Q: I was fortunate to attend the Portland GP in 2018, which had a huge crowd. While watching this year it was apparent the crowd has dropped by about 70% since returning. I realize this is mostly Green Savoree’s fault, but this is a concerning trend where the final stretch of the calendar will have sparse crowds.
Is the brain trust at Penske Entertainment aware of how stale the product is becoming? Another Penske Ganassi one-two without any compelling passing /dueling for the lead (a common trend in the aeroscreen era).
If diehards like myself are getting burned out on the product before the end of the season, what does that say for the casual fan? Something needs to be done to restore parity to the field.
BuckheadIndy from Stankonia, the dirty dirty, the ATL
MP: We’ve had some great races at Portland with aeroscreens, and everywhere else with aeroscreens, so let’s not use the thing to carry all the blame for no reason.
The thing I’d ask is tell me when we had parity in the field? It’s been a loooooong time since an upstart little team like Schmidt Peterson Motorsports or KV Racing or even Dale Coyne Racing played the role of occasional spoiler of the Ganassi-Penske-Andretti domination.
Every championship since the new formula arrived in 2012 has been won by the big three, and of the 13 Indy 500s, 10 have been won by the big three (thanks to KV, Meyer Shank, and RLL for breaking up the group). This further reinforces the point that the biggest teams, which won almost all of the races before the new formula, continue to be the best, with the most money, and most of the best drivers and personnel, and dominating is what they are supposed to do.
Parity? Maybe for a brief period in the IRL from 1996-2000, kind of, but once the Penske cars showed up at Phoenix in 2001 — our Sam Schmidt team was next to them in the garages — we watched that concept disappear. Totally understand how you might be burned out on the Big 3, but this is what it’s been for decades. Might change the players — could have been a Newman/Haas Racing or Galles Racing or Player’s/Forsythe — but the dynamic of a few monster teams taking almost all of the spoils is the norm, and going to a new car won’t change that.
Q: How is the flip of the starter switch bad for safety compared to having to fetch a car not centered in the pit box and sending another crew member and or starter tool into a busy pit lane?
Ron Schroder
MP: Because one involves the crew overseeing starting the car and knowing when it’s ready to leave, and the other presents the risk of the driver leaving without his crew being aware and fully out of the way.
Q: This proposed IndyCar charter membership is crazy. The top 25 are locked in from 2025 and beyond. Total lockout of any new teams for wanting to come race with IndyCar. Sounds to me like Mr. Penske and Mr. Miles have been drinking whatever Mr. Brown from McLaren is telling them is the direction he thinks IndyCar needs to go. Instead of 26-30 full-time entries, weed out the small teams that have supported IndyCar since the IRL was formed, and cut the full-time entries back to around 20-24.
Second, locking the field size at 27 outside of Indy is just stupid. If you have tracks like WWTR, Milwaukee, Iowa, Portland and Road America that can support bigger fields, go race by race. It’s not that difficult.
And my last pissed-off issue of 2024, Mexico said, “IndyCar, you get a Mexican driver in your series, you can come race here.” Once again, IndyCar has dragged its feet long enough, fixated on its 17-race schedule, and NASCAR comes sneaking in the back door. If not NASCAR, it’s F1.
You can’t sit around and wait for your phone to ring, you have to get off your butts and go visit these other venues. I worked at USAC for 15+ years, and that’s how we grew our series.
AE Danville, IN
MP: It’s Penske Entertainment leading the downsizing move, FWIW. Zak Brown supports it, but this is something the owners of the series want first and foremost. If it wasn’t difficult to host more than 27, they would. But since it is difficult at a number of tracks, they aren’t.
I wonder why IndyCar is so focused on the site of the Mexican GP when other options could be explored. How about something original and unique like a street race that is 100 percent IndyCar’s, instead of going to a road course where F1 and NASCAR will draw much bigger crowds, and the series would need to pay to rent the facility and do all of the work to be a distant third in popularity to the other events?
Q: In last week’s Mailbag, Bill M questioned why hybrid IndyCars don’t always start their engines under hybrid power when they’re allowed to.
Presumably if you spin with 100% charge you’ll be able to restart yourself, but if you’re on 0% you won’t. So what’s the “danger zone” of charge where, if you’re driving round below that level and spin, you won’t have enough power to restart the engine?
Paul, Edinburgh, UK
MP: IndyCar’s Honda-built energy storage system is configured to save the last 30 percent of its charge for restarts. In other words, what drivers have to play with, which is on a 0-100-percent charge scale, is actually 31-100 percent. Now, can a driver, having issues or fumbling with self-starting, burn that 30 percent down to zero? I’m not sure if the ESS will let drivers truly go to 0, but if there’s stalling and a need to do multiple self-starts, a driver might be out of luck.
Q: With a nod to big team domination in the standings, would a rule preventing any car in the top 10 of the Leaders Circle from participating in off-season manufacturer/tire/hybrid testing help close the gap?
Vincent Martinez, South Pasadena, CA
MP: It couldn’t hurt, but as I’ve said before, if you’re Dallara/IndyCar, Firestone, or Chevy/Honda, do you want your C, D, and F students helping you to study and prepare for the big test, or your A and B students tacking the preparatory work?
I’m not saying the midfield and smaller teams can’t be super helpful in testing, but you’d probably want to lean on the ones with the best of everything to help you develop whatever you’re working on.
Q: How does race control work? I remember at some point it was a committee of three people or something that made the decisions. Is that still how it works?
Geoff
MP: It was, but years ago, it reverted to two with Arie Luyendyk and Max Papis. If there’s a deadlock on a call, I believe Jay Frye is the tiebreaker.