Indy’s Lost Youth

I enjoyed one of the better conversations this month during a call last Saturday with a friend that works in the IndyCar paddock.

There's no lack of talent amongst the IndyCar job corps, but with full-time offers in other forms of motorsport, many are choosing greener pastures away from Indy. (LAT)

We talked about the positive aspects of the IZOD deal and some of the potential new driver signings for 2010 before moving to a topic that managed to depress the heck out of us!

IndyCars, either in IRL or CART form, was once a 24/7/365 routine for most teams. Yet with the economy in such bad shape and with both series suffering smaller grids over the past few years, the days of full-time employment for all but members of the smallest teams began to dwindle. Sadly, the combining of the IRL and ChampCar entrants into a single series has done little to help the problem.

The top IndyCar teams retain their staff for the entire year, but once you venture outside those few powerhouse programs (Penske, Target, Andretti, and few others), being an IndyCar crew member has become a seasonal profession, and that isn’t a good thing.

The concept of a position as an IndyCar crew member being a legitimate career has all but been dismissed by the next generation of team members.

Most of the mid-pack and tail-end teams keep a few people on staff in the off season, and like the dawn of a new school year, those teams see an influx of new crew members sign on just before the first race. In some cases, their first day on the job coincides with the first day of practice during the opening round.

Whether you’re an IndyCar mechanic, truckie or damper technician with a family to support and a mortgage to pay, and provided you don’t work for Chip, Roger, or Michael, you’ve likely packed up the kids and headed for NASCAR country where jobs are plentiful and the paychecks are steady.

If you’ve ever wondered why the smaller teams have such a hard time bridging the gap to the dominant programs, a lot of it can be attributed to the difference in staff. There are a finite number of jobs available at Ganassi and Penske, and no matter how good some of the personnel might be in the IndyCar Series, there is simply a limited number of prized, full-time positions to be had these days.

That’s not to say that smaller teams have less qualified staff and the bigger teams have higher caliber employees; that isn’t always the case. But the bigger teams do tend to hold onto people for a long time, and those folks build a tight unit that operates faster and more efficiently. But it is also true that with a bigger wallet and more stability, the bigger teams can attract bigger names to engineer, manage and develop their programs.

With so few people winning the lottery to land a full-time IndyCar jobs, it has forced throngs of high quality, veteran open-wheel crewmen to head South where stability and opportunity go hand in hand. Too many experienced hands have bolting for the spoils of NASCAR, and for others, a move to sportscars or the NHRA, and it is happening out of sheer necessity.

In their wake, (and this is what depressed us the most), there’s a fairly large void of fresh, young faces working their way up the ladder for open-wheel crew members. If you had the chance to stroll through an IndyCar paddock in 2009, you saw a bunch of crew members in their late thirties to early fifties. Lots of gray hair. You have a better chance of seeing Elvis and Bigfoot flying a UFO than finding a bunch of 25-year-olds working on IndyCars.

Sadly, the apprentices – the junior IndyCar crew that once dreamt of working up through Atlantics and Lights to make it to Indy – are wisely choosing to latch on to a real career elsewhere.

And let’s be honest -- can you blame them?

While plenty of people still show up to take the 7-month positions that are offered, many come for the sake of employment rather than to invest their lives into carrying on the tradition so many IndyCar crew members held before them.

That has left the old guard to mind the proverbial store, and they will continue to fight through arthritis and injuries to maintain the high level of situational awareness needed in the heat of competition, but the clock is ticking.

The number of 49-year-old ankles, 52-year-old knees, and 45-year-old elbows that are forced to do pit stops is much higher than it should be, and as my friend noted, if the veterans and their creaky bones stopped doing the pit stops altogether, pit lane would get dangerous rather quickly. Thankfully, as many go over the wall as possible.

If all had gone according to plan, Al Unser Jr. would have worn the familiar black and gold of Lotus for the 1985 CART championship. (LAT)

As a whole, the old guard would love to pass their knowledge and pit lane duties onto the new guard, but with the high turnover rate that comes with a short-term job market, the salty veterans press on to start yet another new season without having understudies to groom.

