Interesting Item on New Chassis in Indy Star (Merged)

[Down F0rce]

This thread has had at least four pages added to it since I last looked yesterday, when the Delta Wing was unveiled. I don't think the Dallara or Swift had such a reaction. Neither of those cars appeared on any popular car based webpages either. The Delta Wing has. It has got people talking. All sorts of views of course, and that's a good thing. When was the last time a popular car news page featured a debate about IndyCar racing that wasn't anything to do with the split?

I'm surprised so many people are debating how the car is going to turn. We must have a lot of highly educated mechanical engineers here, I think you all need to tell Bowbly his car won't work. Ah yes, HE is the engineering genius. If he says it'll work, then it'll work.

Like it or love it, this is the car that will get people interested in this style of racing again. The Dallara and Swift may be perfectly good cars (the DP01 was as well, remember...) but if this sport is to survive then something utterly drastic needs to happen... the Delta Wing is it. If it fails, then so what? The IRL was gonna fail anyway. Desperate times, desperate measures and all that...

[rustyfan]

Originally Posted by Flyin Ryan

So he died of the same thing Earnhardt died of? Wasn't the HANS device or similar neck restraints that were its predecessors required in open wheel at the time?

CART mandated the use of the HANS device starting with the 2000 season, as a result of the fatalities the year before.

Originally Posted by Flyin Ryan

The only death I can think of where the roll hoop maybe played a role was the Budweiser exec that flipped over and died in a Grand-Am event at Homestead. Supposedly this was one of the reasons why Grand-Am went to having a closed cockpit for DPs.

That was Jeff Clinton during practice for the Nextel 250 back in 2002. He lost control of his Lola entering turn one, hit the wall and was launched into a series of flips during which the roll hoop gave way and decapitated him.

A failed roll hoop also played a part in the death of Michele Alboreto during testing of the Audi R8 at Lausitzring in 2001, when he blew a tire and was launched into a violent series of rolls.

[Tim Northcutt]

Here is the story Curt Cavin published on the front page of the sports section (with a huge teaser photo abover the masthead on the front of the printed newspaper itself:

http://www.indystar.com/article/2010...rows-questions

Some of the quotes from team owners, etc., especially Kalkhoven's thoughts are intriguing, to say the least...THese guys do not like what the IRL is doing at all, and will draw a line in the sand on this one...

Another split could definitely be on the way...

[Flyin Ryan]

Originally Posted by Tim Northcutt

Here is the story Curt Cavin published on the front page of the sports section (with a huge teaser photo abover the masthead on the front of the printed newspaper itself:

http://www.indystar.com/article/2010...rows-questions

Some of the quotes from team owners, etc., especially Kalkhoven's thoughts are intriguing, to say the least...THese guys do not like what the IRL is doing at all, and will draw a line in the sand on this one...

Another split could definitely be on the way...

Everything from Indycar's recent history points the other way. Penske among a couple others did everything he could in the late '80s to kill or restrict competition that came in that he perceived as threatening his position as the King of Indycar. He purposely drove a well-supported Porsche program out of the sport for example. Carl Haas as Lola importer wouldn't sell you a Lola unless you voted the way he wanted you to in CART Board meetings.

For us to grow open-wheel racing in the U.S., we need to capture a new audience, and that audience is 18 to 35 years old," he said. "This is a group that is not in love with motor cars; they're in love with technology.

Youth are not interested in what we're doing. But open sourcing will allow every engineering university in the country to get involved. If we lock ourselves in a box with one manufacturer, car or engine, we'll continue down the same declining path we're on.

Mr. Kalkhoven, I'm in this age group. They in general don't care about auto racing. The people that do care are there for a party and more watch for drivers and the car is just an instrument for them to drive around in. That's why Danica Patrick is the most popular Indycar driver by far and she's not the best driver. My friends in the late 20s group I'm in see zero connection between a Honda F1 racecar and the Honda they buy to drive. If these people did care about technology in a racecar, they would watch Le Mans or Formula One, and they don't.

