Q: You mentioned on a video that you wished we could do something to fix Bump Day. Here’s an idea to noodle on: Just give it more time. Run pole qualifying first, Top 12 at noon, Fast 6 at 2pm. Then expand the window of bump day qualifying from one hour to three hours, say from 3pm-6pm. Plenty of time to make setup changes, cool engines, etc. Thoughts?
Andy R., Brighton, MI
MP: I like where you’re going here, Andy. Only issue is the series’ desire to end the day on a high with crowning a pole winner, so doing that mid-day means a lot of focus goes to that person and team instead of the LCQ stuff.
I’d be tickled if we spent two days setting the field, minus all the LCQ and Fast 12 and Fast Six nonsense. Let some surprises happen. Give yourself a weekend-long story for people to follow.
Q: After re-watching your “IndyCar Texas 2023 aero options” video on RACER’s YouTube channel, I noticed you didn’t mention the new speedway rear wing pylons which were introduced earlier this year. Therefore, I’m guessing it was the old pylons which were used at TMS last April, right? Could the new ones be used instead next year, or are they designed as an Indy-only item? Since these not only allow for more rear downforce to be generated, but also in a much less draggy and turbulent way than with wickers and Gurney flaps, are the latter still allowed at Indy this year? If we know for a fact that these disrupt the wake in a way that makes it difficult for other cars to follow, why should we keep using them now that we’ve found something that works better? Why not just ban them?
Also, it looks like the word from the paddock is that the changes brought up this year haven’t really help improve the racing and drivers in the draft still feel stuck in a sort of “DRS train” situation. Obviously, we’ll have to wait until Sunday to see the final result, but did you also get the same feedback from the drivers you’ve talked to? If so, is there anything that can be done to fix this? And even if it is still hard to go for a pass when you’re in the middle of the pack, is it at least easier to follow in a corner with the dirty air? I understand this was initially what those changes were made for, so has it improved as intended?
Xavier
MP: Yes, I saved the Indy rear wing pillars for the Indy Open Test. They could be used wherever IndyCar might want them to be in place. Gurneys are allowed, but less likely to be deployed in big and wide form. Heard things are slightly better, but not drastically so. New wings will be needed to get that resolved.
Q: Are there any plans for Abel Motorsports and RC Enerson to do any other races this year?
On the silly season front, has interest from the big teams cooled slightly on “Little Dave” Malukas? Ilott, Ericsson and Jake Dennis’s names have come up more often than Malukas’s.
Joe
MP: Not that I’ve heard. I think Chicago Davey will be just fine; he simply doesn’t have the winning pedigree of an Ericsson or the mystique of an Ilott or Dennis. If he were droll and hyper serious at all times, I’d imagine more teams would be intrigued.
Q: I know it’s often difficult to discern whether is it the driver or the car/team? But the past two years have been very unkind to Jack Harvey at RLL, and the fans have been equally unkind. That being said, he finished 15th and 13th in the championship at Meyer Shank. Pagenaud and Castroneves only managed 15th and 18th last year, currently sit 20th and 23rd with MSR, and Harvey is 21st at Rahal. Harvey’s teammates at RLL are currently ninth and 15th (though Rahal will see that drop after missing the 500).
All of those stats to say… is Harvey that much worse than Rahal and Lundgaard? Did Harvey have better equipment at MSR than Pagenaud and Castroneves have had? Was it that Harvey could do more with a middle-pack car than he’s able to do in a terrible car? Are Rahal and Lundgaard just way better at driving bad cars?
Ross Bynum
MP: Some drivers are capable of helping their engineers to shape and tune an ill-handling car into something that’s much better, and others are better suited to producing great results if they’re handed a great car that doesn’t need much improvement. I think we saw a decent amount of that at MSR. Jack can drive the balls off a car, but I’m not sure he’s an ace — yet, at least — in transforming something bad into something good.
Q: I loved the Indy 500 qualifying format and enjoyed watching it immensely.
Can you help me understand how and why some cars are so much slower than others? I assume that they are running the same engine maps and thus power is identical, or as identical as can be. They all have the same chassis, aero parts, and tires, right? So where does all the difference in speed come from? As a non-racer, I don’t fully understand all the variables the teams can play with to set up a car for speed and how some teams get it so wrong. Please help a relative newbie appreciate what the teams and engineers are dealing with to get it right. The big teams have four cars to play around with, so I can see the advantage there since they can gather more data and try a lot of things, but what else is going on here?
Jeff L., Atlanta, GA
MP: Great questions, Jeff. The first area of major influence is aerodynamics. But since most teams have been around for a long time and had these Dallara DW12s since they debuted in 2012, they know all the tricks to make the cars quick and efficient while cutting through the air on the long straights. Same goes for the transmissions and the uprights — the carriers that hold the wheels and connect to the suspension. Those items have tons of rotational forces going through them, and as a result, teams work like mad to reduce friction to allow the wheels and gears and axles to spin fast and free.
But some teams are better at optimizing their aerodynamics to be fast and efficient, and better at reducing mechanical friction than other teams; in some cases, it’s a money thing where bigger teams can hire more or better people to spearhead such things and turn out slicker cars.
The most underrated area of big or small performance is on the suspension side. Since those four corners are like slingshots, the better the handling in those corners — without scrubbing a bunch of speed — is what sets the car up to fire down the straights at high rates of speed. Get the suspension tuning slightly off, and each corner robs small amounts of speed that hurts all the way to the next corner.
I know of one Fast 12 participant who is convinced he’d be on pole if he’d been in the correct fuel map on lap one; by the time it was fixed, he was no longer in contention for pole.