regards to testing, but the series sees that as being all-inclusive. James Hinchcliffe’s engine broke Monday after just a few laps at Sonoma, so how should that be treated? Should it be attached to Barber since it happened before Long Beach?
Even better, should we even be having this discussion?
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