• This theme of needing a Derrick Walker type to remove Bernard from the paddock/the paddock from Bernard will weave its way in and out of everything going forward—for drivers, owners and managers—until his eventual termination.

• The Loudon oval-racing-in-the-rain incident of 2011 caused general mayhem, gave cause for owners and drivers to question who was in control at IndyCar, if the policies and procedures were sufficient and whether Bernard had kept some people on staff far too long.

If it hadn’t happened before, Loudon officially burst the bubble of good feelings and general positivity regarding IndyCar’s newish CEO within the paddock. It called into question just how much Bernard had actually done in 2010 and most of 2011 to improve IndyCar as an organization, and left far too many owners and drivers with doubts about where his attention was focused. Was it just marketing and promotions?

• The $5 million Las Vegas challenge/2011 season finale was the final straw for some, and that was before the first lap of practice took place. Drivers with knowledge of the track’s recent repaving warned against holding a race on the 1.5-mile oval, citing the inevitable and dangerous pack racing it would generate.

Pleas were made to Bernard to choose a different venue simply because the risks of racing on a track where the grip was too high and the means to reduce downforce (within the rules) were so limited, the end result would be dozens of open-wheel cars glued together.

We know the outcome of the race and what took place that day in October. There was no guarantee a major crash was going to take place, or that a life would be lost, so blaming Bernard for the aftermath (which none of the drivers I’ve spoken with have done) would be dickish, at best.

But, and with a belief already in place that Bernard valued the size and spectacle of the show over driver safety, and after having their concerns about Las Vegas ignored prior to the event, losing Dan Wheldon was a deal breaker for more than a few drivers with Bernard.

Whatever trust existed between Bernard and his drivers before Las Vegas was all but gone by the time many of them flew home from Nevada.

Plenty of drivers continued to work and interact with Bernard through 2012, and a few remained as close allies, but the notion that “he’ll always choose entertainment over safety” was written in stone for many who raced at Las Vegas.

• From a business standpoint, the struggles some team owners faced trying to acquire an engine lease for 2012 proved to be another dagger for Bernard. The lack of an organized, series-run system to apportion engines and to make sure all those who wanted leases got them was a sticking point that started during the 2011 off-season and ran through the 2012 Indy 500.

A lot of promises were made to team owners that they’d either get an engine, or would get one from a different manufacturer, and in some cases, those promises were never delivered upon. It fostered a feeling, much like Loudon the year before, that the series didn’t have control over its policies and procedures.

• If everything mentioned so far have been contributing factors to the anti-Bernard movement, the 2012 edition of the Long Beach Grand Prix should be seen as the event where two different factions put their stakes in the ground and, eventually, fast-tracked his departure through separate initiatives.

First, “Turbogate,” in which the series allowed Honda to use larger cold air inlet covers for its turbochargers after Honda Performance Development, turbo maker BorgWarner and INDYCAR agreed those units were at a slight performance disadvantage to the twin-turbo BorgWarner units used by Chevy and Lotus, almost ground the championship to a halt.

I won’t rehash all of the long and drawn out details, but at its core, Chevy protested--and then threatened litigation against the series--on the basis that no formal notes on establishing turbo parity were entered into the record or added to the rulebook.

Not only did a Penske-led group of Chevy owners and GM itself vehemently oppose the concession granted to those using the single-turbo setup (Honda was the only manufacturer that used the single), but they took aim on Bernard for backing the move made by his technical department.

The turbo cover change was something INDYCAR permitted without informing the other manufacturers prior to Long Beach, and upon arrival, Chevy, Penske and Co. went ballistic after being kept in the dark—being ambushed—as some described at the time.

But was this Barnard’s doing? Was he the one tasked with picking turbo covers or sending out technical updates to the paddock? No, but with the aforementioned sensitivities about the organization and leadership of the series, the buck stopped with the CEO.

To the teams united on this appeal/litigation, being hit with a surprise at Long Beach and then allowing the new turbo cover to be used was an inexcusable sin on Bernard’s part.

Arbitration followed, all sides presented their cases and when it was over, Honda kept its larger inlet cover. It might have been a win for Honda, but for Bernard, it steeled many of the Chevy runners to find a way to send him packing.

Some of the loudest and angriest owners would eventually cool down and eventually disassociate themselves from that “Randy Must Go” group, but the group continued on and evolved into the Tony George-led takeover team that made a run at buying the series in October. More on that later.

Some have pointed to Turbogate as the flashpoint that set Bernard’s firing in motion, and it did play a big role, but not nearly as much as the costs of owning the 2012 Indy car and its spare parts.

Team owners and managers presented their case to the series for the first time at Long Beach, and it was heard with relatively open-minded approach by the series. Some left that meeting feeling positive—that the series took their concerns to heart—while others left thinking they would be in for a long fight to get the series to bring down the spare parts prices. It wouldn’t take long for the positive feelings to turn venomous.

The biggest sticking point, which also happened with the turbo cover issue, is that the series said things in a meeting—stating them as fact, which the manufacturers or owners wrote down in their own notes—which never made it into the meeting minutes or the rulebook.

Like the assurances that were given about turbo performance parity being maintained, owners were told the cost of spare parts would be capped at a total of 125 percent of the total vehicle cost. It wasn’t a huge margin for Dallara or its vendors to work from, but it’s what team owners and managers were told would be enforced. After the first few rounds went by and numerous spare parts were purchased, teams ran the numbers and found the figure to be somewhere north of 160 percent.

The cost to put a Dallara DW12 on the track, minus engine and tire lease costs, was also about $250,000 more per car than advertised. Add in the big difference in spare parts percentages, and the entire topic of cars, parts and prices led most owners to turn bright red when discussing the actual budgets required to go racing in 2012.

In an odd twist, just as the Chevy teams (and GM’s lawyer) argued that since the turbo parity assurance was never made official and INDYCAR had no grounds to allow a larger inlet cover, the series argued that since the 125 percent guarantee was never entered into an official record…the owners had no grounds to demand a price reduction on spare parts…

Talk about big balls.

(Cont.)