Can you name the last time neither a Cadillac nor an Acura were on the podium of an IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship race? After Saturday’s Porsche-BMW-Porsche result at the Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach, I asked that question myself, and it …
Can you name the last time neither a Cadillac nor an Acura were on the podium of an IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship race? After Saturday’s Porsche-BMW-Porsche result at the Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach, I asked that question myself, and it turns out the answer is 2016, before the beginning of the DPi era. This result has been a long time coming.
The satisfaction of Saturday’s result comes not in the failure of those stalwart competitors who have stuck with the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship and whose immediate commitment to the LMDh formula that makes up the Grand Touring Prototype class was a big boost to the idea, but rather the diversity of competition. And let’s be clear, Acura has clearly built the best-out-of-the-box GTP car in the ARX-06, and Wayne Taylor Racing should have won on Saturday. But in three races, there have been three different manufacturers on the winner’s roster, and had things gone a little differently at Long Beach, it could even have been a BMW victory. While it seemed nearly impossible at Daytona, it’s likely there will be a BMW M Team RLL M Hybrid V8 win before the end of the season.
Four manufacturers that are each capable of winning on any weekend, run by world-class teams with some of the best sports car drivers on the planet. That’s a promise fulfilled. Even if the promise was unspoken, when IMSA chose to bring back the GTP name, it was implied. Harkening back to the days of the Porsche 962s, the Jaguar XJRs, the Nissan GTP ZX-Turbo, and the all-conquering Eagle Toyotas was no accident. It was an era of intense manufacturer-based competition, where anyone could win, and did — even Wayne Taylor in a Chevrolet Intrepid. True, there were periods of domination, but there were more periods with a variety of teams and manufacturers winning each weekend. It was the era that sparked my love of sports car racing and captured the imaginations of many.
BMW M Team RLL drivers joined those of Porsche Penske Motorsports on the Long Beach podium, demonstrating the rapid gains made by both makes. Motorsport Images.
BMW and Porsche have some catching up to do in order to match Acura and Cadillac on outright pace, but the gap seems to be closing quickly. Porsche Penske Motorsports won on clever strategy, with help from misfortune and error on the part of some of the key competitors. An error-free run by WTR would have brought almost certain victory. But a win is a win, and sometimes the winner is just the one that makes the fewest mistakes and has the least trouble.
While Ricky Taylor going full-send in the closing laps of the Long Beach race wrecked WTR’s Acura — for the second race in a row after Filipe Albuquerque did the same toward the end of the Twelve Hours of Sebring — and did some damage to WTR’s title chances, it also demonstrates the importance of victory to these drivers and teams. While they may play the points game later in the season, right now it’s about standing on top of the podium. Winning is paramount.
There is part of the promise of GTP unsatisfied, however. While convergence between LMDh and Hypercar is playing out in the World Endurance Championship, where on Sunday the podium for the 6 Hours of Portimao was Toyota GR010 Hybrid Hypercar, Ferrari 499P Hypercar and Porsche 963 LMDh, that hasn’t yet come to fruition in the WeatherTech Championship. But it’s likely the call of competing in the U.S. will prove alluring to the likes of Toyota and Ferrari.
Could we see 15 or more GTP cars at the 2024 Rolex 24 At Daytona? Yes, that’s a real possibility, with Acura, BMW, Cadillac, Ferrari, Lamborghini, Porsche and Toyota all lining up, and perhaps even Peugeot and Alpine running as other brands their parent companies sell in the North American market. It’s an exciting proposition.
GTP is already fulfilling some of its promises. We can’t wait for its full potential to be realized.
Welcome to the RACER Mailbag. Questions for any of RACER’s writers can be sent to mailbag@racer.com. Due to the high volume of questions received, we can’t guarantee that every letter will be published, but we’ll answer as many as we can. Published …
Welcome to the RACER Mailbag. Questions for any of RACER’s writers can be sent to mailbag@racer.com. Due to the high volume of questions received, we can’t guarantee that every letter will be published, but we’ll answer as many as we can. Published questions may be edited for length and clarity. Questions received after 3pm ET each Monday will appear the following week.
Q: Do IndyCar drivers use spotters around the course that will help them know when other drivers are around them? In NASCAR at Road America (and probably other road courses, as well as ovals) they have spotters positioned all around the course to help the drivers know when other cars are getting next to them. Perfect example, the pass at Long Beach where Pato O’Ward went down the inside of Scott Dixon and they made contact — would Dixon have had a spotter at that moment that could have helped? If not any idea why not? A simple “inside, inside” from a spotter could have been a huge help in that instant.
Craig C., Slinger, WI
MARSHALL PRUETT: It’s more a case of one spotter placed strategically on road and street courses, instead of multiple. And not every team uses spotters outside of the ovals.
The Dixon/Pato deal was a tough one because if you know O’Ward, he’s always going to fire his car into the gap, but even knowing that wouldn’t have prevented what happened because he cut to the inside so much later than anyone expected — including Dixon — and from so far back, it wasn’t something Scott or any other driver would have anticipated.
If Dixon had a spotter right there, and was on the radio button leading into the corner, I’m guessing they might have had time to say a word or two as Pato lunged down the inside, but this was more of a surprise than something we saw coming the entire time.
I don’t blame O’Ward for trying, but it was a risky attempt that really needed Dixon to know it was going to happen so he could have moved to the left to save the two of them from making contact. Sometimes that happens — the driver on the outside catches a last-second glimpse in their mirror and adjusts to avoid being hit. That didn’t happen here, and we got the outcome at hand.
Q: Back in 2017 (I think), I heard that the long-awaited book about the history of the Newman/Haas team was put on hold right before it went to the publisher at the request of Carl Haas’s widow. I have not seen any more information on it. Do you know anything about it, and can you check with Gordon Kirby?
Joe Mullins
MP: I spoke with a friend about it at Long Beach and was told the same hold remains in place by his widow. Prospects of seeing the book appear in print didn’t sound promising.
The Newman/Haas story would make a heck of a book, but it seems increasingly unlikely that it will ever get the chance. Motorsport Images
Q: I’ve been wondering something about the upcoming IndyCar hybrid engines for a while now, and recently I haven’t been able to get it out of my head, so I might as well ask.
Electric motors are very torquey, and we all know torque figures have a massive impact on how cars drive depending on how much torque there is and where in the rev range they hit. A lot has been made of the added power, but little talk of the added torque. Do we have an idea of how this is going to influence things? Do they expect it to be in the middle of the rev range? Do they expect to be tuning the engine to hit its power band at higher or lower RPM and having the electric motor handle the other side? Or is it expected to be a more consistent increase across the rev range?
I’m mainly curious because of Indy NXT. I worry that if the added torque comes in too low, hitting hard out of corners, we may end up in a situation where Indy NXT does not adequately train its drivers for the jump to IndyCar, not unlike how it was often said the older Lights cars didn’t sufficiently prepare them for the DW12. And if that happens we have to ask ourselves how to solve that conundrum.
PS: Last week you had a question about if TMS had a road course, and you said you didn’t know. I am happy to inform you that yes, TMS has a 2.3-mile 10-turn infield road course. The ALMS used it in 2000 and 2001, with the 2001 race being the site of the only podium ever achieved by the stylish but fragile Panoz LMP07. Whether or not it has been maintained in a usable state, however, I cannot speak to.
