Sunday’s IndyCar race in Toronto marked the end of an exhausting three-week sprint for NTT IndyCar Series teams that included the changeover to hybrid powertrains and sweltering heat in Iowa spread across a doubleheader in the heartland. Throw in a busy May and June, and collectively, the paddock is tired and sore.
Thanks to the upcoming Olympic break during which IndyCar’s broadcast partner NBC will concentrate on the Paris games, no races will be held until the August 17 oval event at World Wide Technology Raceway, and with the unusually long pause, hundreds of team members will get a chance to breathe and recharge before sprinting to the championship finale on September 15 in Nashville.
There’s one or more tests scheduled to take place between Toronto and WWTR, so it won’t be possible for all of IndyCar’s 10 teams to completely shut down, but according to every squad that spoke with RACER, a rest period of some sort is in motion.
“Once we get back and get settled after Toronto, we’re going to take a week,” A.J. Foyt Racing team principal Larry Foyt told RACER. “The guys have really been putting the time in so they deserve it.”
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“We’ve given everybody the week off,” Dale Coyne said of his two-car crew. “We’ve looked at the schedule and we’ve got a couple guys in here for projects we’re working on, but 90 percent of the teams are pulling back.”
Ed Carpenter Racing general manager Tim Broyles is thankful for the break, especially after teams like ECR exhausted themselves at Iowa while repairing cars overnight between the Saturday and Sunday races.
“We’re shutting down,” he said. “The race team will be off for the full week, and then our shop-based group will have a four-day weekend. It’ll be pretty quiet, and everybody’s earned it; deserves it. If you walked through the paddock on Sunday morning at Iowa and looked at everybody’s faces, they were hammered. You look at the schedule, the garage area was literally closed, I think, for seven and a half hours.
“We had guys there until 3am and back at six. You literally have time to drive to the hotel, take a shower, pack a bag, and go back to the track, and then you’re expecting those guys to come in, perform and do pit stops?
“I’m super proud of the effort our guys did, because even under those conditions, our pit stop times were strong. But we seriously have to look at how we’re doing this. We can’t keep putting people in this situation. It’s just beating everybody down. It’s getting harder and harder to get people that want to do this, and when you have a schedule like this, it makes life harder than it should be.”
Juncos Hollinger Racing co-owner Ricardo Juncos expressed the same concern as Broyles.
“We’re going to have a full week off,” he said. “I don’t think you can realize how bad the schedule is. We’re going to end up having no people to work anymore if they keep doing this. We have no life. And it gets to a point that it is so hard to keep the motivation, the desires. You can have a passion for something, but this is way too much.”
Meyer Shank Racing co-owner Mike Shank is thankful to have reached a temporary finish line.
“Our shop is officially closed for a week, and everybody gets the week off,” he said. “It’s just an absolute brutal, brutal schedule, and these guys deserve some well-deserved time not thinking about race cars.”
Chip Ganassi Racing will need to spool up for two tests during the break.
“We do have a rookie test with Linus Lundqvist and Kiffin Simpson at Gateway (WWTR) toward the end of the break, but we’re going to try to give the guys at least long weekends,” said CGR managing director Mike Hull. “And then there’s a Nashville test we’ve been invited to with Scott Dixon.”
Arrow McLaren team principal Gavin Ward is in the same situation.
“I really wanted to shut down for a week, everybody take the same week off, but there’s the single-car test we are doing at Nashville that puts some workload on the team, and then, with the lack of availability of free time to make use of rookie days, particularly since our rookie [Nolan Siegel] arrived mid-season, there’s no way to do it with the calendar and the track availability out there, but we are able to do a day at Gateway,” he said.
“So we’ve got two single-car test days coming up in the break, but we are strongly encouraging people to take some time off. But unfortunately, we couldn’t do the whole shutdown.”