Welcome to the RACER Mailbag. Questions for any of RACER’s writers can be sent to mailbag@racer.com. 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: Thermal. What a joke! I turned it off at the start of the second race. Stupid idea, worse than F1.
Rich Shiroky, Toms River, NJ
MARSHALL PRUETT: Most of the comments I’ve read on social media have been highly critical of all aspects of the racing, and the other comments have been supportive of the attempt made by IndyCar to create something cool and special during a long break.
Since I doubt this event will return in the same format, there’s no need to throw haymakers at the series, but I would love to see a proper all-star race at some point. This just wasn’t it. I also hope the flamethrower that’s been aimed at the series since Sunday doesn’t scare its super-thin-skinned executive leadership into never trying something new or interesting in the future.
Granted, if history has been a guide, we should be on the lookout for a reality-bending release from Penske Entertainment that hails this as the best thing to happen to humanity. But I hope they don’t. That would be sad. It was a loss. A bad one. Accept it, come up with ideas to prevent it from happening again, and do better next time, if there is a next time. It’s what racers do.
Q: After watching that glorified test at Thermal I have a few thoughts. The NBC broadcast team should win an Emmy for best fake excitement because they actually tried to sell this garbage as an exciting race. As a fan, I couldn’t care less about how the über-wealthy live and was not even remotely interested in the venue that produced a processional of bad “racing.” There was no excitement without fans, grandstands, sponsors, etc. There was no energy at all.
If IndyCar wants us to get excited about non-points races, wouldn’t an actual race be a better way to do it? Why not Motegi, Surfers Paradise or even Argentina? I know the cost is greater, but interest would have to be, too. Thermal club is nothing but a snoozefest. Is there any way IndyCar lets this dead dog lie and finds actual races to run?
Brian Z, Phoenix, AZ
MP: If I had to guess, I’d imagine the track had some sort of stipulation in its agreement where a lot of heavy lifting was done during the broadcast to promote its existence and membership opportunities. There are many fine homes there that have leatherbound books and smell of rich mahogany, but there are also a lot of unsold lots to be purchased by new members to build more trackside mansions, so in the absence of an event sponsor like Pennzoil or Firestone, it looked like Thermal, which forked out a lot of money to make the event happen, got the title-sponsor treatment during the broadcast.
Since Thermal was the main backer of the event, it makes sense for them to be treated as such during the broadcasts.
Q: The last 10 laps at Thermal were pretty exciting, and from the interviews it sounded like the driver is going to keep that entire prize money awarded. Doesn’t that normally get split up within the team to some extent?
CAM in LA
MP: Prize monies are paid to the team, so it’s not something the drivers get directly and can keep. All depends on the team and the contracts the drivers have done with their teams. One told me it would be a 50-50 split between driver and crew, and another told me they don’t do event-specific prize money distributions; they pool all of the winnings across the season and pay an end-of-year bonus for their crew who take home whatever percentage they’ve negotiated.
Back when I was an IndyCar crew member in the 1990s and early 2000s, the average percentage I got was 1% with lesser teams, and a fraction of that with the better teams. I also recall having to get creative one year, when our little TKM/Genoa Racing team was damn near broke from the start of the season, by accepting a small salary — I think it was $45,000 as assistant team manager/engineer — with a 3% prize money take in the hope of getting to a proper number by the end of the year. My optimism for our team’s fortunes must have been higher than our team owners’ because they accepted my little strategy and it worked. Especially after we qualified second for the Indy 500 and led 18 laps with Greg Ray.
That led to a very testy exchange the week after Indy where it was conveniently forgotten that I was no longer on 1%… but they finally, and begrudgingly, paid what they owed.
If you want a driver-keeps-the-money story, our Genoa Indy Lights team put in a lot of effort to practice for a downtown pit stop challenge in Quebec in 1996 ahead of the Trois Rivieres race. We beat the Player’s team, which was a big deal; I changed the right-front, our crew chief Jon Ennik did the left-front, and our driver Dave DeSilva did a great job of launching the car, stopping for us to do the fronts-only change, and firing across the finish line.
I’ve forgotten how much it paid — maybe a couple of grand — and the promoters did hand him that wad of cash later that night at a Lights party. Dave, a paying driver whose father owned the second-largest construction company in California — built the new Oakland Raiders/Oakland A’s stadium, as well — was a sweet guy who was worth more than all of us combined, was really hyped after winning the pit stop competition, and decided it was his prize money to keep.
Whatever bond he had left with us was largely broken after that. We’d put in time in sweltering summer heat in our tiny East Lansing, Michigan shop, to practice pit stops — keep in mind that pit stops weren’t done in Lights — and treated this as the one event during the year where we as the pit crew had a tiny moment to shine. So, knowing the prize money was like pocket change to our driver, I badgered him for the next day or two, and at first, he peeled off something like a hundred bucks apiece for each of us. Felt like we were being tipped as his servers at the country club in his mind.
That was an even bigger insult than getting nothing at all, so I kept after him and he upped it to maybe $300. Ennik came to me afterwards and said, “Hey man, I wouldn’t ask him to give out any more money… he’s really pissed.” I think my response was something like, “Good, he should be pissed, at himself, for trying to s*** on us and take money that belongs to his crew.”