Welcome to the RACER Mailbag. Questions for any of RACER’s writers can be sent to mailbag@racer.com. We love hearing your comments and opinions, but letters that include a question are more likely to be published. Questions received after 3pm ET each Monday will appear the following week.
Q: So, is Arrow McLaren going to fire Rossi before this season is over, now that he broke his thumb?
Russell Zipoff
MARSHALL PRUETT: This season of ‘Survivor: Arrow McLaren’ might be the first where everybody’s torch gets extinguished and no winner is crowned. Kidding aside, I can’t see why they would.
Rossi has five races left on his contract, four are on ovals, and he’s excellent on ovals. Also, his replacement, Christian Lundgaard, isn’t available until after the season is over, so there’s no reason to cut ties with Rossi.
Q: They say politics makes for strange bedfellows. I say motor racing does, too. Good seeing Theo back. Along with not knowing fear, swallowing your pride is a must for drivers. I don’t have what it takes to turn left at 220mph nor go back to work for a company that unceremoniously fired me.
Over in Cup, Rick Ware is really stepping up with personnel and investment trying to make a real go of it. Am I wrong in that I haven’t seen that in IndyCar?
Shawn Lee
MP: Theo also remains under contract to Arrow McLaren and has been paid a portion of his salary — said to be 50 percent — of whatever was agreed upon when he was signed, so there’s that. I assume in the second item, you’re referring to RWR’s involvement with Dale Coyne as a co-entrant? If so, RWR has brought funding to the relationship. Coyne owns the team, cars, shop, pays the staff, etc. Other than sending more money, there’s not much for RWR to step up to with a team it doesn’t own.
Q: I have been wondering what the umbilical connection does. Does it automatically switch the radio over to wired and private? Is there information coming through it that the team cannot see wirelessly? Can actual changes be made to the car through it?
Craig
MP: Communications and power. The cars send live telemetry from the car’s onboard data acquisition system throughout each lap, and a bigger burst of telemetry data when they cross the start/finish line (or wherever the master beacon is located), but the onboard central logger unit (CLU) data loggers have much bigger files written to their hard drives to offer via download when the cars come to a stop in the pits.
The logging rates — how many times a channel is sampled and recorded per second — are lower via telemetry where there’s limited bandwidth, but there’s no concern for file size in what’s being captured by the hard drive, so if damper velocities are being seen at 100 hertz (100 times per second) on telemetry, that might be recorded at 1000hz on the CLU to give a finer view of that channel, and that’s where the umbilical comes into play to rip the full data package from the car after a run.
Teams can speak privately to the driver through the umbilical and as noted, the assistant race engineer can download CLU data, make and send CLU logging changes and changes to the driver’s dash. Each team’s engine technician also communicates with the car through the umbilical to download data from the engine control unit (ECU) and make any mapping or parameter changes to the ECU.
Q: The booth seemed to highlight Ericsson moving in the braking zone as Rosenqvist attempted to overtake him in Toronto. Felix definitely made contact left front to right rear. I think we were pretty close to having a car take real flight. I’m very curious why race control didn’t rule on a block on Marcus’ part there?
Ryan, West Michigan
MP: Because they didn’t believe he blocked him, otherwise, they would have given him a penalty.
Q: I have a question about the incident at Toronto where Rosenqvist and Ericsson braked late and went off into the runoff area. The guys on TV seemed to think one of them could have possibly been penalized, but I didn’t catch which driver they said. Can you clarify what a possible penalty would have been there?
Steve, Michigan
MP: Using Detroit — the most recent street race prior to Toronto — as a guide, the penalty given to Marcus Armstrong for blocking would have been to yield three positions.
Q: I enjoyed the Toronto race but I was hopeful that during the red flag they would clean up some marbles to make for a great sprint to the end. Is there a protocol for when the sweepers go out?
David Campbell, Indianapolis, IN
MP: As I’ve observed, it tends to be based on the time available and the need. With most of Toronto being single-file in the twisty bits, Turn 3 — the end of the long back straight — is where I’d send a sweeper since that’s where most passing happens, but that’s about it, and drivers had no issues ducking left or right into Turn 3 to try and pass from the first lap to the last.
Q: All the ovals that IndyCar runs on, except Milwaukee, also host NASCAR. In order to improve the racing, NASCAR treats the surface with various chemicals designed to make for better racing with NASCAR’s Goodyear tires. I’ve heard a couple of NASCAR drivers suggesting that NASCAR do the same thing at the Brickyard.
Of course, IndyCar’s Firestone tires famously don’t get along with NASCAR’s surface chemistry.
Why doesn’t IndyCar kill two birds with one stone and switch to Goodyear? IndyCar’s oval races suck, and if this change would fix that, as well as fixing the Brickyard oval races, why not try it? That way, it would be in NASCAR’s interest to make racing better for both series using the same tires.
Also, what was IndyCar race control thinking when they chose not to throw an immediate full course yellow when Pato O’Ward slid into the wall in Turn 1 at Toronto? It was a restart. Pato is fifth? So he slides into the wall and 22 cars are going to avoid him in a tight, blind corner within 5 or 6 seconds? Are they thinking he’s going to get restarted and not get hit by any of those cars? They’ve got three weeks to rethink caution procedures. They need to use it.
By the way, if Palou wins the drivers’ title this season, a big reason will be that he was able to avoid being collected in that incident.
Ed Joras
MP: If Goodyear wanted to supply IndyCar with tires, I’m confident it would. If the Toronto Turn 1 melee revealed anything beyond the question of why it took longer than it normally does for a full-course yellow to be triggered by race control, it’s how the series might rethink its approach to allocating marshaling resources.
At Toronto, Turns 1, 3, and 8 have been the most common locations where crashes happen. We can run through each road and street course and do the same assessment of where the most frequent incidents happen, and with that info in hand, going heavy on the EM Marshaling light panels, and possibly extra race control staff on the ground at high-incident corners to support the volunteer track marshals, seems like an approach to consider moving forward.
Turn 1 at Toronto is where the majority of big multi-car crashes occur. The idea of having a race control spotter in Turn 1, and other corners of concern during the race with their fingers on the go-yellow buttons is comforting.