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Q: For decades, car design was all about speed. Sometime in the mid to late ’90s, IndyCar evolution became more about safety, reliability, and cost control. Huge gains were made in these areas, but at the expense of 25-30 years of incremental speed evolution.
What would the cars look like today if they would have been allowed to continually evolve through annual engineering and design advancements meant primarily to gain competitive speed advantages? In a perfect world, the anticipated 2027 car design should make up for as much of this gap as possible, at least aerodynamically. That’s the car I’d like to see considered, imagined, designed, tested, and raced.
Greg K.
MARSHALL PRUETT: I’m with you, Greg. Let’s do a deep dive to start the new year.
For most of IndyCar’s 100-plus years of existence, the cars and all of the innovations and unique ideas they were conceived from held the interest of its fans. There was no separation of the drivers and their cars; curiosity for what made the drivers so brave and skilled carried over to the cars and curiosities about the unique or boundary-pushing concepts they contained.
Unlike a football or basketball, the main tool we use to play our sport constantly changed and evolved, and the interaction between our athletes and the dynamic machines they strapped into was a big part of the intrigue.
Even the post-WWII “junk” formula and the roadster era that followed, which mostly went against the high-tech grain, were beautiful, or offered interesting takes on the same basic chassis layout and Offy engine package. A few cool and new things emerged like a turbodiesel polesitter at Indy and the SUMAR Streamliner, which fully encapsulated the driver and had four fenders, but they were outliers. Nonetheless, the cars were still a huge part of the intrigue and attraction.
And then we had IndyCar’s wildest creative decade in the 1960s when wings and turbocharging arrived, which carried into the 1970s, and even with the arrival of mass-produced off-the-shelf cars from March and Lola in the 1980s, there was enough freedom and variety to make the technological side interesting for fans.
More mass production came in the 1990s as Reynard joined in, and it was with the engines where the greatest variety was found, and huge power as well. That bled into the early 2000s and peaked with Gil de Ferran’s record qualifying run of 241.428mph at Fontana in 2001, and then it soon settled as Champ Car became a de facto Lola-Cosworth formula while the Indy Racing League went full spec on the chassis side starting in 1997 with Dallara and GForce, and two types of engines in Oldsmobile and Nissan.
The Champ Car Lolas (with the odd Reynard thrown in) were still super-fast, and there were plenty of tiny improvements made on the chassis and aero side, but they weren’t things that the average fan would notice, and all the engines were supplied by Cosworth, and together, it led to a gradual loss of caring about the technology side.
That kind of care was surrendered even earlier with the IRL on its debut in 1996, with possible exception for the monster Menard Buick V6 power that was being made. But the cars, as a whole, became spec tools by 1997 that not only looked the same, but by rule, could not be modified.
So with both IndyCar series locked into a spec or spec-ish look and sound, it’s easy to understand how and why, after nearly a century of awesome and vibrant cars being a central part of an IndyCar follower’s fanhood, that elevated degree of vehicular interest – of wanting to know about the finer details – started to die on slightly different IRL and Champ Car timelines.
Once both series stripped the personality out of their formulas to present a cheaper, generic product, the desire to know all about those cars largely died.
Today, they’re just tools where the only innovations are found inside the dampers, which fans can’t see and don’t care about. And inside the engines, which follow the same can’t see/don’t care theme, because IndyCar’s engine suppliers keep everything they do under lock and key and don’t welcome fans into that world.
Hybridization, the newest tech in the cars, has been relatively open for sharing, and some folks have shown an interest, but it, too, is spec, which makes it a lot like the cars: Something cool to process and learn about when it’s new, but after a short period, you’ve learned what there is to know or grown accustomed to seeing the same old thing, and the curiosity is lost.
Also, hybridization hasn’t been embraced by a decent amount of fans, along with some team owners and drivers. So while the DW12s have cutting-edge energy recovery technology inside the bellhousings, I’ve seen more “kill it with fire” reactions than, “wow, that’s amazing, tell me all about it.”
Racing’s origins are an offshoot of human creativity. One person’s big ideas pitted against the next person’s grand ideas. It’s human expression in its coolest vehicular arena. But when we allow ourselves to kill that creativity and expression, we can’t be surprised when racing series that stifle creativity also end up stifling their popularity.
The easy argument against embracing creativity is costs, but I’ve never known a time where racing wasn’t insanely expensive. I don’t want to blow up IndyCar by having wide-open technological freedom, but I also don’t want the costs-first side to win and give us another decade or more of good-but-underwhelming growth with a car – the core of our sport – that does nothing to spike new interest. Not while IndyCar is living deep in NASCAR’s shadow, and in the widening shadow cast by F1.