There's little stopping Indycar from doing open sourcing now with the current-style designs, what's stopping them from open sourcing is the costs of competing and no access to cheap composites manufacturing and there's only one engine allowed to compete that has to be supported by an automaker. If you allow independents to build an engine, you're not dependent on manufacturers to subsidize a series, anyone can then truly compete. The top car owners don't want that though because they want the money.

Kalkhoven's whole thing on universities, we already have the SAE Formula competition. He's going to sell that for $600k cars in competitive first-class auto racing? This recession has hit the universities hard too and they've been cutting expenses. Not to mention we've seen a couple universities run teams at Le Mans and they've been far from competent or impressive (one from Japan a year or two ago).

[bjohnsonsmith]

I'm looking forward to August, which is when they plan to test the Delta Wing.

[Flyin Ryan]

Originally Posted by bjohnsonsmith

I'm looking forward to August, which is when they plan to test the Delta Wing.

...and per Cavin the decision's being made in May.

[bjohnsonsmith]

Of course.

[mountainstar]

Originally Posted by Flyin Ryan

So he died of the same thing Earnhardt died of? Wasn't the HANS device or similar neck restraints that were its predecessors required in open wheel at the time?



The only death I can think of where the roll hoop maybe played a role was the Budweiser exec that flipped over and died in a Grand-Am event at Homestead. Supposedly this was one of the reasons why Grand-Am went to having a closed cockpit for DPs.

He did die of similar issues to Earnhardt but IRC the neck was also involved. No guarantee HANS could have prevented it, but it might have helped.

I can't recall the dates now, but around that time in the late 1990's the HANS device had been redesigned into the more compact version we see today, again if IRC, mercedes benz and the FIA footing a lot of the bill for the research and redesign. So HANS was just coming into common use at the time and a lot of drivers were not using them yet.

[Yannick]

The sideways crash structure of the Delta Wing looks questionable, to say the least.
Given the close proximity of walls to many of the Indy Car Series' racetracks, the series organisers should pick the design which offers the safest crash structures, not the one with the most spectacular looks. They really should have all 4 competitors' cars crash-tested independently before choosing their car.

Initially, I didn't care at all about which car the series would run in the future or which manufacturer would win the audition, but on some other message boards on the web, I came across some talk about the Delta Wing design that was presented recently. People called it the Batmobile.
So the radical design of the car might create publicity, but not the kind that the series want, when everybody just talks about them racing Batmobiles.

A successful bull rider promoter might think different because of the publicity a radical design can create, but in that sport, they have the same gear all the time. You cannot radically re-design a bull.

So be it the Swift, the Lola or the Dallara, but please not this Batmobile of a Delta Wing design.

[Flyin Ryan]

Originally Posted by mountainstar

He did die of similar issues to Earnhardt but IRC the neck was also involved. No guarantee HANS could have prevented it, but it might have helped.

I can't recall the dates now, but around that time in the late 1990's the HANS device had been redesigned into the more compact version we see today, again if IRC, mercedes benz and the FIA footing a lot of the bill for the research and redesign. So HANS was just coming into common use at the time and a lot of drivers were not using them yet.

I'd thought it was more widely-used than that in open wheel because I remember in the aftermath of Earnhardt's death Brett Bodine vouching for the HANS device (or some other neck restraint) because he said he test-drove an Indycar a few years or so earlier and the restraint was required. After his test was over, he liked it so much he decided to wear one when driving stock cars. Earnhardt died in early 2001 and I figured Bodine's test would've been in the mid- to late '90s or so.

[djb]

just read the last bunch of pages on this topic, interesting read and will be rather intriguing to see where this all goes.

I appreciated the various points that looked at the whole politics of this thing, the interests of the big guys and how that plays a part with this.

shall be interesting thats for sure, although my feeling is that this delta wing is really for the WOW effect and is purposely over the top.

[JagtechOhio]

Ryan,

GREAT opinion in response to Kalkoven's remarks, thanks.

[johntt]

I love the ideas and thinking behind the Delta Wing, but I suspect that its too radical a design. I seriously doubt that Bowlby hasn't considered the side impact issue, its far too obvious a thing for a designer of his level to miss.

