Q: Power pits for new wing as they are getting ready to go green. IndyCar calls off restart, enabling Power to change his wing without going two more laps down. Penske privilege?
Joe Mullins
MP: The guy finished 10th and needs a miracle to win the championship, so if it was done to help him, it was a failure.
Q: Why does IndyCar decide to count any laps before green that extend past the normal pace laps towards the total race count? As a fan, it just feels like we are being shortchanged (although I recognize it is not normally a crazy amount). Like with Palou, it’s just crazy to me that we lost six laps of racing.
And then follow up: why was the restart after the lap six Newgarden crash single file? We never saw the green on the attempted start, so I would’ve thought that it should’ve been a normal two-wide start. Again, this is one of those little things that can make a fan feel short-changed.
All in all though, the weekend was a huge success and the racing was great Hoping they stay at Milwaukee for years to come.
Ben, Chicago
MP: The race — the event of competing over a prescribed number of laps — starts at the end of the pace laps, regardless of whether the green flag flew and actual racing took place. The lack of going green doesn’t mean the next lap(s) are additional pace laps.
The rules call for the start of the race to be double file and all the rest to be single. The race started on lap one, even though no wheel-to-wheel competition happened until the restart.
Q: It’s so easy to nitpick and be critical these days, but I just wanted to say how awesome the racing was this weekend at Milwaukee. I was pleasantly surprised by the crowd. Clearly a long way to go, but Penske Entertainment needs to do everything they can to never let this track fall off the calendar again.
Has there been any thought into improving the front and rear wing tether system? Surely there’s got to be a quicker way to unclip and reattach the tethers. A wing change these days is absolutely painful to watch.
Michael, Halifax, Canada
MP: You should see the pre-quick change noses that were held in place by 15-20 countersunk allen bolts that took three years to change. The real pain is the 20-30 seconds lost navigating most pit lanes. I’m sure IndyCar and Dallara could work on improving the change time, but of all the things the series needs to improve, is this one to waste time on and force teams to spend more money to buy whatever updated parts? I’d say no.
Here’s one of my shots of Buddy Lazier’s Hemelgarn Lola in 1991:
Q: What are the persistent problems plaguing RLL across both their IndyCar and IMSA programs? It has not just been an outlier race or two, but they are consistently mid-pack at best with what appears from the outside to be well-funded and properly equipped programs which have had past success.
With three team principals who are all in their 70s, you have to wonder about the long term outlook and succession plan, especially having just built a Taj Mahal HQ in Indy.
Graham is no longer the young charger, but one of the senior members of the paddock and one who has family and multiple businesses to manage, taking focus away from driving and training. Fittipaldi has been a big disappointment even on road courses, and Lundgaard sees greener pastures elsewhere in the paddock in ’25.
In IMSA their cars look spectacular, but again are rarely in the conversation come race day with a driving squad which primarily came out of GTs.
The whole thing is just perplexing with RLL not being a consistent front runner in either series, much less both.
Pedro
MP: Effective leadership over both programs, and specifically on the IndyCar side, lack of top-tier engineering leadership. Bobby Rahal isn’t meant to be putting in 16-hour days to run RLL; not at 71 years old and with auto dealerships and other businesses to oversee as well. Same for Mike Lanigan.
When I think of Penske, I think of Tim Cindric running the show, with authority, and he has some amazing lieutenants in charge of organizational or engineering/competition success with Ron Ruzewski, Kyle Moyer, Jonathan Diuguid, Myron Bouslog, Travis Law, etc., to lead and direct the team.
Same with Ganassi and Mike Hull and his army of organizational/engineer/competition managers with Barry Wanser, Mike O’Gara, Chris Simmons, Taylor Kiel, Jim Hamilton, Blair Julian, etc., doing the same exact things.
Penske has a NASCAR program, which I haven’t included in this rundown, so if we look at the comparisons of Penske and Ganassi and RLL who currently have multi-car IndyCar programs and manufacturer IMSA programs, I’d bet the owners of RLL would look at the hardcore team/engineering/competition leadership trees at their fellow IndyCar+IMSA teams and see they have nothing like the same staff volume or structure.
RLL has excellent people in most, but not all of its key positions. It doesn’t have enough of the same badasses its rivals have, and it also needs a big change at the top with Graham moving into the team president/managing director/dude who’s going to shake things up and restore the team’s competitive stature.
Graham is really excited about Jones’ successor, a first-year IndyCar race engineer by the name of Ashley Higham, but he’s both young and inexperienced. The best race engineer RLL’s had, in terms of on-track results, is Ben Siegel, who runs Lundgaard’s car, and he’s also somewhat young. Huge future for him — future technical director and more if he wants — but that doesn’t change the fact that here in September of 2024, there’s no deep engineering structure to rely on, no badass technical director to lead the team out of the wilderness, and that’s a vital problem to solve.
The team is stuck in that most unfortunate place where it expends a lot of effort and money but has no idea what it will get from weekend to weekend, other than frequent disappointment. Slow starts, rallying to find fixes, and Herculean efforts by Rahal or Lundgaard or Fittipaldi on occasion to overcome being lost on the first day is the well-worn script for RLL.
Bob, Mike, Dave and everyone else there deserve better. But not if they keep making minor adjustments when major alterations are required.