FormulaFox
MP: Definitely understand the training concern, but we trained Indy Lights drivers in the 1990s with flat-bottom cars that made limited downforce and had 420hp and sent them to CART where they had underwings and lots of downforce and 900-plus horsepower, and the Kanaans and Hertas and Helios and Dixons of the world did just fine when dealing with the jump to light speed.
Indy NXT and all of its previous iterations have fluctuated heavily when it comes to speed, technology, and relevance to what those kids would drive in the big series. And yet, each era has seen phenomenal talent emerge and thrive in IndyCar, so I’m not worried about a turbo motor from Chevy or Honda, which already makes prodigious torque, being aided with an extra dose of electric torque. Considering the extra weight the cars will be carrying, the ERS units won’t give drivers the explosive acceleration that made the former LMP1 Hybrids disappear out of the corners like they were dragsters.
Great note about TMS; I’d forgotten about it being part of the early days of the ALMS when half of its schedule seemed to be on crappy rovals. I’m struggling to recall the old infield section as being something the track has preserved; in walking and driving around the infield, nothing stood out as being maintained and utilized, but I could be wrong.
It’s an increasingly common conversation among racing fans in the United States who want to see success in Formula 1. The talent pool is clearly there, so why are there not more drivers in the frame for F1 seats? Logan Sargeant has become the first …
It’s an increasingly common conversation among racing fans in the United States who want to see success in Formula 1. The talent pool is clearly there, so why are there not more drivers in the frame for F1 seats?
Logan Sargeant has become the first full-time American on the grid in over 15 years, and at a time when immensely skilled young drivers are shining in what appears to be an ever-strengthening IndyCar field, it feels like there should be a conveyor belt queuing up to join him in F1. Instead, there are three in Formula 2, but none are banging the door down quite yet.
While Ecuador can also lay claim to Juan Manuel Correa and both Guatemala and Spain the same for Brad Benavides, the youngest of the trio and best-placed is Jak Crawford. At just 17 and Red Bull-backed, he’s got time on his side, an F1 team’s support and – like Correa – a podium to his name.
But his story is perhaps a good example of why it’s taken so long to reach the point of fans having an American F1 driver to get behind, and why the three currently chasing the dream in F2 – and all of those who may follow – deserve the utmost respect.
Crawford was hotel-hopping around Italy at the age of 12 to start racing karts, before a growth spurt – hardly unusual for a kid entering his teens, but also not something you can predict – made that path appear too challenging and a move into Formula 4 cars in Mexico followed after he turned 13.
That wasn’t exactly a stable period, as he was still racing karts alongside a stint in USF2000, but then it all changed very quickly in October of 2019, when he was still just 14 years old.
“My dad received an email or a phone call from Dr. (Helmut) Marko saying that he wanted to meet us in Mexico City,” Crawford recalls to RACER. “This was back in in 2019. We were in Houston. So of course we are close to Mexico City – only an hour flight. So they were there for the grand prix, of course, and me and my dad got the flight and met Dr. Marko that night.
“That was my my first interaction with him. I had a 15-20 minute chat with him, which went well, and that was when he said he wanted to see me on track. So within a week, he sent me to the Milton Keynes headquarters to go in the simulator. And then I went to Van Amersfoort Racing (in the Netherlands) for time in their simulator as well.
After making a good impression on Red Bull’s Helmut Marko, Crawford’s F1 hopes got back on the rails with a string of junior programs in Europe including Italian F4 with Van Amersfoort in 2020. Red Bull Content Pool
“All was good on the simulator, and then I went to a two-day test at the Red Bull Ring. There were some other Red Bull Junior drivers there, there was Johnny Edgar there, and Harry Thompson, who was a part of Red Bull at the time, so I was sort of up against them.
“At the Red Bull Ring, I remember it was very, very cold, very wet for half of the day – it was really tough to get any sort of tire temperature or anything. But at the end of the first day, he had already offered me a contract and said he was impressed by my simulator work and my first day and that was it. It was done on the first day.
“So that was that was really nice. That was a moment I think I’ll remember forever.”
There had already been a training camp with the Ferrari Driver Academy that had amounted to nothing, at which point Crawford felt the F1 dream had disappeared. But in the space of three weeks he’d gone from having first contact with Marko to signing a contract that would put him on course for a full season of Formula 4 in Europe.
It’s a dream to many, but it came at an often-overlooked price when you think about what many other young teens would normally be doing at Crawford’s age.
“I miss my family, of course,” he says. “I had to leave school quite early at 12 years old, then I started doing homeschooling or online school on my own. So I think I miss, you know, the bit of the childhood of growing up as a teenager and the high school part of it, which is tough. It was something that I wanted – I’m a very social person, especially with my friends.
“So that was a really difficult part, to miss out on on the social life of just an American sort of high school thing. But it’s definitely worth it.”
During that time, Crawford was being fast-tracked from Formula 4 towards Formula 1. And yet he was still hotel hopping around Europe as he raced for Van Amersfoort, British-based Hitech, German team Motopark and renowned Italian outfit Prema.
Last month’s long flight to Melbourne paid off with an F2 podium. Red Bull Content Pool
It was less than a year ago that Crawford finally got a permanent base he could call home – or at least a home away from his family’s Houston home – and even that was designed around his racing career and where he needed to be, with the hardly-glamorous Milton Keynes (I’m British, I can say it…) picked due to its proximity to his F2 team Hitech and Red Bull’s factory.
“I do feel I have matured, especially as I’m living on my own already,” he says. “I was living alone at 16… I have to cook for myself, I have my own car, I drive myself around, places I need to go. And it sort of feels like I have a job – even though I’m still in Formula 2, it feels like have a job and I’m doing everything for myself.
“So yeah, I do feel like I’ve had to mature more as well. On the racing part of it, I’m racing guys that are older than me, and with quite a bit of experience in racing. So in that part, I have to advance myself. I feel like in my career, I’ve done a good job of doing that even since an early age in go-karts, always moving up early to the next category, which was good. I think that sort of helped me in the junior careers to be where I was at, in F3 at such a young age.”
After his podium in the F2 sprint race in Melbourne and as the second-longest serving member of the Red Bull Junior Team at just 17, Crawford appears to be on a promising trajectory towards F1 at some stage in the future. But despite it working out for him so far, he would prefer it – both for himself and other Americans who aspire to race in F1 – if there were options to race closer to home and not be at a disadvantage to other drivers.
“It does matter if there was a route to Formula 1 in the U.S., I think,” he says. “I do wish there was a better one, although there’s not many ways I could see it happening any better. Of course, they have (series) like the U.S. F4 Championship, which is I’m pretty sure is FIA-driven. But that’s all they really got. I think they have a regional series as well. But it stops there and it’s not going onto an F1 path.
“So when you get that chance to go to Europe on an F1 path, you have to take it. It’s really difficult to learn all the tracks and stuff like that. And it’s a different type of racing over there – completely different from racing in the US to Europe. So, I wish there was a better path, but I don’t think there possibly will be.”
Formula 1’s owners Liberty Media are listening, but it won’t be a quick fix. So for now, drivers like Crawford will continue have to consider such a major life change if they want to chase an F1 future.
Kyle Larson is not a driver who gets sentimental very often. Larson is California cool, and when he does get emotional, or #BluntLarson as social media labels him more often than not, it’s about something concerning the racing or a decision NASCAR …
Kyle Larson is not a driver who gets sentimental very often.
