What I Re-Learned This Week By Re-Reading On Track Magazine

Porsche pulled out from CART at the end of the 1990 season after taking a leap with a front-mount turbo layout on the March 90P chassis. (Porsche)

Given the current spec state of IndyCar racing, I find myself getting a bit misty eyed for the days of when manufacturers announced their withdrawal from the series!

It feels like an eternity has passed since Toyota, GM and Nissan pulled out from IndyCar. We’re so far removed from the days when multiple engines were the norm, an announcement like the one below was considered unfortunate, but not earth shattering.

If we received the same news from Honda today, we would be left with two dozen Dallara soapbox derby cars. How times change…

October 4th, 1990, Vol. 10 No. 19

Porsche Folds Indy Car Tent

Confirming rumors that have circulated for months, Porsche AG announce Sept. 18 that its Indy Car racing program would be concluded at the end of the 1990 season. Porsche declared that it now wishes to concentrate on Formula 1 racing, which it will re-enter next season in partnership with the Footwork Arrows team.

While confirming the shutdown of Porsche factory involvement in Indy Car racing, Porsche acknowledged that it is finalizing plans to put together a customer engine program for next season, the details of which could be released soon.

Likely candidates for a customer deal are Derrick Walker, who has indicated he would like to continue to run a team with or without Porsche factory involvement, and Bruce Leven’s Bayside Racing, a longtime Porsche customer in IMSA racing.

Porsche's aged self-built '2708' chassis, shown here in practice at Phoenix in 1988, was quickly replaced by a March 88C. (Marshall Pruett)

I was a big fan of Porsche’s brief participation in CART, and almost took a job as a second mechanic on the spare car in 1990.

(It paid all of $30,000 and if you’re wondering where a second mechanic on the spare car fits in the hierarchy of an IndyCar program, it’s one grade above cleaning the tractor-trailer with your tongue.)

Porsche returned to IndyCar racing with their own chassis -- the '2708' -- at the end of 1987 at Laguna Seca, where Al Unser Sr., starting 21st, retired after a few laps with water pump failure. The Porsche chassis, looking outdated on its debut, was quickly scuttled in favor of a customer chassis to house its potent 2.65L V8 turbo.

Porsche chose the March 88C chassis at a time when the majority of the field moved to Lola’s offerings. With March looking to rekindle their success and sales in CART, they were able to offer Porsche more attention and bespoke chassis solutions for their engine program. Porsche rewarded March’s commitment by sticking with the British constructor through the end of the German marque’s CART program.

Teo Fabi, coming off of three years with the Benetton F1 team, was hired to pedal Porsche’s single entry in 1988, earning eight top-10 finishes in a season marred by the death of team principal Al Holbert. Ex-Penske Racing GM Derrick Walker was drafted in to assume the running of the team, and after a solid year of development, took the Porsche Indy program to a more competitive level in 1989.

The front-mount 2.65L Porsche V8 turbo. (Marshall Pruett)

The tidy, nimble March 89P suited Fabi’s driving style perfectly, allowing the diminutive Italian to earn two poles and a win at Mid-Ohio. That victory would serve as Porsche’s only win during the four-year program.

Despite the solid platform the 89P offered, March followed Lola’s path for 1990, building a tight-waisted, sharp-nosed car that required a lot of extra effort to package its components in the narrow body. The 90P’s exterior looked impressive, but it’s what March did beneath the bodywork that was even more advanced.

So advanced, as it turned out, CART’s Board of Directors (comprised of CART team owners) deemed the car to be illegal. Through 1989, a CART chassis was permitted to have its top half constructed of carbon while retaining the aluminum shell at the bottom for the driver to sit in.

March, trying to seize an opportunity with the new 1990 rules that said the lower half of the chassis did not need to be made from aluminum, went the carbon-carbon route much to the dismay of their rivals.

After seeing the all-carbon fiber chassis denied, Walker’s team were forced to wait for March to build a new aluminum-carbon 90P chassis, which proved to be a major setback to their testing program.