Thinking about my own progress up the open-wheel ladder, and having gone through the same Atlantics/Lights/Indy route, if I had the same kind of options crew members face today, I’d load up the UHaul and set the GPS for NASCAR-ville in a heartbeat.

So, when the first IndyCar race gets underway next year and you’re wondering why the Target boys or the Penske crew are cranking off pit stops a few seconds faster than 75% of the field, it’s because they’ve spent every day during the off season practicing in their shops. As you watch many of the other teams lose time and track position during their prolonged pit stops, realize it’s not because they’re inept – there’s a strong likelihood they’ve barely had a chance to remember each other’s names, much less figured out how to orchestrate a flawless pit stop.

My friend summed it up perfectly. “You can’t expect a bunch of strangers…many of them who’ve come to work in IndyCars because they lost a job in another series…to show up, to learn all of the weak spots on the cars that need special attention or preparation, to know how to massage all the little parts and pieces that add up to a difference over the course of a lap, and then go do pit stops that are right there with the best teams in the series. It just won’t happen.”

He ended our call with a rather poignant, if not ominous observation.

“I’ve known my car chief for almost thirty years. We came up in the sport together. I’ve known another one of my crew guys for at least 25 years, and another for probably twenty years, if not more. Year after year, I see the same guys I came into the sport with, but where are the new faces – the young guys that want to stay? We’re all getting old together. Think about it…if all of us old guys retired tomorrow, who’d be left to run the cars? Where’s the next generation that is supposed to follow behind us? Who do we train? There’s a big gap there that no one is talking about. No young kid is going to start a career in a series where he’s going to be unemployed five months out of every year. He’s gonna go where the money is, and it’s gonna keep happening until we get the costs in this series in order.”

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

February 18th, 1985, Vol. 5 No. 2

Lotus’ Troubled IndyCar Project

A $2.5 million sponsorship contract has apparently fallen through, and real doubts now surround the future of the much ballyhooed Winkelmann Team Lotus IndyCar project. Al Unser Jr. has been released by his contract (the young star immediately snapped up by Shierson Racing) and the team is now in limbo, its future in the hands of commercial Director Ekrem Sami who is now in the United States in search of sponsors.

“Ha! That’s a good one,” Little Al chuckled at the memory of his Lotus deal gone bad.

Little Al broke through in '85 in Doug Shierson's Domino's Pizza car. (LAT)

“The Lotus thing came into my world by Ray Winkelmann. He wanted to start an IndyCar program – he contacted me and asked me if I would drive the Lotus he was having Lotus built. I, being a young, young and naive driver, thought about Lotus and said, ‘Wow! Lotus is real history. This would be a great opportunity.’”

Unser Jr. says the allure of having a new IndyCar program tailored around him was impossible to ignore.

“Really, my whole thinking was that no one else would have a Lotus. Pretty much all throughout my career at that point I was developing an IndyCar. When I went to Indianapolis for the first time with Rick Galles (and in classic Unser Family style, Little Al still pronounces ‘Indianapolis’ as ‘In-din-apolis’…I think we need to adopt the Unser delivery of the word as the one and only way to say it…) and we developed the only Eagle chassis in the field. That’s what I really liked about Roger Penske; he developed his own cars. I watched my dad and Uncle Bobby win with their own cars, so when Ray contacted me, I said ‘Of course.’ This was me getting to do something different than everyone with the Marchs and Lolas.”

Leaving Galles for Winkelmann’s Lotus outfit also came with a boost to Unser Jr.’s bank account. At least on paper.

“I got a raise from what I was being paid by Rick Galles…but I never saw any money. I signed the deal with Ray, and as a matter of fact, things got so far with the deal, he flew me over to England and I saw the wooden mockup of the Lotus IndyCar tub. It was full scale, but didn’t have a back end to it. But it was the honest-to-God real thing that would have become the proper chassis.”

How the deal ultimately fell apart gives an insight to how the world of auto racing used to work. Such a leap of faith by a hopeful team owner involving so much money would never happen today.