Larson is California cool, and when he does get emotional, or #BluntLarson as social media labels him more often than not, it’s about something concerning the racing or a decision NASCAR has made. Ahead of the Bristol dirt race, Larson had a few such takes when he said NASCAR officials have a way of overcomplicating things by using a drone and reiterated that the sport shouldn’t be on dirt. Then he dropped an F-bomb in his care center interview about Ryan Preece.
Honesty and straightforwardness are more of Larson’s style. But on Sunday evening, after winning at Martinsville Speedway for the first time, the rarely seen sentimental side of Larson came out in his winner’s press conference.
It started when Larson was asked where he was going to put the grandfather clock. Martinsville’s rich history of awarding a clock to its race winners is unique and highly regarded, and it’s not uncommon to hear a race winner immediately share where they plan on putting their new possession.
Larson doesn’t know just yet, but he too had already thought about it before leaving the racetrack. Owen, Larson’s son, wants it in his bedroom. But Larson doesn’t want him to break it. Plus, the clock does work, including chiming at the appropriate times, and Larson knows that will eventually annoy Owen.
But another reason Larson isn’t sure is that “that’s probably one of my most prized trophies.”
The half-mile Martinsville Speedway, known as paperclip, has not been kind to Larson in his NASCAR career. In his 16 previous starts going into Sunday, Larson had three top-five finishes. It’s a racetrack that, whenever there is a test available, Larson is signed up for because of how much he’s struggled at the track. He’s also put in tons of time away from the track on the simulator and iRacing trying to figure it out.
Sunday’s win was an accomplishment of something Larson didn’t see possible.
“I was teared up the whole last lap,” Larson said. “I heard Cliff [Daniels] was teared up, too. So that feels really, really special because he’s so strong and emotionally strong. To hear that means a lot.
“This win here today means a lot for everybody and to Hendrick Motorsports as well with everything this track and trip means to them.”
Larson’s Martinsville win ended years of hurt at the Virginia track. John K Harrelson/Motorsport Images
This is one of the reasons why Larson isn’t going to let the clock become just another trophy.
“I’m not into clocks or anything like that, so being that it’s a clock doesn’t add any significance to me,” Larson said. “But I think every time you look at it, it’ll remind me of the 10 years of struggling I’ve had here and then to accomplish the win that we now have and the work.
“This was probably the first weekend I’ve shown up here with a positive attitude, honestly. I’ve left here just mad. I’ve hated this place. I’ve wished it would flood. I’ve wished a lot of bad things on this place. And it’s not going anywhere. I wish it was like that (pointing to a picture on the wall). Maybe dirt.
“I think just because it’s a tough track, that’s why it means a lot.”
One would think that winning is what matters. It’s the goal of every race car, and with winning comes glory and championship points. The trophy, to some, might be an afterthought or bonus.
Not to Larson. while the grandfather clock is often mentioned and very well known as the prize for winning at Martinsville, Larson is a driver who is always curious about what the winning trophy is going to look like.
“Oh yeah. Definitely. For sure,” Larson said. “Typically, they have the trophies somewhere throughout the weekend, so you get to see it before you race, and the majority of NASCAR trophies are really cool. So, you know when you win, you’re going to get something cool.
“But even like sprint car races, rarely are there trophies that look cool. But when there is, not that you put any more pressure on yourself to win, but when you do win, you’re like, ‘All right, that’s pretty cool,’ and get to take that home.
“Thankfully, NASCAR races do have all pretty cool trophies.”
And one special clock that Larson finally gets to figure out where to put and be reminded of his accomplishment with every chime.
“For us, everything is bad.” “That was one of our worst days in racing.” “We are not good enough.” “I don’t think this package is going to be competitive eventually.” Those quotes might sound familiar, and that’s because they were all from Mercedes …
“For us, everything is bad.”
“That was one of our worst days in racing.”
“We are not good enough.”
“I don’t think this package is going to be competitive eventually.”
Those quotes might sound familiar, and that’s because they were all from Mercedes Formula 1 team principal Toto Wolff either during or after the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix. To add some context, Lewis Hamilton and George Russell had just finished fifth and seventh. Given the fact that in 2012 — three years after the team won the world championship as Brawn — Mercedes managed to score just a solitary seventh place from the final six races of the season, a year in which it won a race no less, you’d have thought by Wolff’s comments that both cars were out in Q1.
I get it, Mercedes has extremely high expectations and to be so far off Red Bull’s pace for the second consecutive season hurt. But while that Red Bull dominance runs the risk of making 2023 boring to many neutrals who want a fight at the front, those Mercedes expectations and how it intends to try and meet them provides one of the most fascinating storylines.
For starters, we’re talking about a team that finished second in Australia, is just nine points behind the second-placed team in the constructors’ championship and already has a front-row start to its name this year. It could be in bigger trouble, and certainly could have further to climb.
Yet it’s the actual second-placed team in the constructors’ championship, Aston Martin — with a Mercedes power unit, gearbox and rear suspension components — that highlights just why Wolff was so despondent early on. That another team using those Mercedes parts could be quicker was a massive shock.
And yet the narrative changed almost instantaneously. As quick as Wolff and Mercedes were to take the optimism of the car launch and throw it into the bin in Bahrain, by Saudi Arabia the team principal was almost giddy when talking about the steps already being found back at the factory as it searches for new directions.
When was the last time a front-running team was speaking in such terms about sweeping car changes?
Innovative approaches can be risky, as the sidepods of the Mercedes F1 W14 have shown. Steve Etherington/Motorsport Images
Of course, so much of the focus is on the sidepod concept that Mercedes has opted for, standing out so clearly compared to the rest of the grid. But as it got to work trying to redesign its car for 2023 and beyond, Mercedes clearly identified there was much more to it than that. The team had previously stated the sidepods weren’t a major performance differentiator, and that’s a position that holds.
“To be honest, perhaps we’ve adopted the word ‘concept’ to mean sidepods, but what we are doing is looking at bigger departures from what we have been doing,” trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin said recently. “So this car is an evolution of the car that we had last year — a lot of that is tied around where we have got the side-impact structure. We’re looking at bigger departures because it’s evident that this hasn’t given us the performance that we’d like.
“Saying that, there are other areas of the car that we know that we can improve as well. It would be very misguided to believe that if we put a different sidepod on it all of that gap is going to vanish. The reality is that the vast majority of that gap is going to have to come from other performance areas.
“We’ve got a lot of projects at the moment to try and bring performance over the next five races.”
The key to understanding why Mercedes switched approach so quickly — and why Wolff went from optimism to despair to optimism faster than the W14 can change direction — comes from the reality of when the team knew it was in trouble. To that end, Shovlin says a quick turnaround is possible due to how early the team recognized it didn’t have the development potential it wanted.
“You can look at your development rate in the wind tunnel and before we had even got to Bahrain there were conversations about looking at bigger departures,” Shovlin said. “That’s not like looking at it in isolation for this year’s car development — we’ve done that over the course of the last 10 years. If you’re not finding the gains you need, you make a bigger change, explore another area and often you unlock that.
“That had already happened before Bahrain, but perhaps the urgency to try and bring those bits to the track has gone up following the early races.”
