All-purpose open-wheel (F1, IRL) racing thread

Not from what I've seen, no. I would guess that demographically, the Indy 500 crowd is pretty similar to an F1 crowd in Europe. The race tickets are expensive as hell, but a huge percentage of the fans camp out near the track.

Monaco is a crazy exception to this, of course.

 

Can't recall but you have been to Montreal for the Grand Prix, no?

 

I have -- about 7 or 8 years ago.

 

A lot of fans at the IndyCar forums seem to be really shaken by Dixon's crash still - the consensus seems to be that Indy dodged a huge bullet. The series has been spinning him walking away as an example of safety innovation in the series, but some fans are very concerned about the cars going airborne for some time now. (Which killed Dan Wheldon, of course.)

As someone said, if they don't fix whatever design flaw is turning the cars into hang gliders, they are going to put one in the seats at some point.

 

I'm no engineer, either, but in a nutshell, what they were saying is that the decrease in horsepower in favor of sleeker cars to maintain the speeds is why they fly now.

In both the Bourdain accident and the Dixon accident, by the time I knew the severity of what happened, they were OK, for which I'm grateful.

I have to figure out what I'm going to do to explain it to my son when (inevitably) the next driver is killed on live TV in front of us.

 

The victory of Takumo Sato has lead me to wondering why American drivers do not win the Indy 500 more often. I seem to remember when CART and IRL separated in 1996 it was specifically stated that IRL would provide more oval races and more opportunities to American drivers. There were concerns that from 1989-1995 foreign drivers had won four times. By my count U.S. drivers have won six times in the 22 years since then while drivers from seven other countries have won the Indy 500.

Why is the the Indy car series dominated by foreign drivers? Because the best U.S. drivers are in NASCAR?

 

There's no doubt the elimination of tobacco sponsorships severely hurt the development of Canadian drivers for IndyCar. Hinchcliffe is competitive but he isn't Paul Tracy or Jacques Villeneuve and while Lance Stroll is still young, I suppose he will be a back marker for Williams in F1 as long as daddy's signing cheques.

 

Isn't a significant part of the problem the way the sponsorships in IndyCar work as opposed to Nascar? I've always understood that the Indy drivers have to be a lot more involved in bringing sponsors to the teams, which is why you'll see a guy like Mikhail Aleshin get a fulltime IndyCar ride thanks to backing from Russian billionaire Boris Rothenberg, while a serious young American talent like Sage Karam will end up racing one or two races a year because he doesn't bring any money to the table.

Nascar has seemed better, for the last 20 years or so at least, of building young drivers names through its trucks and Busch series, but also the teams seem to have greater leeway to plug a relative unknown talent into a good ride.

 

What I recall is that it was evident at the end of the race, last three or four laps at least, that Sato had the best car - or at least a better car than Franchitti - and if he could just handle it, he would win. Then he shit the bed in turn 1 on the last lap.

That's why I said he should have won it. Not like he was screwed by anything other than his own exuberance and aggressiveness.