To further complicating things, Porsche went the odd route of moving its single turbocharger in front of the engine in 1990 in a bid to improve throttle response from shorter turbo piping, and to optimize weight distribution. It served only to create a host of cooling, aerodynamic and chassis balance issues that would take most of the year to overcome.

For all of the artistry Alan Jenkins put into the FA12 chassis, its engine made it handle like a piece of farm equipment. (LAT)

Porsche made the smart choice to add a second car for John Andretti in 1990, effectively doubling their development pace, but with all of the redesigned 90P’s delays, the team was forced to run their March 89Ps in the first two rounds at Phoenix and Long Beach.

The funky 90P finally made its debut at the Indy 500 where to no one’s surprise, both of the new cars failed to finish. The March-Porsche 90P would score its only meaningful results in the hands of Fabi on street courses, with a pole in Denver and a best finish of third at the Meadowlands.

Between the loss of Holbert’s role as a driving force behind the program, the dramas and added costs involved with getting the 90P on track, and the adventurous forced induction architecture with their Indy engine, terminating the program wasn’t a hard decision to make.

Porsche’s F1 efforts in the 1960s notwithstanding, their dalliance in CART was never the right fit for a company whose reputation was built on sportscars. Rather than leave open-wheel behind after four tough years in CART, Porsche insisted on going further down the path, choosing the most expensive series possible – F1 – to demonstrate their abilities.

A po-faced Alex Caffi ponders what his future might have been like if not for the career-killing V12. (LAT)

As Porsche cited in the On Track story, they pulled the funding from CART to dedicate their resources to F1 in 1991. For those that remember the ill-fated Footwork Arrows-Porsche program, the German manufacturer’s move from IndyCars to F1 encountered problems that made the carbon-carbon March 90P debacle look tame.

For all of the amazing history Porsche made in motor racing up through the 962, and over the past 15 years with various prototypes and GT cars, there was a point in the late ‘80’s and early ‘90’s where the storied marque was simply lost in the CART and F1 wilderness.

Footwork drivers Michele Alboreto, Alex Caffi and Stefan Johansson (standing in for the injured Caffi at mid-season) did their best to round the Alan Jenkins-designed FA12 into shape, but with Porsche’s V12 weighing in at nearly 400 pounds, the Italian pilots fought with a car whose wrecking ball of an engine swung like a massive pendulum behind them. Turn the wheel to the left and the V12's mass shoots to the right. Turn right and the anchor swings to the left...the car's operators said it made for dizzying drives. V12's were the engine of choice in 1991, and with Honda and Ferrari serving as a benchmark, Porsche chose the most difficult path by building one of their own.

To make matters worse, the porky Porsche committed its second sin by failing to produce enough power. Being heavy and short on power has rarely produced the results anyone desires of an F1 engine, but that is what the British team had delivered to their doorstep.

Like the odd placement of the turbo in the March 90P, Porsche made another curious move by conjuring the drive platform used on their fearsome 917s, sending power to the transmission from the center of the V12, rather than the tail end of the motor, as was the norm.

The turbo placement was ill-conceived, as was March's decision to build an all-carbon tub without gaining prior approval, but Porsche's CART program had potential. They weren't far from breaking through when the plug was pulled. (IMS)

The latter move forced the center of gravity upwards on the engine to make space for the center drive, completing the holy trinity of design flaws. Heavy, high and down on power, the leaden engine wouldn’t finish out the season after being dropped like a, well, lead balloon after just six rounds of futility.

The three drivers failed to either qualify or finish at each of the six rounds the Footwork-Porsche marriage lasted. For all the potential the FA12 chassis showed, it was never able to demonstrate its full capabilities. Only with a switch to the ancient but reliable Cosworth V8 and the year-old A11C chassis did allow the team to make it to the finish line, but after failing to score points with their Porsche engine, the team was relegated to pre-qualifying – the final blow from the unsuccessful partnership. Alboreto, Caffi and Johansson ended 1991 with zero points accumulated, with the Porsche V12 bowing out as one of the worst engines to ever power an F1 car.

For 1992, the Footwork Arrows team replaced their Cosworth V8s for 1990-era McLaren-Honda V10s (badged as Mugens) in the back of a rather conventional new chassis, the FA13, allowing Alboreto to claim four top-6 finishes with the customer engines.