In a cost cap era, decisions need to be clear and made at the earliest possible opportunity in order to get the most value out of them. No longer can a team like Mercedes simply explore every avenue with almost endless investment until something clicks; it needs to identify a route it believes has potential and commit to it fully.
That means doing so when there’s not the same ability to back out as in the past. It explains to an extent why there was such determination from Mercedes to exhaust the current direction first, because the time and money invested into it couldn’t be written off prematurely.
But that also adds to the intrigue around its current situation. If Mercedes really is finding exciting new directions that are likely to provide a major performance gain compared to the previous car, then it’s going to result in a clear closing of the gap at the front, whenever it can actually bring items to the track.
Shovlin’s “next five races” included Melbourne, but that’s still taking us up to the end of May or early June, and it’s still a stretch. Teams map out development plans many months in advance — McLaren has already talked about a B-spec car sometime between Baku and the summer break — and Mercedes has changed tack late.
It’s a bit too simplistic to think the current gap in races provides more freedom to develop the car, given the fact that the race team doesn’t design wind tunnel parts and vice versa. But it will allow some more in-depth analysis of what is and isn’t working on the current car, because there are going to be strengths that Mercedes will want to protect based on its performance in Australia.
Last year was a case of trying to iron out a few specific, very big, problems with a car that Mercedes had faith in. This year is the opposite as it chases a complete revision as quickly as possible in a season that still has 20 races remaining.
Get it right and the impact could be huge, not only within the current year but also future seasons given the stability of the regulations. Get it wrong and the impact could still be huge, but for different reasons.
A little after 1:30pm local time on April 1, J.R. Todd and John Force collided in the second round of NHRA Funny Car qualifying for the Winternationals at In-N-Out Burger Pomona Dragstrip. At first glance, it looked like Force got the worst, and his …
A little after 1:30pm local time on April 1, J.R. Todd and John Force collided in the second round of NHRA Funny Car qualifying for the Winternationals at In-N-Out Burger Pomona Dragstrip.
At first glance, it looked like Force got the worst, and his John Force Racing machine was heavily damaged. The wild incident happened in seconds as Force lost control of his car, veered into Todd’s (left) lane and collided with Todd when their parachutes tangled. Todd was then along for the ride as Force’s car crossed back into the right lane and hit the wall head-on.
Both drivers walked away, and both competed the next day. But the story goes much deeper for Kalitta Motorsports.
To the naked eye, it might have looked like Todd’s car, his primary car, escaped with minor damage. In reality, both the body and chassis were badly damaged, and for the rest of the day, the team began making plans to get it back to Indianapolis, where Precision Built Race Cars (PBRC) could get to work on repairs.
Kalitta Motorsports was initially scheduled to stay out west between Pomona and Las Vegas. So, a decision had to be made whether to leave the hospitality trailer and equipment on the West Coast while two team members drove to Indianapolis to drop off the chassis before going to the race shop in Ypsilanti, Mich.
How did the car get to Indianapolis? With help from a friend and a touch of old-school racing transportation.
“Del [Worsham] and I have a great relationship, personal and professional,” said Kalitta Motorsports general manager Chad Head. “Anytime we both get screwed up, we always come to each other and go, ‘What do we do? Here’s what I think.’ I was going down a path and Del goes, ‘Why would you do that? Just take my Tundra and my open trailer … put your guys in it and go home, and get this car to Indianapolis.’
“So, Saturday night, we hashed that out and that’s what our two hospitality guys got in Sunday afternoon and headed east. It takes everybody to try to make the best plans you can; you’ve got to use the people around you, and that’s what I tried to do.”
Incredibly, the story doesn’t end there.
With Todd’s primary car on the road, the 2018 world champion went into Sunday’s eliminations driving his backup. Todd didn’t drive it long.
In the first round of eliminations, Todd’s car blew to literal pieces before the finish line. Todd again climbed out and walked away.
Kalitta Motorsports was now down two cars, and the team’s workload got much heavier. Any plans team members had during the off-week between Pomona and Las Vegas were gone, with it becoming an all-hands-on-deck effort from all to rebuild its fleet of cars.
“We’re fortunate to have three complete race cars,” Head said. “We travel with two, and we have one at the race shop (for) this situation. You never dream of this situation happening, but last year we made the investment, and we built a third car exactly for this reason. So, our efforts and the financial part of it really paid off in doing what did
“So, we basically were left with our third car in line — which is a great race car, no issues at all — but it was at the shop. Getting our primary car back to Indianapolis to those who constructed the car ASAP was pivotal. Every hour, every minute counted to get that car back to Indianapolis.”
The front half of Todd’s chassis was destroyed in the Saturday qualifying crash. The car’s body is likely headed to life as a show car because of how much patchwork it will require.
The backup car was destroyed in the Sunday explosion. While the body was a complete loss after the explosion, Kalitta Motorsports will look closer at how much work needs to be done on the chassis in the coming days, as the focus has been on getting the primary back in action.
To better understand what has gone into Kalitta Motorsports and Todd getting to Las Vegas for this weekend’s Four-Wide Nationals, here is a day-by-day timeline picking up with the rest of the team departing Pomona for Michigan and the hauler then departing the team shop to head back west to Las Vegas.
Monday, April 3
The team haulers depart Pomona for the race shop in Ypsilanti, Mich. The hospitality team members, who left Pomona Sunday, arrived in Indianapolis Monday night with the primary car from the Saturday crash.
Tuesday, April 4
PBRC begins its work on the primary chassis. The two team haulers arrive at the race shop in Michigan at midnight.
Wednesday, April 5
By 2 p.m., the third chassis — now to become the backup — is scaled and ready to go. By the end of the day, the fabrication department has two new Supra bodies prepared to be fitted into the chassis. Also, by the end of the day, the primary chassis repair is completed by PBRC in Indianapolis.
In the morning, a Kalitta box truck leaves for PBRC in Indianapolis and returns that evening with the repaired primary chassis.
Friday, April 7
Now back in the race shop, the primary chassis is at the attention of the whole race team in the morning, who works to get it scaled. By 6 p.m., the chassis is ready for the clutch, safety systems, and all the electronics to be installed.
Saturday, April 8
A day of clutch, safety systems, and electronics are installed in the chassis.
“Everything was done Saturday night,” Head said.
Sunday, April 9
The team has the day off for Easter.
Monday, April 10
The race shop is cleaned, and the team haulers reloaded to completion by 2pm.
Tuesday, April 11
Kalitta Motorsports team haulers depart for Las Vegas, where they are expected to arrive Wednesday.
“The effort and the team camaraderie as far as Kalitta Motorsports,” Head said when asked about the biggest thing to know from the last week. “It started with Connie 60-plus years ago and it continues today, and everybody wants to work as hard as they can for Connie. The coordination — it started with our two hospitality and Del helping us out, and then it went into the chassis manufacturer there in Indianapolis and then the entire staff at Kalitta Motorsports in Ypsilanti. We have a traveling crew, but we also have a shop crew, so this was a really total team effort. I think it shows preparation.
“The last couple of years, our team hasn’t produced the results that we would like to see, that Connie would like to see, or our partners would like to see. But we’re prepared, and we’re working really hard to get that trophy.