“I think that Ray figured that if he signed me, American sponsors would jump on board. But that’s not what happened. Ray didn’t have the funds to pay Lotus, so they stopped building the car for him (Lotus would later complete the smart-looking chassis, the Lotus 96). January rolled around and it came time for my first check to show up…and it did not. February came and still no money…and then John Paul Jr. got in trouble.”

As fortunes would send John Paul Jr. and John Paul Sr. down a path of prison time for a variety of drug-related charges, Little Al’s unfortunate fate with Lotus would quickly be forgotten with the offer of a new job.

“John Paul Jr. was supposed to drive for Doug Shierson, but when he went away, Doug called up my dad and asked him to drive the Domino’s Pizza car. Dad asked Doug if he’d rather have his son! Doug said he’d heard I was in a long-term contract with Lotus, so he didn’t bother asking. My dad told him, ‘Noooooo…he sure isn’t anymore…the deal fell through.’ A couple of days later, I was sitting in Shierson’s office in Adrian, Mi., and that’s how that deal went down.”

Unser Jr. says he never got the chance to see pictures of the finished Lotus 96 after his trip to England, but from his memories of visiting the Lotus facilities at Ketteringham Hall, a conversation with the car’s designer, Frenchman Gerard Ducarouge, has stayed with him for nearly twenty-five years.

“I was talking with him and was asking about what range of spring rates he’d had in mind for the Lotus IndyCar. He tells me, ‘I design my cars with one spring rate, and never change it. Springs never need to change on my car.’ I told the guy, ‘Hell no! That ain’t gonna happen, pal. Wait until you get to the Speedway…then we’ll see about that!’ There’s such a big difference between Milwaukee and Michigan, or Nazareth and In-din-apolis, but he would have had to learned that one the hard way. He didn’t believe me.”

BMW extracted well in excess of 1000hp from their 1.5L 4-cylinder turbo F1 engine, so making power with the new 4-cyl IndyCar engine shouldn't be an issue. The drone of 20+ IndyCars using expelling flatulent audio might be, though. (LAT)

In hindsight, Unser Jr. says the Lotus deal falling through was the best thing that could have happened to him. He’d shown his potential in CART through the 1984 season, but with Shierson in 1985, Little Al skyrocketed to the top

“Quite honestly, I was really looking forward to the Lotus. It would have been a life-learning experience and it’s just a shame that Mr. Winkelmann wasn’t able to raise the funds, but it was truly a blessing that the Shierson ride opened up when it did. It’s funny. When I signed the deal with Shierson, the first thing my dad said was, ‘Where’s my commission?’ I said, ‘Commission? You don’t get no commission!’

“We both laughed at that one. But then, dad, who didn’t have a ride at the time I went to the Domino’s team, went on to win the 1985 CART championship! He and I ran within a point of each other for the title. He was on a race-by-race deal with Roger Penske, and how it turned out was a real blessing for all of us. It was quite a year that year. Those were magical times.”

Raggedy Sounds of 2012

File this one under “Pruett’s latest stupid concern about something utterly trivial.”

The IndyCOT due in 2012 is supposed to come with a turbocharged 4-cylinder engine, which makes a lot of sense in terms of cost containment, but it falls flat in two other areas.

In terms of fuel efficiency (and yes, I know that no one looks to IndyCar racing as a place where solving global warming will take place, but manufacturers do like to promote their ‘Green-ness’ whenever possible), asking a small displacement engine to make the same kind of power a bigger V8 makes comes at the expense of fuel consumption. Expect the new motors to swallow ethanol at an alarming rate.

Readers have weighed in on Grand-Am, and improving the promotions of the series has been the most common reply. Cooling down the DP cockpits was also a popular note. (LAT)

But tops in my trivial concerns will be the sounds that come from the new engines. As a guy that grew up around 4-cyl turbos, I can tell you that they do absolutely nothing to warm one’s heart. While I grew up on 4-cyl turbos, and love them for the silly amounts of power they can generate, the rest of their attributes leave something to be desired.

Ragged, muted, farty and sounding a bit like a hair dryer with a handful of rocks stuck in the blower, I’m afraid we’ll be hearing nothing like the zoomy Cosworth DFXs, Ilmor-Chevys, or the various monster turbo V8s that dominated the last fifteen years of the CART and CCWS era.

