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: Been following racing of all types for my whole life. Kind of miss the unknown possibilities of a blown engine during a race affecting the outcome with these almost bulletproof engines (unless it was someone I was rooting for).
I’m looking forward to attending another fun weekend with the IndyCar circus and other fans at Mid-Ohio, and wondering what (if any) type of problems do the new hybrid systems bring to the power trains? What can go wrong with them that could cause some type of engine failure?
Mike Nikishin, Burgettstown, PA
MARSHALL PRUETT: We’ll need to hold the first hybrid race to have a better idea on the issues that might arise. Thousands and thousands of testing miles have been completed, but we’ve never had a full race distance done with 27 cars, and with contact between cars and all the other normal things that happen and go wrong between the green and checkered flags that can shake and rattle the ERS.
We could have an ESS or MGU failure. An ESS problem wouldn’t necessarily be the end of the world, but a seized or broken MGU, since it connects to the motor’s crankshaft via the input shaft, could lead to may hem. Overheating of the ERS unit — ESS or MGU (or both) — could cause failures.
The MGU is the main area of sensitivity at the onset of hybridization. There’s nothing wrong with the thing, but IndyCar doesn’t want to push it too hard, which is why the power figures are being kept somewhat low. When IMSA went hybrid, there were expectations for all kinds of ERS problems, but it never developed into a serious issue. There were occasional hiccups, but nothing widespread.
Famous last words for me here, but IndyCar’s final-spec ERS has done a lot of running and the reliability has been quite good, so based on that reality, I’d expect Mid-Ohio to continue the trend. Said another way, it would come as a surprise if all of the reliability we’ve seen with the final-spec ERS goes out the window and leaves us with half or more of the field sitting parked and smoking on the side of the road on Sunday.
Q: I realize the charters are a foregone conclusion at this point in IndyCar, but I just don’t understand why the series has been so hellbent on adding them? I totally understand why the teams want them, but it doesn’t make much sense to me from a series standpoint — it’s not as if it is struggling to attract car owners and interested teams right now. Why go through all of this trouble, turn away potential interested parties, and reward charters to the incumbent teams? They don’t have charters now, and those same teams show up every week and there is a full grid. If this was 2007, I could see how charters would hold value for the series at a time when it was tough to get a full grid every week, but are they really worried that a bunch of teams are going to up and leave now without a charter system in place?
I would much rather the series embrace the opposite stance and lean into competition — embrace bumping! You could run road and street course qualifying with Round 1 split into three groups — the top two from each group automatically advance to the Fast 6. Bottom two or three from each group go into a Last Chance Qualifying like Indy for the final spots on the grid, which would be in place of the now-moot Fast 12 segment. It would certainly make qualifying even more exciting and would force teams to up their game if they want to continue to play — which can only be good for the product, considering it’s a professional series.
Matt, Nazareth, PA
MP: I’ve had the same struggles to find the overwhelming reasons to create charters, but we do know that team owners would like to have their entries protected, so guaranteeing starting positions in every race — except, thankfully, the Indy 500, which they backed away from after receiving a big backlash from fans — is something they will receive.
And attaching a free-market monetary value to their entries is another thing they won’t turn down, so that’s what they’ll get as well. It all fits with the spec-minded direction the series has been on for many years. Strip away as many areas that you can where failure could exist, like multiple tire suppliers and multiple chassis suppliers, so nobody is at risk of picking the wrong vendor, and that way, you’re all but guaranteed to be able to compete at the highest level.
It’s also protecting your ability to compete in all but one race while letting the newcomers be the only ones at risk of failing and potentially going out of business. That’s not the spirit of racing I fell in love with.
Minus the guaranteed starting positions, the charter works for me, but maybe I’m looking at it the wrong way.
Q: As an engineer, I have no problem switching between U.S. and metric units to make comparisons. However, a lot of fans on social media are utterly befuddled by IndyCar’s insistence on using the longstanding U.S. units for power and torque for the ICE but metric for the ERS. To be honest, I think that is deliberate obfuscation to cloak just how impotent this ERS is in practice versus all that was promised.
Power is torque times rpm, plus any necessary conversion factors. 30 Newton meters of torque at 12000 rpm is equivalent to just under 51 hp, woefully short of what the originally stated goals were at the out-set.
The series will allow 105 kJ of energy deployment per lap at Iowa. That’s equivalent to 50 hp for 2.8 seconds, assuming that the driver is able to harvest and deploy that much with everything else going on during an 18 second lap — and a 100% efficient MGU, which we know is not possible.
A standard rechargeable lithium battery pack on a homeowner-level weed whacker is 30 watt-hour capacity. One Wh equals 3.6 kJ, thus that pack contains 108 kJ energy. Obviously, I don’t expect Hinch to be making that comparison on screen, even though it is realistic.
A gallon of E85 contains about 94,000 kJ of heat energy, and a turbo engine at full throttle can reach 40% efficiency in converting heat energy to kinetic energy at the driveshaft. 105 kJ is only about as much en-ergy as the ICE puts out the back end from burning 0.14 ounces of E85.
I’ve been a fan of the series since the turbine era, and I’m having a real hard time understanding the hype around this “development.” It’s a mass of complication with precious little benefit versus allowing a little more turbo boost, OEM marketing efforts be damned.
Steve Jarzombek
MP: I hear you, but there are a lot of constraints IndyCar gave itself by sticking with the same chassis since there was no space to build a stout high-voltage lithium-ion battery solution. Left with a small void to fill in the bellhousing, what Chevy and Honda came up with is, as I’ve said many times, a marvel of packaging. But due to the extreme limitation of space to fit an ESS and MGU, they weren’t able to make a monster ERS that delivers giant horsepower and torque.
The series says it could go as high as 150hp with the unit one day, so that would be great. But it’s starting at a modest 60hp and 33.2 lb-ft of torque to maintain the reliability it’s achieved with the MGUs.
First and foremost, this is a marketing exercise, not a deep technological exploration by IndyCar, Chevy, or Honda. It’s to give its current and hopefully more auto brands in the future the relevance they need to stay in or join the series. So far, from 2013-23 (and half of 2024), no manufacturers wanted to join IndyCar while it was non-hybrid.
The new ERS package might not produce the staggering performance we’d hoped — at least at the outset — but I’m but focused on what the move to hybridization could do to bring more car companies into the series.
On the units of measurement, I’ve conveyed the concern and need for the series to Americanize everything related to the ERS units. Newton-meters and kilojoules just don’t jive here, so let’s hope the advice was taken.