Welcome to the RACER Mailbag. Questions for any of RACER’s writers can be sent to mailbag@racer.com. Due to the high volume of questions received, we can’t guarantee that every letter will be published, but we’ll answer as many as we can. Published …
Welcome to the RACER Mailbag. Questions for any of RACER’s writers can be sent to mailbag@racer.com. Due to the high volume of questions received, we can’t guarantee that every letter will be published, but we’ll answer as many as we can. Published questions may be edited for length and clarity. Questions received after 3pm ET each Monday will appear the following week.
ED’s note: We had a few letters from readers last week wanting to know the identity of the person shown speaking to Devlin DeFrancesco on the TV broadcast after he climbed out of his crashed car at TMS. According to the team, it was “Coach Hector,” aka DeFrancesco’s personal performance coach and trainer Hector Maradiaga of Infinity Sports Institute in the Miami area – MG.
Q: Wasn’t Texas run at night at one point? If so, does nighttime affect the racing dramatically?
Shawn, MD
MARSHALL PRUETT: It was, and it does. It’s the swings in temperature from the start of the race to the middle and latter stages when thinner air becomes thicker air and influences downforce, which can be tuned throughout the race — within reason — by teams during pit stops, and with the change in downforce, you’re also at risk of burning off your tires if you start overly light on aero and cause the tires to slide.
Q: While the seating chart and number of grandstands for the 2023 Honda Indy Toronto are the same and the promoters don’t anticipate adding additional ones, it’s evident that the current pit lane has to be reconfigured to fit a 27-car field. As you know, the pit lane that has been in use since 2016 barely squeezed in 24 full-time entries last year. I know that the promoters and IndyCar have a plan. That’s great, but what is it?
The reason I am asking is so I, and no doubt others like me, can figure out the best place to sit if we want to have a stellar view of the action in the pits. The promoters usually post a Festival Map diagram that shows people how the track and its infield is laid out, but the only track map that is on the site right now is for 2022. If you could get IndyCar and Honda Indy Toronto’s promoters to shed more light on this, it would be appreciated.
David Colquitt
MP: Based on a conversation I had with IndyCar’s Jay Frye about this exact Toronto pit lane scenario during the offseason, this year’s race will indeed squeeze 27 cars onto the same location as last year.
Q: Were you able to speak to Evi Gurney or anyone else at AAR about the Dan Gurney autobiography? If so, what’s the latest update? We’ve been hearing (for years now) that Evi is going through photographs. I’m beginning to wonder if we’ll ever see his autobiography in print.
Rick Johnson, Lynnwood, WA
MP: I fly down to LA on Wednesday and will head straight to AAR. I’ll get an update while there, Rick.
Q: I’ve always wondered how the GTD teams pick what car they run, and how that may be different from the GTD PRO teams. Is it driver preference? Business interests (like, I’m a Porsche dealer so I’m going to run Porsche)?
Bill Jackson
MP: All about the preference of whomever is paying the Pro-Am GTD bills, including the manufacturers. (That part’s supposed to be a secret). Take the new AO Racing team. Owner/driver/financier PJ Hyett is a lover of Porsches, so they run a Porsche. Could be a dealership thing, like Paul Miller Racing which has run just about every GT3 model made by a brand they represent — BMW, Porsche, Audi, and Lamborghini come to mind among the cars they’ve raced that have a direct link to what they sell on the street. And then you have the privately funded Magnus Racing, which has run every GT3 car on the planet and frequently switches brands to ensure it is using the hottest model of the season. GTD PRO teams are, almost exclusively, fully funded by the factories.
IndyCars under the stars at Texas was a thing until pretty recently. Phillip Abbott/Motorsport Images
Q: I watched every minute of the race at TMS, as I do every year. I was amazed when I read the story on RACER that the race attendance improved significantly. Sorry, but that doesn’t pass the eye test. No secret that huge portions of the grandstands are closed off and have been for years. But the grandstands that were open had so few people that it was painful to watch. In fact, after a few laps, it was obvious that the director of the broadcast was taking pains not to use shots that showed how empty the stands were.
Ovals are the heritage of IndyCar. While I love seeing them run on street and road courses (I’ve been to Mid-Ohio 15 times), it is sad that there are only five ovals on this year’s schedule. TMS needs to stop yapping and actually put fans in the seats, and Roger and his folks better figure out how to help.
Bob Isabella, Cleveland, OH
MP: Nowhere in the story did we state there was a significant improvement in attendance. I wrote that there was a double-digit percentage increase in ticket sales, and that there was a visible year-to-year increase, but we also included a photo that clearly demonstrated the stands were anything but full.
The story was a deserving nod to the track’s new efforts to do better, and as I noted, they didn’t say what exactly that increase happened to be. If it was 10 percent, and there were 5000 people last year, it means there were 5500 this year, or some variation on that theme. Whatever it was, a double-digit increase is meaningful, considering how poor attendance was in 2022.
I’ve hammered Texas in the past — last year being the most recent — for the poor efforts to grow its IndyCar audience, so what purpose would barking at the promoters again, after they’ve demonstrated an improvement, happen to serve?
For those of us who were there on pit lane or in the stands on April 2, there was a feeling of encouragement that Texas can and did do better, and was given a ton of footage to use to draw a lot more people in next year. If, after a whale of a 2023 race, sales are flat in 2024, there’s no hope for the future. But for now, with the track’s renewed interest in IndyCar, I can’t find a reason to ignore the positives and dwell on the negatives.
Q: Will IndyCar be using any of the new aero updates this year at the 500? The tracks are super-different. I’m wondering how much, if any, crossover there is with the new parts. Also, if the caution didn’t fly, do you still take Newgarden as your winner?
Ian
MP: IndyCar will have new stability wickers and new rear wing mounting plates that will allow for more downforce to be cranked in for race setups. There’s more that I’ll put together in a written piece and a video once we get to the open test later in the month. Minus the last caution, Pato would have been hard to beat.
The IndyCar calendar offers what is probably the most diverse collection of tracks of any racing series in the world. This is usually taken to mean that over a season, IndyCar pays visits to the likes of speedways, short ovals, road courses, and …
The IndyCar calendar offers what is probably the most diverse collection of tracks of any racing series in the world. This is usually taken to mean that over a season, IndyCar pays visits to the likes of speedways, short ovals, road courses, and street courses. However, the variability in surface type, bumpiness, grip level, and ambient conditions that IndyCar teams will experience over the course of a season is also extraordinarily diverse, and something that engineers are constantly analyzing and assessing as they fine-tune setups in search of every ounce of performance.
Unlike every other sport, in racing each team is not only battling with one another but also with the field of play itself, and that arena changes from week to week (and even session to session) in ways that no other sport would allow. While the likes of soccer, football, and baseball have standardized their playing surfaces – and even gone so far as to play indoors under stadium roofs to protect from outside conditions – teams in racing are left to adapt on the fly to the ever-changing characteristics of the race track.
Engineers are almost always thought of as engineering the car, but there times when a better way to think about it might be that they are trying to reverse-engineer the track, and simply apply the appropriate changes to the car as a result.
Teams and engineers are constantly adjusting a whole host of setup parameters in reaction and anticipation to track surface and ambient conditions changes that occur throughout a race weekend. Being able to adapt (and even predict) these changes offers a huge competitive advantage to those that can continuously keep the car’s setup in the optimum window, even as the variables are changing all around them.
