Q: Do you think any of the IndyCar teams with open seats are interested in splitting a seat between two drivers? Like Coyne’s approach of having Katherine Legge run ovals and bringing in different drivers for road and street courses last season?
Surely the drivers would prefer a seat all to themselves, but I’m thinking a shared drive is better than no drive at all, right? I know the number of different drivers per car is now limited by the charters, so teams won’t be able to swap in a new driver every race.
Do you think teams would only split a seat as a last resort for money reasons? Could teams could go this route for performance purposes? Or would they pretty much always prefer to stick with a single driver for a given ride if they can?
Luke, southern Utah
MP: Interested? No. Forced to out of financial necessity as you mentioned? Yes. Teams want to vie for championships and race wins, and unless we’re talking about splitting a seat among champions and race winners, it’s a recipe for losing out on titles, which is obvious, and makes winning races extraordinarily hard because of the lack of continuity and chemistry.
Same thing in most sports where a player sits on the bench and might not get into a game for a decent stretch of time — when they do go in, you rarely see brilliance because it takes time to get warmed up mentally to be at 100 percent. It’s no different for a driver who sits out road course or ovals, and only on rare occasions — Mike Conway as Carpenter’s road racing ringer comes to mind — does it get you to victory lane.
Q: I noticed that Meyer Shank will have Scott Dixon in the No. 60 Acura for all of the endurance races and Felix Rosenqvist for Daytona only. It seems interesting to me that Dixon is in for all the endurance races over their own driver in Rosenqvist. How does this come about? Is this at the request of HRC to have Dixon over Felix, or was it something where Rosenqvist doesn’t want to do all of the endurance races?
Joey, Florida
MP: No disrespect to Rosenqvist, but if it’s between him and Dixon, for any job, Dixon gets the nod. And because this is the factory Acura team, which is heavy funded by Acura, Acura/Honda’s longstanding top dog Dixon is the immediate choice for the brand. Palou is also in “favored son” status with Acura/Honda, which is why he’s in for all the enduros in the sister car.
Felix loves sports car racing. I’d also say that with MSR’s IMSA team leaving GTP at the end of 2023 as the best team in the class, and it returning with almost all of the same people in place for 2025, that it’s incredibly solid. The IndyCar side is where MSR made strides last season, but still fell short of expectations. Having him focused on IndyCar, where the greatest gains are needed, sounds like a very Shank move.
Q: Peter Kerr wrote in last week about track limits. I’d agree that in some cases they border on ridiculous and are bad for the look and the spectacle. When there isn’t a consequence for a driver getting it wrong my interest goes down, but I know the asphalt runoffs aren’t going to go away or be reduced in size.
In F1 there are very few Tilke-era tracks I get much much excitement from as an observer, and it looks like they’d be even less enjoyable in person due the distant location of seating anywhere other than a straightaway. The re-issue of Zandvoort is a pleasant exception. It’s hard to imagine how they were able to get it certified when others are reduced to coming off like parking lots with arbitrary lines painted on them.
A second issue with the huge concrete runoffs is that the racetrack itself loses visual definition when these areas appear to be nothing other than a continuation of the track surface. Along with this, the translation of the car’s speed gets diluted and diminishes the spectacle. Only the very talented and brave can drive an IndyCar or F1 car at full commitment, but the telecasts don’t come close to doing all they can to make that obvious. A possible simple and partial solution: Why not paint or stain the runoff concrete runoff areas to mimic the surrounding terrain?
For example, when either side of a straightaway is lined with grass, color the runoff concrete in a similar shade of green starting where the two surfaces meet, and maintain it until it gives way again to a natural surface or other defining elements. There is no shortage of how this could be applied (roller, sprayer) and it could be permanent or not. You lose nothing in the safety department, don’t have cars stuck in a gravel trap and the track looks more like a track.
Do the same to “green out” the portions of alternate track configurations that aren’t being used on a given weekend. This would reduce a lot of visual distraction, make some tracks look less bush-league and allow the tracks themselves to stand out and translate better on camera.
In the realm of F1 the cost would be very small, and I’d think pretty minimal to IMSA and IndyCar. How much it might help is tough to say, but it wouldn’t hurt and wouldn’t require much to try.
Here’s some very high end iPhone graphic work to provide an example:
George Moran
MP: You have a highly creative mind, George. I like it.