The Dallara concepts have the opposite problem, they are far too conservative.

The Swift has the best balance of the past and future IMO.

[gttouring]

the dleta car will smoke indy laps.
this is not really what we need- unless there is a wide track front street version.
because indy should innovate
but lets allow for multiple chassis. For pete's sake.

[Jay]

Originally Posted by Flyin Ryan

So he died of the same thing Earnhardt died of? Wasn't the HANS device or similar neck restraints that were its predecessors required in open wheel at the time?

No...sadly the HANS device was too late for Gonzalo.

[bjohnsonsmith]

Personally I like the Swift but the problem of having or not having multiple chassis persists. Hopefully the ecomomic situatation will be better by 2012.

Why not then go a head with the chassis of choice but at the same time leave the series open for other manufacturers?

[Tim Northcutt]

Originally Posted by bjohnsonsmith

Personally I like the Swift but the problem of having or not having multiple chassis persists. Hopefully the ecomomic situatation will be better by 2012.

Why not then go a head with the chassis of choice but at the same time leave the series open for other manufacturers?

For the manufacturers to produce cars at the price point that the IRL wants, the builders themselves are saying that they need exclusivity in order to recoup what they will invest to build them and to provide spares, etc.

Let's say all four would be allowed to do it, and they end up splitting the entries evenly...all four would lose their shirts providing only 5 cars each with the millions they would have invested to design, create, and test the car itself.

[bjohnsonsmith]

I'm not saying all four manufacturers should start making cars all at the same time, that would be a bit daft. Once a manufacturer has been chosen, the door should be left open so anyone else wishing to enter their own chassis can, as happened in the 80s and 90s with March, Lola, Reynard etc. Replacing an existing spec series with another isn't going to do it.

[Flyin Ryan]

Originally Posted by bjohnsonsmith

I'm not saying all four manufacturers should start making cars all at the same time, that would be a bit daft. Once a manufacturer has been chosen, the door should be left open so anyone else wishing to enter their own chassis can, as happened in the 80s and 90s with March, Lola, Reynard etc. Replacing an existing spec series with another isn't going to do it.

Well Indycar and ChampCar never became spec series de jure, but de facto. Other constructors lost interest or didn't see the financial benefit to continue, or lost their shirts on it like Riley & Scott and Reynard (and as Lola almost did). There was nothing stopping Panoz from continuing to develop their IRL car from 2006 onwards, they chose not to and instead put all their energy into the exclusive car contract in ChampCar. You can't say Panoz made the wrong decision there, this is a very expensive game seen by the fact Panoz is now essentially bankrupt and got sold to Carl Haas to just get rid of debt. In a way, it's the same thing with Chevrolet and Toyota leaving IRL by choice and that made it so the only people supplying were Honda. They made the decision "we're spending too much money to get our ass kicked consistently for no return". There's probably some kind of parable of people that ignore business sense with their businesses don't stay in business for long.

I see this in my day job, as the technology required to manufacture engines that meet government regulations and increase fuel mileage go up, the number of companies capable of building such engines continues going down. In some markets, my company has 100% market share because the initial price outlay to be competitive is too high for other aspirants to get in, and this is a far more widely diverse world with a lot more money involved than racecar construction.

The only way you can have multiple constructors and multiple engines with the current financial state of the Indycar Series is decrease the technology of the cars, or don't decrease the technology but make it less specialized to get away from only having a handful of people that know how to work on a car. Auto racing at the top level worked this way from the very start of auto racing til maybe 20 years ago. Every county in Indiana has a fabrication shop that can build a tubeframe, it's just welding. Very low initial cost outlay because the number of people that can build a tubeframe from engineering drawings is high. For carbonfiber, it's a very small group of specialist car builders like Max Crawford (who's getting so much business right now in Denver, North Carolina, I think his doors are closed), aviation companies, and a few car companies maybe. Then on engines, I look at the Daytona 24 Hours race just completed and a lot of the top cars in Daytona Prototypes had a BMW engine. BMW had nothing to deal with the project, it was a guy that took a BMW and he souped it up himself and it was competing for overall lead. There are tons of engine builders like that in this country.