The track surface
The joke that is made wherever race car engineering is taught is that the four most important parts of a race car are the tire, the tire, the tire, and the tire. It’s a saying based on truth: the importance of the tires is no joke, they are the only part of the race car that actually comes into contact with the road. By extension, the most important part of the race track is the surface, for largely the same reason. The state of the racing surface is the dominant factor in the amount of available grip for the tires in a given session, lap, or even corner.
Track temperature is the single biggest consideration when assessing the surface. Tires have an operating window where they produce the most grip: too cold and the rubber doesn’t get sticky, too hot and the tire will oversaturate and begin to slide. Given the relationship between a tire’s pressure and temperature, engineers are constantly adjusting the starting tire pressures based on track temperature in order to keep the tire in its operating window.
Track temperature is hugely influential on tire pressure and temperature, and therefore its effect on overall grip is very powerful. The track grip, usually quantified as a friction coefficient, then dictates practically every aspect of a setup: from downforce level to spring stiffnesses to static alignments to gearing. Put simply, a car setup exists to take advantage of the available track grip at all times if possible, or make the best compromise for overall lap time if not.
Not only does track temperature dictate the grip level, but also the car balance. Since the front and rear tires are different widths, have different forces acting on them, and are used in different ways, a change in track temperature does not have an equal effect on the front tires as the rears. A sudden shift in track temperature will not only change the grip level, but also the understeer or oversteer characteristics of the car. As track temperature itself is constantly changing, an engineer’s job of dialing in a setup is a never-ending task.
Street courses often serve up different surfaces on different parts of the lap, forcing engineers to hunt for a compromise. Phillip Abbott/Motorsport Images
The road material is another factor influencing grip, because that is what has to interact with rubber of the tire. Different types and ages of asphalts, tarmacs, concretes, and sometimes resins are seen over the course of an IndyCar season, and each offers slightly differing amounts of grip. This isn’t so much an issue when the track is one uniform surface, but tracks like Toronto famously use different materials in different corners. In this case, engineers simply have to make more compromises: a setup change that might benefit one corner but hurt another.
Road material is also a big reason why teams go test at tracks after they’ve been repaved. Barber Motorsports Park was completely repaved in late 2019, and because of this there was an enormous increase in grip. Testing in early 2021 was important: laps were more than 2.0s faster than the pole time from 2019 (and that’s despite the addition of the aeroscreen). Such a big difference required not only a rethink on setup, but a completely new stack on gears given the difference in cornering speeds.
Track surfaces can also vary wildly in terms of bumpiness. A lap around Detroit is a very different experience compared to a lap around Barber in this regard. The primary effect of bumps on setup is the spring and damper package. Stiffer cars can be run lower to the ground, which is good for downforce, and are more reactive and better at changing direction. However, stiff cars do not handle bumps well at all. The ability of a softer setup to absorb the bumps and keep the tires on the ground is critical; the tire can’t do anything if it’s not on the track because it’s bouncing up in the air!
Finally, when analyzing the track surface, another vital factor is ‘track evolution,’ or the amount of rubber that’s been put down. To start a race weekend (or after a rain shower), the track is referred to as “green,” meaning a fresh track. As cars beginning completing laps, they will leave a layer of rubber down on the track. The more laps that are run, the more rubber there is on the surface. This beneficial for grip: the best thing that rubber can stick to is more rubber, so the more laps that are run on a track, the faster it gets. This why it’s called ‘track evolution’, and it’s the reason teams typically wait before they start running at the beginning of the first practice, and why teams will always try to leave their qualifying laps as late as possible. Like many of the other factors discussed already, as track grip changes so does the balance, and so engineers will have to compensate accordingly with the setup.
Teams will always try to stay ahead of track evolution because it is relatively predictable. However, a quirk of putting rubber down is that the calculation changes depending on what kind of rubber was put down most recently. Different tire compounds don’t always agree with one another. Engineers will always take note of what series ran on track immediately before a session, as a race weekend typically has many series competing one after another. If for example, a NASCAR session ran immediately before an IndyCar session, engineers would expect the grip to be slightly reduced to start the session, because NASCAR rubber doesn’t aid track evolution for an IndyCar.
Another aspect of track evolution is marbles. If you’ve ever taken an eraser to a piece of paper and seen bits of rubber chunks fall off, then you’ll be familiar with the concept. As tires are grated against the track surface, the worn rubber is shed from the tire and lands off the racing line. Driving on the marbles is a massive grip loss and can be very treacherous; they get between the tire and track surface, like a cartoon character trying to run on ball bearings.
Ambient conditions
As IndyCar races everywhere from Florida to Oregon over a seven-month period, naturally a wide range of temperatures, air conditions, and wind will be encountered during the year. Changes in these conditions will have knock-on effects to the car’s setup that are vital to get right: a team’s ability to adjust their setups as conditions changes can be the difference between having a competitive setup or a poor balance by the time the race comes around.
Changes in air temperature will affect several aspects of car setup. The importance of track temperature has already been discussed, but track temperature is heavily influenced by air temperature and cloud cover. The radiator covers, sometimes called blockers or blanking, come in various sizes and are largely dictated by air temperature. These covers can be seen at the inlet of the side pod, and their shapes differ depending on the engine manufacturer. Covering more of the radiator is beneficial for drag, but also leads to higher oil and water temperatures for the engine, which affects power output. Finding the right compromise of drag, power, and reliability by adjusting these blockers depending on the air temperature can have a huge impact on performance, especially at aero-sensitive tracks like Indianapolis Motor Speedway, where drag and power are the dominant factors on lap time.
Hitting on the right configuration for the radiator blockers can make a massive difference at aero-sensitive tracks like IMS. Michael Levitt/Motorsport Images
Air density, which is influenced not only by air temperature but by humidity and air pressure, has a big effect on a car’s downforce, which in turn influences the starting ride heights. As an example, the same car going the same speed will generate more downforce in denser air. When conditions are predicted to generate more downforce, engineers will need to raise the starting ride heights of the car in order to compensate (and similarly they can lower the car when air density is predicted to go down).
This is done to keep the car operating at a similar proximity to the ground (where generating downforce is most efficient), no matter the air conditions. A car that is not lowered sufficiently in response to a drop in air density will be too high throughout the lap, losing large amounts of downforce due to operating far from the aerodynamic optimum. A car that is not raised in response to an increase is air density will be lower everywhere on track, which can potentially make the car undrivable. A car that is too low will actually be pushed into the ground by the downforce, called ‘touching’ or ‘bottoming’, when the car is traveling near top speed. Small amounts of bottoming are to be expected as the cars approach top speed, but too much will cause the car to hit the ground so hard that it unloads the tires, which can unsettle the car and cause time loss or even force the driver off the track.
Wind is another aspect that can vary drastically, and since it has a huge aerodynamic effect, it needs to be accounted for in the setup. Anticipating the wind is one of the most difficult aspects of adjusting the setup to get right. Drivers and engineers are constantly kept updated on the current state of the wind speed and direction when working trackside.
Typically, drivers and engineers talk in terms headwind, tailwind, and crosswind relative to various locations on the track. For example, when driving on a straight leading into a high-speed corner, a headwind will do several things: it lowers the car’s top speed, it creates more downforce, and also shifts the aero balance of the car. A tailwind does the opposite of these.
As a consequence, the gear ratios are typically adjusted based on the simulation’s prediction for top speed, which will have to accurately account for the wind. From a performance perspective, selecting gears is a give and take between top speed and acceleration. If a big headwind is predicted then the top gears can be shortened to give better acceleration (since the previous top speed is no longer attainable due to the headwind). In the case of a tailwind, the gears will need to be made longer to gives additional headroom to avoid hitting the rev limiter.