Granted, I’m VERY pleased to know the naturally aspirated V8 tones of the current IndyCar will be gone (a vast improvement over the IRL’s deafening “If I close my eyes, I’d guess a NASCAR Truck race is going on, and hey, why are my ears bleeding?” sounds from 1997-2001), but replacing it with the soulless sounds of a turbo-4 might leave fans wanting for a richer tone to enjoy.

My email to the car’s designer suggesting they weld kazoos and whistles to the ends of the exhausts wasn’t immediately returned.

I’m big on the sights and the sounds of IndyCar racing – let’s hope the engine manufacturers can conjure up crankshafts or exhaust systems that will deliver a pack of inspiring IndyCars that make sounds to match their visual impact.

IYCFJOTF2010 Grand-Am

This week we're posting answers for the latest edition of "If You Could Fix Just One Thing For 2010" on Grand-Am. Next week's Triple Stint will focus on the IndyCar Series. As usual, please try to keep your 'IYCFJOTF2010' submissions solution-minded. Send them .

We got a few letters that summed up what many of the other emails said, and here are the two that embodied the others the best:

Marshall,

I just read triple stint, and I want to thank you for writing news and opinion without promoting ranting and complaining from readers. It's refreshing to hear constructive criticism instead of complaining.
I was lucky enough to sit next to big name Grand-Am driver on a flight to Atlanta from the July Daytona race. I was really impressed with his willingness to talk about Grand-Am with a fan. I asked him similar questions to yours, and he offered three things (I can't remember the order, though):

1. Better promotion. NASCAR owns Grand-Am and has all kinds of money/resources. He believes that Grand-Am's product is great, but no one knows about it.
2. More equality. He felt that he was down on speed (2-3mph I think) compared to other cars. I remember seeing what he was talking about while watching the July Daytona race.
3. Air Conditioning. Cockpit temps can reach 140. Enough said.

If I had to fix one thing, I would increase Grand-Am's promotion. Grand-Am has the best racing in the world right now. I understand they limit technology, but no one else has the side by side and close racing on road courses that Grand-Am has. NASCAR has the resources to promote Grand-Am and increase its fan base. I hope they do.

Kyle
Chapel Hill, NC

Hi Marshall,

here are my two-cents about what I would change in Grand-Am:

Things don't look all that bad for 2010, so there really are no immediate changes necessary. I am, however, a bit worried about DP car counts which have now been declining for a few years and are quite a far cry from the class's heyday in 2005/6. With the current "chassis cycle" and the 10 year guaranteed eligibility ending after the 2012 season I don't think that will change anytime soon as people won't buy cars if they don't know if they'll have a place to run them in the future.

So what the series and the competitors will need soon is some clarity about the future of the class. Will the current chassis be eligible past 2010? If so, will there be any changes to the cars? What can be done about cost containment? Or will we get something completely new in 2013? If so, can we already phase it in in 2012? What I would like to see, is Grand Am addressing these issues.

The DP-formula seems to have run somewhat out of steam and I think Grand Am has to be proactive if they want to reinvigorate their top class. From what I read, cost escalation for the engine programs has been a major issue that has driven teams out of the series, so this should definitely be addressed. Also, in another Triple Stint you wrote about how the lack of aircon in the DPs doesn't make potential gentleman drivers happy - this is another issue that should be looked at.

There's a need to take action, not immediately, but in the foreseeable future and I would like to see Grand Am acknowledge this instead of just "staying the course."

Andy Lutz

MISC:

• I’m hearing that not only will Audi be testing the R15 Plus in Florida in January, the test will also include the first laps of the GT3-spec R8 by the German marque. That’s a mightily accelerated timeframe for the R8’s possible ALMS GTC inclusion.

• The only confirmed Dyson Mazda for 2010 is the car of Guy Smith and Chris Dyson, but despite the claims of one site in particular, I’m hearing that Dyson Racing has been working well into the holidays to secure the funding to run a second car again. Whether the results are successful, and whether Marino Franchitti and Butch Leitzinger will still be available if the second car returns is still to be determined.

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.