Tonight’s 250-lap NTT IndyCar Series race on the rapid Iowa Speedway oval will be an intense one set in high heat for the 27 drivers. The dozen-plus crew members on each of those cars will face a different kind of intensity as a long day of action, starting with qualifying at 3:45pm ET, post-qualifying setup changes and an 8pm race that will run for at least 90 minutes, is only part of what they have to deal with in temperatures that will climb over 90 degrees.
With an anticipated checkered flag somewhere around 9:30pm, the teams who are fortunate to get through the 250 laps without contact on the tight 0.875-mile circuit will have until 11pm to start preparing their machines for Sunday morning’s Race 2 — another 250 laps — with a green flag at 12:30pm ET. For those who have broken cars to fix, the 11pm garage curfew will be lifted, but there’s no escaping the fact how hundreds of crew members will be worn out by the heat, and worn out by the long day-to-night-to-day construct for the Hy-Vee doubleheader once it’s over Sunday afternoon.
“The first part of this is we have some planned parts we’re changing,” Chip Ganassi Racing’s reigning championship-winning team manager Barry Wanser told RACER. “Ideally, we come out of the race unscathed, as far as no crashed cars. If there’s any crashes, we’ll move people from the other cars into that car to help replace whatever parts need to be replaced. But the rest of the cars, we have some pre-planned changes, a lot of right-side suspension parts with the loading here in Iowa being so high.
“So rather than worry about something failing, it’s just better to change out some parts with fresh stuff for tomorrow race. So we have the normal prep work we do and those parts changes, and the goal is to try to get out of here tonight as soon as possible, get some sleep, because we’re back at 6am tomorrow.”
IndyCar has tried to help manage the workload by closing the garages until 11:30am today, and once they’re filled with crews, teams will look to limit their personnels’ exposure to the heat by bringing them into the air-conditioned transporters once they’re done with car- or track-based duties.
“All the crews have to go through it,” Wanser said, noting Sunday’s high is expected to reach 94F. “Going into today, the cars are pretty much ready to go after we prepped them after practice on Friday. We’ll make whatever overnight changes the engineers thought about to what they need for qualifying. And then, this is kind of unique. Most doubleheaders have a qualifying impound between qualifying and Race 1, but we don’t have impound this year, so we’re going to be able to specifically run a qualifying setup that we worked on yesterday, and then we’re going to be able to change that after qualifying for more of a race setup.
“Then we race and they kick us out at 11, so we’ll get as much work completed that we can tonight. And it’s also just keeping everybody hydrated, keeping everybody fed, and hopefully ending the night with good races and clean race for all five cars of ours. If we can get out of here at 11 and don’t have to stay later to repair things, that’ll be huge. Then it’s back to the hotels that are nearby, get as much sleep as possible and come back at 6, get lined up, and do it again.”