A headwind will also lead to more downforce as there is more air going over the wings, so a ride height compensation will be required to avoid bottoming too hard at the end of the straight. A strong tailwind will have the opposite effect: air going over the wings collides with wind going the opposite direction, and less downforce is generated. The result is a grip reduction, and when a tailwind picks up suddenly it can really catch a driver out. A great example of this was in Turn 2 at last year’s Indy 500. Turn 2 is unique at Indy because it’s the only corner without a massive grandstand to shield the track from the wind. Sudden gusts on corner exit caught more than a few drivers out that day.
Finally, strong winds will change the car’s aero balance, or center of pressure. Aero balance is the distribution of downforce front to rear, so it plays a big part in the whether a car will understeer or oversteer, particularly in highspeed corners. The most common method to adjust aero balance is with the front wing flap. However, since this can only be done between outings or during pit stops, compromises in some corners will have to be made for the benefit of others. When dealing with a big headwind, downforce is added, but it will not do so proportionately front to rear – the wind will change the balance of the car. This can be particularly unnerving because a sudden aero balance shift from a gust of wind (especially when a disproportionate amount of front grip is added compared to rear grip), can cause entry instability and lead to sudden spins because the rear can’t keep up with the front.
Further complicating this matter is that fact that all the corners are oriented differently, so a headwind entering one corner may also be a tailwind or a crosswind for another. To protect from this, engineers sometimes choose to lower the front wing flap angle to give the rear a higher percentage of the overall grip if they think strong winds will make the car unstable. That may compromise the balance in other corners, but it will do so in a stabilizing (read: not crashing) manner.
Summing up
The car is constantly interacting with the track, which means the state of the surface and the ambient conditions will play a huge part in how the car behaves. So powerful is this effect that sometimes teams won’t even venture out if they think the conditions for a practice session aren’t going to be representative to the forecast for qualifying or the race. This is also why the morning warm-up is such an important session for teams, as it is the session where the track surface and ambient conditions are typically most similar to the race. Still, from time to time a race will take place in conditions that haven’t been seen at any point in the weekend, and the teams will simply have to react.
It cannot be overstated how crucial a role simulation plays in reacting accordingly to an ever-changing track. It is pivotal for a team to roll off the truck fast, keep up with a changing track from session to session, and determine the right adjustments (or right amount of adjustment) in order to be successful. Many teams have dedicated Simulation Engineers whose job is to match a mathematical model to reality at the end of a session based on the collected data, then use that model predictively for the subsequent session to determine a best course of action.
Even before the debrief for a session finishes, teams are already looking ahead to potential changes for the next session, especially when the turnaround time is tight during a race weekend. Determining the best setup changes to make between sessions is one of the hardest aspects of a race weekend for the engineers; there are an endless number of changes and combinations of changes that could be done. Ultimately, since the track surface and ambient conditions are the same for everybody during the race, the car setup doesn’t actually need to be perfect, or even good. It just needs to be better than everyone else’s.
Personal fondness or disdain for the dirt race aside for a moment, it should be agreed that NASCAR, Bristol Motor Speedway, and all involved in putting on the event deserve their flowers today. The third edition of the event for the NASCAR Cup …
Personal fondness or disdain for the dirt race aside for a moment, it should be agreed that NASCAR, Bristol Motor Speedway, and all involved in putting on the event deserve their flowers today.
The third edition of the event for the NASCAR Cup Series cars, although littered with inconsistent calls and non-calls for cautions, was the most entertaining. Not only was the driving ability and adaptability of the sport’s top stars on display, but the field was able to put on such a show because the track was well-prepared.
“I thought tonight was a great night for NASCAR and a great night for dirt racing,” said Chase Briscoe. “I felt like that was finally the first time we’ve had as close as it’s going to get to what dirt racing is in sprint cars or late models and how you drive them. I just thought, from my vantage point, a great race. I thought that’s why you saw the dirt guys shine tonight because it was finally a real dirt track-style race.
“I thought the track prep guys did a phenomenal job. At the beginning of the day, before we even started the race and they had the trucks out there hot lapping, I thought there was no way the top would ever come in, and it definitely came in. I had a blast from my side.”
It’s unclear when Steve Swift, senior vice president of operations and development for Speedway Motorsports, and his team began their day’s work, but they were already on the racetrack and overseeing the prep work as early as noon when folks started to filter into the field.
Cars, equipment, and the water truck were put to work all day. Craftsman Truck Series drivers Grant Enfinger and Rajah Caruth, who had competed on the dirt the night before, drove their trucks for hot laps to further work in the track as the Cup Series field prepared for pre-race activities on pit road.
“This was a lot of fun from start to finish, one of the best races I’ve been a part of,” said Austin Dillon, who also praised Speedway Motorsports. “You saw guys come and go, sliding, moving. I don’t care what anybody says, that was an awesome race.”
Said Ricky Stenhouse Jr., “I hope that was a good show. I thought the race track was as good as it could be. You could run kind of all over the place, so hats off to the track.”
There were indeed cars all over the racing surface. There were single-car spins from a driver stepping over the limit. There were crashes. And there were drivers putting on a clinic of good racing with slide jobs and some bumping and shoving, even amongst teammates like Dillon and Kyle Busch.
Chase Briscoe was among those saluting NASCAR and Bristol for putting on a ‘proper’ dirt race this year after a couple of false starts. Gavin Baker/Motorsport Images
Sunday night was a great show, and that’s what matters to NASCAR. If drivers like Briscoe, Dillon, and Stenhouse were having fun and liked the conditions they had to compete on, it feels hard to criticize it when those three know what good dirt racing should look like.
Not even the bump, crater, or sinkhole that was in Turn 3 drew many complaints.
“Ah, it’s just dirt racing,” said Tyler Reddick, another dirt ace. “It’s fine.”
Briscoe said it was fine if you drove around it, which he did most of the night. However, he did see other drivers, like winner Christopher Bell drive over it a few times.
“It wasn’t bad. I think that’s normal,” Briscoe said. “You’re going to have that at a dirt track, it’s never going to be perfectly smooth. You’re going to have character in it. I thought it was fine, but I’m sure some guys didn’t like how rough it was. But whenever you have something like that, you can use it to your advantage or disadvantage, and it’s really a tool for your car.”
The inaugural edition of the Bristol dirt event was far from impressive. It might even be fair to say it bordered on disaster. Rain early in the weekend led to mudslinging practice and heat races. Then both the Craftsman Truck Series and Cup Series races were postponed until Monday and run in the sunlight.
Track conditions were terrible. It became single groove because it took so much rubber, and it was so dusty that not only was it hard to see on television cameras, drivers were complaining, too. NASCAR officials had to implement single-file restarts late in the Cup Series race.
Running the events at night last season made a huge difference, and track prep was better. it led to optimism coming into the third year, and the hype was well deserved. Drivers could compete with what they had Sunday night, which led to a much more enjoyable viewing experience.
It’s not too much to acknowledge the latest edition of Bristol dirt was a success and those who made that happen. Tomorrow, everyone can go back to debating if it should be on the schedule for another year.