There can be a middle ground allowing human creativity back into IndyCar — beyond the effing dampers — without breaking the bank. Pick a region or two on the cars where teams can play with bodywork, internal aerodynamics, or suspension technology… and seek sponsors and corporate partners to be involved in those areas to enrich their bank accounts.
Come up with styling options for the engine suppliers to use to make it easier to tell a Chevy from a Honda from a Toyota/Dodge/whatever, to whatever degree is possible — outright stealing what IMSA has done with its manufacturer GTP styling requirements.
Identify areas in the electronics, or software/apps where teams and manufacturers can apply their expertise and give them a six-month window of exclusivity before having to publish those solutions. Many folks love seeing what Apple/Google/Samsung/etc. come up with for phone/tablet creations and app developments; why not tap into that by pulling those folks and fans and companies into IndyCar with the same creative process? Is there a Chevy/Honda/whoever head-up display that can be integrated into the cockpit?
How about those same, but custom phone/tablet solutions in the cockpit instead of a spec steering wheel that delivers the display on a spec LCD screen? Imagine big and small tech companies having a green light to get involved with teams — to the teams’ enrichment — and use the cockpits as tech labs and promotional tools.
Instead of endless worrying about costs and keeping creativity and innovation to a minimum out of fear for runaway budgets, how about opening up tech areas and ideas where IndyCar teams can actually profit and become wealthier through bringing all manner of sponsor/partner deals into the paddock?
An example: As we’ve had in IMSA and the WEC for many years, I’ve heard IndyCar is considering a rear-view video camera system for the next car. In sports cars, the first systems were simple bullet cameras pointing out from the bumper that fed a little monitor on the dash, but they’ve become pretty serious, with some using lidar and software that point to which side an approaching car is trying to make a pass.
In keeping with how IndyCar has done things for decades, it will find a single vendor, sign that vendor as the spec supplier, make a modest profit on each sale, and that’s the end of it. Everybody must use the new rear-facing camera and cockpit monitor, pay a set price, and it’s installed and forgotten. It’s a broken way of thinking that kills business and innovation.
No wonder so many teams are having to take on investors or sign more paying drivers just to stay alive.
Regarding how I hope Penske Entertainment approaches this hypothetical rearview camera situation, it will set the technical specification for a rear camera system, identify a spec vendor that can be used, if desired, but leave it open for teams to seek their own vendors. Hey, Sony, or Nikon, or Apple/Google/Samsung/Intel/Bosch/LG/Philips/Toshiba/whoever, let’s do some cool things together in creating a solution, have you become an associate sponsor, and use our team’s cars as a rolling laboratory and promotions machine for this item, and maybe other things you make as well.
Imagine the advertising possibilities with those big companies, using their IndyCar involvement as part of their annual marketing campaigns. It’s everything we dream of, and would also enrich FOX, racetracks with banners and onsite activations, and through digital advertising.
IndyCar can change its future if it’s willing to stop doing dumb things like making almost everything spec. From Hisense to Sharp to JVC to Vivo to Motorola, to all of the big names like Apple and Google, they are barred from doing anything tech-related in IndyCar. Think of all the significant tech brands you know of, or whose products you own, and of all the up-and-coming firms in Silicon Valley and other tech-rich regions, and they can’t make a single thing to be used in IndyCar. By IndyCar’s choice.
(And yes, I realize there are other series who do the same dumb thing, but the question was about IndyCar. And also, the spec rules we have today were written long before Penske Entertainment bought the series or IndyCar’s entire operations and tech department led by Jay Frye were hired.)
Think small and spec, and get small results, which is what has plagued IndyCar — traced back to the IRL and Champ Car — for longer than some of its newest fans have been alive. Or have some balls, and refuse to be driven by fear, and make smart business decisions that benefit the teams.
Every time a decision is made to sign a spec deal, it’s the series that profits and the teams who are further strangled in some financial way. Penske Entertainment, led by Roger Penske — among the greatest business people this sport has known — has its first chance, through bringing a new car to market with Dallara, to show his business expertise by removing the word “spec” from a range of areas on the car.
Opening up big and new and real business opportunities for the paddock by breaking decades of spec thinking is critical.
And if the whole damn thing is another spec car from nose to tail that continues to handcuff IndyCar’s teams from seeking and finding new technology sponsors and partners, I’ll have to question why the series signed its entrants up for another decade of financial struggles.
“Spec” has been the noose IndyCar willingly places around the neck of its teams and watches as they complain about struggling to breathe. It’s time for a rethink on the ways and places where open competition can make IndyCar better, more interesting, and stoke new business development.
Let the technology world — aerospace, aviation, automotive, electronics, and so on — in and let their collective infusion of money and engineering and creativity lift IndyCar to heights some of us once enjoyed before the word spec started choking the life out of the series.