Right, so I turn left at ARCA, make a U-Turn at Trucks, hang a right at Nationwide, then either take the fork left to Cup or right to Indy. Got it. (LAT)

The team would go from strength to strength with the aging Mugens, leaving many to wonder what Jenkins’ sleek FA12 could have done if they had access to the Japanese powerplant in 1991.

The reasons for Porsche’s curious move to go motor racing with old chassis technology upon re-entry to CART and even older technology on their return to F1 might never be adequately explained, but their recovery from this incredibly humbling period proved it was just an aberration -- a small stain in their history books.

After watching the CART program evolve from 1987 to 1990, I can’t help but think if Porsche had stayed in IndyCars for another year or two, they would have become a major player in the series.

Rant Of The Week

Hello Triplestint,

After reading about the pending launch of your Danica News Network, I'm confused and I think you may be the only entity that can help.

As I follow Danica Patrick's ongoing and unfaltering tedious flirtation with stock car racing, I have noticed that, amongst her many superpowers, she has the ability to re-invent the mundane as the radical and the fundamentally basic as the intriguingly complex. This would be quite a talent in itself if it were not for the fact that she seems to be able to transfer this gift to those around her. Take her recent visit to Michael Waltrip Racing for example.

After she spoke with Michael with regards to running some Nationwide Series races in 2010 he said the following in something I read on ESPN.com: "The thing I liked about her, and appreciated, was it was intense -- it was just about racing a car. Her people have studied the industry and they've chosen a path for her to get experience in a car. That includes Nationwide."

Notice how a discussion about racing for a stock car team is 'intense' because 'it was just about racing a car'. Straight off the bat she has nailed it, she has made a potential employer believe that the very act of giving her a job has a special quality and intensity because she will, at some point in the future, want to do that actual job she has been hired to do. Genius!

In the world of us mere mortals, the path to Sprint Cup goes through an apprenticeship of Camping World Trucks and Nationwide Series and possibly some early ARCA events on Superspeedways like Daytona or Talladega. But team Danica have turned basic logic into the sort of intense and detailed study that only an expensive agency/consultant can truly deliver. Who am I to question their abilities and it would be simply wrong of me to suggest that 10 minutes on Wikipedia would have delivered all the information they needed on the career path of Juan Pablo Montoya, AJ Allmendinger, Sam Hornish Junior, Scott Speed and Michael McDowell.

"She got me right off the bat, just with talking about her history in open wheel and what she's accomplished, and the way she progressed to where she is now, and wanting to do the same thing in stock cars, telling the story with passion and conviction and desire. I left the meeting wanting to go race a car. It was that infectious."

If her 'passion' and 'conviction' were all it took to get MW hooked I would suggest she must be using something similar to Wonder Woman's 'lasso of truth'…

The arts and entertainment business has proved that once you have a reputation you can pass any old rubbish off as a work of art/genius. 'Mr. Bean' is a perfect example. The character that Rowan Atkinson has created has made him wealthy beyond his wildest dreams despite being a basic homage to the work of silent movie legend, Buster Keaton and that of the French physical comic genius, Jacques Tati.

Danica Patrick seems to be stock car racing's 'Mr. Bean', keeping her unsuspecting public entertained by passing off an old act as something new and original, convincing them that what she is doing is a fresh and radical approach to success in NASCAR.

So I need to know if it is just me or is she becoming a trail blazing pioneer who has thrown away the rule book only to replace it with the same rule book with a different cover?

~Brian Kerramba

Brilliant! Keep the rants coming!


The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SPEEDtv.com, SPEED, FOX, or NewsCorp.

Marshall Pruett is Auto Racing Editor for SPEEDtv.com. Pruett grew up at "Pruett's Olde English Garage," his father's shelter for abused foreign cars, and spent his childhood being dragged across the West Coast to help with his dad's amateur racing exploits.

Pruett spent twenty years working in the IRL, CART, IMSA, and most of the known open-wheel feeder series before retiring from active duty in 2001. And in case you were wondering, no, he isn’t related to Scott Pruett.

Marshall lives in Northern California with his wife Shabral.