So we have round 2 of the F1 season this weekend along with the first round for Indy car. Indy gets aero kits, more power, new faces etc.
24 entrants compared to 20 for F1. They've just finished practice 1 and the field is covered by 3.5 seconds with the top 19 covered by less than a second. It's looking like great racing this year.
I've always liked the looks of the DW12, but i welcome some diversity
Chevy have the upper hand despite a much simpler looking aero kit with the first 4 places in practice so far. Simona is 15th after a year away being screwed by Sauber in F1, lets see how she does as the weekend continues.
Even better after the joke of a season last year, the new Indy Lights car looks to have rejuvinated the series. 13 cars are entered which in the grand scheme of things is crap, but car counts were as low as 8 last year. Interestingly Max Chilton is coming not to Indy, but Indy Lights with Carlin Motorsport who have been massively successful over in Europe in GP2 and GP3 with drivers like Chilton, Aleshin, Nasr, Jolyon Palmer etc. He's doing lights with them this year as a learning step before he and Carlin move up to Indy car next year.
I finally think Indy car is really on an up swing.
BTW, you can follow live timing and scoring for the Indy cars and the support races with video feed here.
Ha Ha! Simona was .4 faster than Marco!
The areo kits- are they specific to the engine manufactuers?
I thought they would keep that separate- so that there would be basically 4 different versions Honda/Chevy+ areo A/B.
Would be bad if the difference was in the aero, and the Honda teams were saddled with that decision.
alfadriver wrote:
The areo kits- are they specific to the engine manufactuers?
I thought they would keep that separate- so that there would be basically 4 different versions Honda/Chevy+ areo A/B.
Would be bad if the difference was in the aero, and the Honda teams were saddled with that decision.
Yes the aero kits were developed by the engine manufacturers. Teams don't have to use them, but all of them have. The development isn't frozen though, so I if Honda are on the back foot they can work to catch up. But let's face it, while the Chevy engine/aero appears to have the upper hand right now, it's a whole lot closer than F1. After F1 FP2 the gap from first to third is 0.861 seconds. That covers 1st to 16th at St Pete after Practice 1.
The Honda package can be looked at as an incredible number of options compared to the less complicated Chevy package. St Pete is a very tight circuit which may not lend itself to lots of short chord wing elements...
I'm more excited about Indycar this year than I have been in a long time.
Adrian_Thompson wrote:
etifosi wrote:
Ha Ha! Holy sh!t, Marco was only 0.4 slower than Simona!!
Fixed that for you
Too cool, she was 2nd fastest Andretti driver, only .06 behind Ryan Hunter Rae Dawn Chung Newton John.
The plan wasn't originally for Chilton to be racing the second Carlin Indy Lights car. He was supposed to be their testing and development driver and to prove how fast they are in testing and that they would have two pay drivers in the races. Then Chilton would drive in IndyCar for Carlin in 2016. However, they couldn't find a pay driver (or at least one willing to pay what they were asking) for the second car and for now, Chilton is in the race seat. However, if someone does come along with a check, I imagine that Carlin would begin the process of purchasing an IndyCar chassis and Chilton would begin testing that.
etifosi wrote:
Adrian_Thompson wrote:
etifosi wrote:
Ha Ha! Holy sh!t, Marco was only 0.4 slower than Simona!!
Fixed that for you
Too cool, she was 2nd fastest Andretti driver, only .06 behind Ryan Hunter Rae Dawn Chung Newton John.
Cool, she's carried it through to Quali as well. Hunter Ray is in 8th, Simona is 11th, Marco 12th and Munoz is 14th. Not bad for her first race back. More impressive is she's the 3rd Honda qualifier.
ncjay
Dork
3/29/15 6:30 p.m.
Team Penske has gotten the season off to a heckuva start. Maybe Penske has been watching Mercedes over in F1 and wants a piece of that action. Good race except for the bits and pieces of bodywork flying all over the place. The guys doing all the carbon fiber repair should be busy enough this season.
yeah, pretty nice race, watched it back to back w/ F1 and both of them kept me awake for the whole show. Good to see Montoya back. For a while all the cautions were a pain but the seemed to ease off it and let them race for the 2nd half of the show.
looks like JPM is back in his element
I was somewhat disappointed with the race. I started to watch it, but they really need to get their E36 M3 together on contact and cautions. Either that and/or they need to increase the strength of the aero kits. 22 laps under caution, that's 20% of the race, not acceptable
It also makes for a long race at well over 2 hours. I ended up drifting away to do other things, although it turns out the 2nd half was incident free by the look of it. I came back to see the last few laps and was surprised to see not just JPM win, but all 4 of the Penske cars in the top 5. Honda must be frantically sharpening their CFD programs for next time out.
Pity Simona whacked someone (I forget who) and earned a drive through.
On the up side. They are definitely faster and it doesn't seem to have decreased the passing attempts which was a concern of the aero kits. And 22 cars still running at the end is more than F1 car get to start a race.
