IndyCar: 2020 Bommarito Automotive Group 500

Doc Austin said:
Mid Ohio is going to be much worse. They almost never have a decent race there. The track is too narrow and the straights are too short. Most of the corners are so close together there's never time to get alongside. I hope this time they prove me wrong.

If we go back to Iowa, both of those races were insane, so it's not the car or the shorter track that's any sort of problem. Why was Iowa so nuts and Gateway was so disappointing? Also remember that most Gateway races have been great too. We just had one slightly disappointing race.

I think most people are really more aggravated by the yellow finish than anything else.

The only thing I can figure is that the aeroscreen makes a ton of turbulence because that's the only thing that's changed since last year. Maybe over the winter they can find a solution in the wind tunnel. Maybe an add-on piece that straightens the flow coming off the screen or something.

I don't think we have a tremendous problem, just something that needs a little tweak. Most of the races this year have been really good and its only just today that was a little disappointing.

The last thing we want to do is something fake like DRS or PTP or cheezy custom deg tires. They need to fix the turbulence issue by fixing the turbulence issue. Leave everything else alone and straighten out the airflow.
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They brought a harder left-side tire at least so that didn’t help in addition to the higher track temps. It makes sense to believe the aeroscreen has an impact too, whether it be not enough air getting to the rear wing or something else. Typically passing on ovals comes from very grippy cars or tires that wear significantly and this weekend had neither of those. Fortunately the race goes back to a night event again next season. Iowa has variable banking and an old surface so it makes sense they pass more there.

For what it’s worth I think Mid-Ohio has put on good racing for the last few years, it’s probably the road course I look forward to the most besides Road America now. Hopefully they announce it within a couple of days.
 
donthaveanickname said:
Pato is gonna watch Newgarden's gearbox for the rest of the race. :(
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There's a reason they don't race trains on an oval-shaped piece of railroad track... the leading train can't pass the lappers, and the chasers can't pass the leaders... even if they are faster. So it's all down to pit stops and undercuts/overcuts. It's more chess than racing.

The only legitimate way out is high horsepower and *dramatically* less downforce. I don't know how long it will take for the various sanctioning bodies to develop the courage to strip away 60 or 70% of their downforce... probably longer than I have the patience to wait.

Sorry for my rant, but this race was a serious piece of sh!t.
 
LewTheShoe said:
The only legitimate way out is high horsepower and *dramatically* less downforce. I don't know how long it will take for the various sanctioning bodies to develop the courage to strip away 60 or 70% of their downforce... probably longer than I have the patience to wait.
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Then you have to worry about blowovers. If you cut all the downforce, you are also cutting drag and the cars will go like utter hell, and in some situations, actually create lift. You have to have enough downforce to counter any lift the car might create. Otherwise you are risking the cars taking off, and I think we've had enough of that.

IndyCar had the right idea when they stripped the upper body downforce off these cars. They just didn't go far enough in replacing that with underbody downforce. We don't have a blowover problem, but there is still enough downforce on the tops of the cars to wreck the air to the car behind. Smaller wings, larger tunnels would seem to be the answer here. But then again, now you'll have higher cornering speeds and shorter braking zones. It's kind of an unsolvable Rubic's cube, or at least the perfect balance is too hard to find.

However, I don't see the need to completely redesign the cars after one less than perfect race. Indianapolis was awesome and Iowa was simply crazed. We've actually got really good races. Gateway was good too, but we've just become spoiled with races like we just had at Road America.

Gateway was just a matter it can't always be mind blowingly thrilling. In the past we have had stinker races but that was just how it was and we lived with it. During the cart years it wasn't that unusual to see only two or three cars on the lead lap, so what we've got now is not all that bad.

With everything now being so heavily televised, racing has become more entertainment than sport, and thus the fascination with every race being exciting. This has led to a lot of artificial means to create artificial excitement, starting with mandatory "option tires, PTP, DRS, lucky dogs and all sorts of silly jokes. Formula One is the king of contrived crap, and look at how consistently bad their races always are.... and by that I mean consistently every week.

You can't fake competition.

I think if you ask people what the glory years were your answers are probably going to revolve around Prost and Senna in the McLaren Hondas, Schumacher in the Ferrari years, Andretti in the Lotus 79, Penske's panzer pushrod Mercedes, the Nissan GTP years, the Porsche Group C years, the Ford V Ferrari years, the 917 years, and even McLaren in the Can Am years ……. and there's lots and lots more examples of the golden years being characterized by someone or some team, or some manufacturer dominating and making everyone else look silly.

It's not that racing isn't as good as it was in the "golden years." That's not the problem because today's racing is a lot better. The real problem is we no longer view racing as pure sport and expect to be entertained. It doesn't always work that way when it's real though.

Sorry for my rant, but this race was a serious piece of sh!t.
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If you go back to some of the cart and F1 races, a lot of times the leader was on his own lap, or at best there were only two or three cars on the lead lap. You almost never saw Indianapolis won by two or three seconds, and you almost never saw the second place car even in the same picture as the winner in F1. If you thought Gateway was bad, check out some of those old stinkers.
 
In a nutshell, I would rather watch a race in which the winner laps the field than a 'close' one in which the leader fears reaching lapped traffic because of an inability to pass, and deliberately slows down to avoid doing so. That particular condition that Lew mentions is a breaking point for me as well. You'll see it on a badly rubber down dirt track sometimes too.
 
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A lot of the CART short oval races with trimmed-out superspeedway aero and something around 900 HP weren't barnburners either, that's for sure. This past weekend wasn't great by any means but high HP/low aero isn't a blanket panacea.

I doubt anything will change in the short term. The engines are maxed out as is and Chevy/Honda have shifted development to the next generation, they can't test, and they need to figure out the direction of whatever the new car is, which needs to happen sooner than later. The most likely adjustment for 2021 is probably going to come from tire development.
 
I'de be ok with keeping the current car and tweaking the aero package. The current car is not bad at all, but occasionally they run into a track or conditions that don't favor them. I think they made the car a hell of a lot better with the new bodywork. It just needs a little more work, though they have a great place to start.
 
gnomesayin said:
In a nutshell, I would rather watch a race in which the winner laps the field than a 'close' one in which the leader fears reaching lapped traffic because of an inability to pass, and deliberately slows down to avoid doing so. That particular condition that Lew mentions is a breaking point for me as well. You'll see it on a badly rubber down dirt track sometimes too.
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But is the car completely to blame? If you remember Indianapolis, Sato won that race by working through a big pack of cars and leaving Dixon trapped. I don't think there was enough time for Dixon to recover, and Sato was faster anyway. At least in that instance, the cars were pretty good in traffic, or at least Sato's was.

I don't know what went wrong at Gateway because that race is usually really good. Looking back also to Iowa, those races were nuts, so the car is good more often than not.

Maybe worth considering is that the tires could be part of the problem. You simply burn them up sitting behind another car. I don't know if this is how all rubber is, or if the tires degrade poorly because they are designed to degrade. If the tires are not performing, maybe the tires are part of the problem. I say stop worrying about designing controlled degradation into the tires and build something that works in all conditions including traffic.
 
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