In a parallel universe, Colton Herta is toiling fruitlessly in Formula 1’s lower midfield with AlphaTauri, achieving results that make the frustrating start to his 2023 IndyCar campaign in this world seem encouraging. That would have led to intense …
In a parallel universe, Colton Herta is toiling fruitlessly in Formula 1’s lower midfield with AlphaTauri, achieving results that make the frustrating start to his 2023 IndyCar campaign in this world seem encouraging. That would have led to intense scrutiny, some ill-founded opining about the capacity of IndyCar drivers to make the leap to grand prix racing, and soul-searching about whether taking on F1 at all was a good idea. Instead, it’s Nyck de Vries who is lumbered with iffy machinery and struggling to build on his promising one-off debut with Williams last year.
But that doesn’t mean there’s no interest for fans of American drivers. Logan Sargeant’s numbers are unimpressive on paper, but he’s made a quietly impressive start to his grand prix career. He doesn’t have the best of machinery, but the Williams FW45 has at least shown the pace to threaten points finishes on merit. While he’s yet to escape Q1 in qualifying or finish a race higher than 12th, the 22-year-old has looked better than the results suggest.
Rookies are under intense pressure when they graduate to F1. Sargeant has more reason than most for unease given he was given the seat by the previous management regime, headed by Jost Capito. Even then, it was only as a result of the contractual shenanigans triggered by Fernando Alonso signing for Aston Martin and Oscar Piastri signing for McLaren, given Alpine originally planned to place Piastri at Williams for a year or two. To say Sargeant earned the seat by default is unfair, but he did require a slice of luck for the opportunity to open up.
Fortunately, new Williams team principal James Vowles was already familiar with Sargeant. While best known for his tenure as Mercedes strategy chief, Vowles had a wider role within his previous team that included overseeing its young driver program. He first crossed paths with his current driver when Sargeant was evaluated in the simulator. Mercedes passed on him, less because Sargeant wasn’t seen as a good prospect and more because his age didn’t slot well into the Mercedes junior portfolio. As Vowles has subsequently explained, “we already had a good suite of drivers”, although he has also suggested that “I was wrong and Williams were right” in recruiting Sargeant. Of course, had Sargeant stood out as a potential megastar Mercedes surely would have snapped him up, but he was nonetheless regarded as a driver with promise.
Vowles has also been at pains to stress that Sargeant is at Williams on merit. The team funded him in F2 last year and his paying him a healthy salary to race for it in 2023. Thanks to billionaire Harry Sargeant III being Sargeant’s uncle, he’s been pegged by many as a pay driver, but that isn’t the case. Had it been so, he certainly wouldn’t have raced for the unfancied Charouz team in F3 in 2021. But for Williams picking him up, Sargeant would have been lost to single-seaters by now.
What matters for Williams is performance, and while Sargeant’s junior single-seater career wasn’t stellar in terms of titles, he has won plenty of races at F4, F3 and F2 level. That followed an outstanding karting career, so he came into 2023 as a driver who wasn’t a sure thing in F1, but who did have genuine potential.
Despite his reputation as a pay driver – one that Williams insists is inaccurate – Sargeant earned his spot on the grid through the speed he showed in the junior categories. Sam Bloxham/Motorsport Images
He’s already come a long way since Williams signed him last October. As Williams head of vehicle performance Dave Robson noted, Sargeant has been on steep learning curve since even before he was given the race drive. But diligent preparation over the winter meant he arrived for pre-season testing ready to go.
“When we first met him, way back in Miami last year, I think he was quite daunted by the whole thing,” said Robson. “But [that changed] over the course of the P1 sessions, the work in the factory and in the simulator and getting to know everyone the winter. We’d spend all the time just talking to him about things – which is not always an easy way to spend a few hours with engineers, trying to bore a racing driver – but to be fair to him, he listened, he took it all in. It means he got experience of talking to people and understanding the way we look at things. By the time we arrived in Bahrain for the test, there was no problem at all, he was fully into it.”
Probably the most eye-catching moment of Sargeant’s season so far is also the low point, rear-ending De Vries at the final standing restart in Australia after being caught out by cold tires and brakes. While he escaped a penalty for the blunder, he was apologetic. Fortunately, his other two race outings have been clean, with the high point a superb first lap in Bahrain where he showed real confidence and incisiveness.
Tire management is an area where he still needs to improve, but that’s standard for rookie drivers. While he’s familiar with the generic characteristics of Pirelli rubber from F3 and F2, the depth of detail in tire understanding in F1 is enormous and it is always a steep learning curve for newcomers. He also struggled badly with graining on the medium rubber in Australia, although he was far from alone on that score.
Qualifying has shown unfulfilled glimpses of Sargeant’s speed. In Bahrain, he set a time good enough for Q2 but didn’t advance because McLaren driver Lando Norris had set the same laptime but posted it earlier. That was despite being caught out by the changing wind conditions and making an error that cost him time.
For the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, Sargeant’s first Q1 lap time was good enough for a Q2 place. Unfortunately, a moment of inattentiveness resulted in him drifting onto the painted Qatar Airways logo separating the main straight from the pit entry and he was disallowed. He didn’t respond well to that, making a mistake on the push lap of his second run then going off at the first corner of the push lap on his unexpected third run. He also tagged the wall at the end of that incident, leaving him stranded trackside without a time set at the end of a Q1 session where he looked to have the edge on teammate Albon.
Hints of Sargeant’s pace have been evident in qualifying, although he’s yet to convert them into results. Glenn Dunbar/Motorsport Images
“One small mistake by a few inches not even at the last corner but pit entry and then in the space of few minutes spiraled into a little bit of an unfortunate session,” said Robson of Sargeant’s session. “It’s very easy for that to happen and it’s experience you need to keep yourself a little bit calmer in that situation and make the following chances work. That is what it is to be a rookie, when you’re playing with such fine margins.”
In Australia, Sargeant lacked the searing speed of Albon but did have the pace to have reached Q2. But for a moment at the penultimate corner where the rear stepped out, he would have done. There is a clear theme here of having pace but failing to piece it all together in qualifying thanks to errors that needs to be ironed out, but given he’s just three races into his F1 career, that’s all part of the process a newcomer must go through. And had he produced the speed he displayed when it mattered in qualifying for one of the first three races, he might well have converted it into a points finish.
He’s still getting used to how to work with the team to get the car balance he wants and he has been a little surprised by struggles in the high-speed corners relative to Albon given that’s historically been a strength for Sargeant. Australia was a good example of that, where he lost time consistently to Albon in the fast Turn 9/10 sweep. But that should come with time.
The unscheduled break in the season, the result of the cancellation of the Chinese Grand Prix, means Sargeant is in a period where he can reflect, re-evaluate and head to Baku in the hope of putting together a more complete weekend. Even after jumping out of the car in Australia, he already had in mind what he needs to achieve, especially with the sprint format meaning he has just one practice session before the serious stuff begins.
“I feel quite fortunate that I’ve been to Baku before [in Formula 2 last year], which makes things a little easier, but it’s going to be a challenge,” said Sargeant. “It’s going to be about stepping up to the plate a little bit quicker, taking it one step at a time.”
Sargeant’s has at least shown that he has the pace to make something of himself in F1. He may lack the profile of Herta, and understandably so given his career prior to 2023 was restricted to the junior categories, but he’s showing signs of being able to make a name for himself in F1. Provided, that is, he can build on this good, if frustrating, start.
