There's not much reason to expect that this year's Bombardier Learjet 550 at Texas Motor Speedway will feature much of the pack racing that many IndyCar Series fans find so appealing. In fact, there has generally been a trend toward single-file running over the past three or four years in the IndyCar Series, even on the 1.5-mile speedways like Texas where the competition was often too close for comfort from 1997 to 2005.
The Indy Racing League was well ahead of the curve in terms of cutting costs, but turning the IndyCar Series into a Dallara-Honda spec car formula -- as it has been since the start of 2006 -- has definitely hurt the quality of racing.
AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez
Danica Patrick enters Saturday night's IndyCar race at Texas fourth in the championship standings.
When all of the entries have the same chassis and are running the same engine and tires, it's very difficult to gain an advantage, especially when the rules in terms of developing the cars are as restricted as they are in the IndyCar Series.
By now, most teams have gotten just about all they are going to get out of the Dallara, which was introduced for the 2003 season. The ones that haven't are catching up quickly, as demonstrated by the improvement on oval tracks this year by former Champ Car teams like Newman/Haas/Lanigan Racing, KV Racing and Dale Coyne Racing.
So you've got a group of 10 to 12 cars capable of turning laps within 0.1 seconds of one another around a place like Texas. Then you factor in the way teams try to maximize fuel mileage, often instructing their drivers to run single file because it's faster and more fuel-efficient than running side by side.
The end product is that for the first three-quarters of the race, drivers are pretty much cruising around, making sure they don't waste fuel and get caught out by a full-course caution if they have to pit a lap or two earlier than their more miserly foes.
By the time they are ready to race, the cars are now so closely matched that nobody can do any passing. Restarts take on an air of desperation, leading to crashes. It's a tricky problem that the IndyCar Series technical staff is going to have to solve quickly, or else the speedway racing is going to be pretty boring for the next two and a half years until a new chassis and engine package is introduced.
Then again, some folks are happy to see a bit of sanity restored to the IndyCar Series superspeedway races -- events at TMS in particular. Texas has been the site of some of the IRL's most devastating accidents, including those involving Davey Hamilton in 2001 and Kenny Brack in 2003.
Mauricio Gugelmin had an enormous accident at Texas in practice for the CART race that never happened in 2001. "Big Mo" was in Indianapolis recently for a reunion of the PacWest Racing team (and the Indy 500) and it reminded me of a conversation we had a few years ago about how difficult it is to balance speed and excitement with safety.
"The hardest thing in this business is to slow cars down, especially when you have talented engineers trying to make them go faster," Gugelmin said. "To come up with something that will slow the cars down and make everyone happy is almost impossible. I don't think it can ever be perfect. If it did, I think the sport would actually lose some of the mystique or drama that comes with the danger."
Gugelmin believes that it is more dangerous for open-wheel cars to run in close proximity in a pack than it would be if they were running faster and less restricted.
"Trying to make Indy cars race like stock cars is the biggest mistake because they are two very different types of racing," he said. "You should never mix both. Sure, they race close in stock cars, but at most of the tracks they have to back off for corners or adjust. The biggest thing, of course, is the cars have fenders over the rotating tires. I can totally understand why NASCAR drivers don't like racing with restrictor plates.
"When you find yourself at tracks where anybody with some bravery can go flat-out, it invites people to race and run close together. Then it only takes a mechanical failure or for somebody to make a mistake and you have massive accidents."
The legendary Mario Andretti is certainly not a fan of the way the IndyCar formula has evolved.
"It's terrible, and you know why? It's like CART was at the end of its heyday when they were a victim of their own success," Andretti lamented. "They had a lot of cars that were very equal, and it's hard to pass. They don't have enough stragglers. Yeah, they have Milka Duno, but they need more stragglers in the back to shake things up in traffic and all that. They don't have enough of that, in my opinion.
"The IRL formula is all wrong anyway. The cars are totally out of breath, and everywhere they go they're running terminal speed all the way around and they can't pass. With that formula, I don't see how anybody could walk away with it."
Over the past year, there have been several meetings devoted to the creation of the IndyCar Series' engine and chassis formula for 2012 and beyond. Maybe it's time to shift the focus to making the current package a bit more racy.
John Oreovicz