[bjohnsonsmith]

To Flyin Ryan:
The equivalent in F1 has happened with teams/constuctors coming and going. Recently we've seen Honda, now Toyota and BMW leave. As it happens these teams are road car producers and it doesn't look to good from a marketing point of view if you aren't winning and there is a global recession and as you say, 'They made the decision "we're spending too much money to get our ass kicked consistently for no return". '

However F1 has kept the door open for other teams to come along and have made racing a little more 'viable' through budget capping, though that saw Ferrari threatening to leave. Maybe then decreasing the technology of the cars, or making it less specialized is what has to be done.

Btw I always thought the raison d'être of the IRL was for it to be a spec series?

[nickyf1]

Well IIRC anyone can build an Indycar chassis, which must then be approved by Indycar themselves. Any team may use an Indycar approved chassis, which was brought in in 2003 IIRC. Prior to that you could use anything built to IRL rules without IRL needing to properly approve them, if thats the right wording.

[mountainstar]

A part of the car manufacturer dollars in all of motorsport going away is due to the global depression/recession and also due to the "eco" fad like we had in the mid 1970's. It's hard to justify spending loads on motorsport when you are cutting dealers/shifts/employees etc and it isn't popular right now to be seen doing something fun(fun=anti environment in the minds of pseudo-progressives).

That said, manufacturers are always looking for a challenge to stand out. Another reason why Honda and Toyota pulled out of F1 was they ceased to lack having much of a technical challenge anymore. Coupling that with the reasons above it as a no brainer to pull out. Same with toyota and gm previously pulling out of indycar.

So I am convinced the way forward is opening up the regs both with chassis and engines. I'd let our brilliant engineering minds go to work devising regs that incorporate required safety features as well as certain dimensional and weight requirements, then I'd let all comers design what they want in those parameters.

We need not fear competition. It is the lack of competition that is driving everyone away.

On the delta wing, I have a hard time seeing how you turn that thing at low speed. I also sense if it understeers or oversteers it must be a ***** to control.

[Tim Northcutt]

Originally Posted by mountainstar

A part of the car manufacturer dollars in all of motorsport going away is due to the global depression/recession and also due to the "eco" fad like we had in the mid 1970's. It's hard to justify spending loads on motorsport when you are cutting dealers/shifts/employees etc and it isn't popular right now to be seen doing something fun(fun=anti environment in the minds of pseudo-progressives).

That said, manufacturers are always looking for a challenge to stand out. Another reason why Honda and Toyota pulled out of F1 was they ceased to lack having much of a technical challenge anymore. Coupling that with the reasons above it as a no brainer to pull out. Same with toyota and gm previously pulling out of indycar.

So I am convinced the way forward is opening up the regs both with chassis and engines. I'd let our brilliant engineering minds go to work devising regs that incorporate required safety features as well as certain dimensional and weight requirements, then I'd let all comers design what they want in those parameters.

We need not fear competition. It is the lack of competition that is driving everyone away.

On the delta wing, I have a hard time seeing how you turn that thing at low speed. I also sense if it understeers or oversteers it must be a ***** to control.

Agreed on all counts

[JagtechOhio]

I think it's telling that three people here, all with a fair amount of knowledge and strong opinions, have butted heads at one time or another and have all reached a general consensus.

In the same six months, the IICS has taken no significant action, and the owners took a clean sheet of paper and made one very large spitball.

So much for talking heads. They should try listening to each other, too.

[bjohnsonsmith]

Originally Posted by mountainstar

I am convinced the way forward is opening up the regs both with chassis and engines. I'd let our brilliant engineering minds go to work devising regs that incorporate required safety features as well as certain dimensional and weight requirements, then I'd let all comers design what they want in those parameters.

We need not fear competition. It is the lack of competition that is driving everyone away.

I agree. I just hope that if a single chassis is decided upon, the IRL includes the provision for both future engine and chassis manufacturers to be able to take part, economic factors permitting, rather than having a closed shop.