In a remarkable turnaround, Bridgestone/Firestone announced last Friday that the company’s Firestone brand will continue as the exclusive tyre supplier to the IZOD IndyCar Series until 2013. The announcement was made just seven days after the company formally revealed it was pulling out of the IndyCar series at the end of this year…

The move was precipitated by IndyCar’s team owners insisting to series CEO Randy Bernard that he broker a deal with Bridgestone/Firestone. Bernard was considering a switch to Continental or Cooper tyres, but the team owners made it clear that they didn’t believe a change could be made on such short notice. The owners also emphasised to Bernard that they don’t believe any other tyre manufacturer can equal the high quality and safety of Bridgestone/Firestone’s tyres.

“The team owners are collectively very relieved that Firestone had an open mind and that they were able to reach this agreement with IndyCar,” said Dennis Reinbold (below with Tomas Scheckter), co-owner of Dreyer & Reinbold Racing. “Firestone’s racing tyres are not only important from a safety and reliability standpoint, but they contribute greatly to the wheel-to-wheel competition for which our sport is famous.”

Since Bridgestone/Firestone entered Indycar racing in 1995 the company has never suffered a tyre failure, other than through punctures by debris. The bulletproof reliability of Bridgestone/Firestone’s tyres is something everyone in IndyCar has come to rely on. In contrast, Goodyear’s spec tyre programme in NASCAR has been and continues to be riddled with failures in many races. Continental has also had troubles in this its first year as the spec tyre supplier to Grand-Am.

Bridgestone/Firestone has also developed a reputation for producing tyres that perform identically from set to set. Quality control and consistency in both performance and dimensions have been bywords for the company, and it has done a tremendous job building tyres for the wide range of tracks Indycars race on from street circuits to superspeedways.

Back in 1995-99 Bridgestone/Firestone drove Goodyear out of CART and the IRL by utterly outperforming its rival. It took four years for all the teams to make the switch and for Bridgestone/Firestone to become the sole tyre supplier in both CART/Champ Car and the IRL. Over the past 16 years the team owners have learned to deeply appreciate Bridgestone/Firestone’s products, and after considering a switch to another tyre company Bernard seems to have taken on board the same lesson.

“We feel that this new supply agreement will benefit everyone,” he said. “It provides a safe and reliable product for the transition to the all-new cars for 2012. We have to thank everyone at Firestone for working with us to help ensure the best for the long-term growth of our sport.”

Bridgestone/Firestone’s Amercian racing boss Al Speyer (above with Helio Castroneves) says he hopes the agreement will continue until the 100th running of the Indianapolis 500 in 2016. The deal does not extend to the Indy Lights series, however. The Lights cars will race on Firestones this year, but will have to find a new brand for next season.

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It’s been rumoured for several months that Bridgestone will pull its Firestone brand out of the IZOD IndyCar Series at the end of this year, and the formal announcement came at the end of last week. Over the past few years Bridgestone’s bookkeepers have been telling the company’s racing division that its IndyCar programme wasn’t delivering the promotional value to justify the cost, and inevitably the bean counters have won the battle.

“During our long history in racing we have met or exceeded all of our motor sport goals,” said Bridgestone/Firestone’s American racing boss Al Speyer. “So now it’s time to set new goals – for ourselves and for our brands. Companies that strive to achieve the highest levels of brand loyalty and recognition must continue to find ever more effective ways to communicate their brand message.”

Speyer added a compliment for IndyCar’s CEO Randy Bernard and his efforts to recreate the series. “We want to commend IndyCar on the recent positive momentum with new engine manufacturers and other corporate partners coming on board and wish the series continuing success,” said Speyer.

Firestone founder Harvey Firestone was a big supporter of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in its early days, and his tyres were on Ray Harroun’s Marmon Wasp when he won the inaugural Indy 500 in 1911. The company will celebrate its 62nd win in this year’s 100th anniversary running of America’s greatest race (it will be the 96th 500) and is by far the most successful tyre builder in Indycar history.

Firestone pulled out of Indycar racing in 1976 but returned in ’95 after Bridgestone bought the venerable but struggling American tyre giant. Racing as Bridgestone in CART and Firestone in the newly introduced IRL series, Bridgestone/Firestone out-engineered and outperformed Goodyear, forcing the latter to throw in the towel by the turn of the new century. Since then Firestone has been IndyCar’s sole tyre supplier and the company has done a superb job, producing excellent tyres for a wide range of tracks from rough, slow street circuits to high-speed superspeedways.

Of course, Bridgestone is the world’s largest tyre company and has spent plenty of money in recent years in both Formula 1 and IndyCar. Its resources and technical capabilities are second to none and the company will be hard to replace, particularly in the short time available. Bridgestone/Firestone prepared for its 1995 return to Indycar racing by first building Indy Lights tyres starting in 1991, before undergoing some 15,000 miles of Indycar testing in ’94 with Scott Pruett driving a test car for Pat Patrick’s team. Whoever replaces Bridgestone/Firestone next year will not enjoy a development programme anything like it and will also have the added challenge of working with a brand-new car also in need of development. It will be a tough job.

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I had the pleasure of talking to Jim Hall of Chaparral fame recently. The tall Texan built and raced some of the sport’s most appealing and ground-breaking cars, and went on to run successful teams in America’s Formula 5000 championship and in CART, winning titles in both categories and the Indy 500 in 1978 and ‘80 with Al Unser and Johnny Rutherford respectively.

Hall is one of those rare people who have been successful as a driver, car builder and team owner. He also created a legend with his white Chaparrals, and at 75 he is sharp as a whip and able to recall many details from days long ago. I’m writing a story for the magazine to appear later this year about Hall’s many achievements and didn’t have room for the following stories about his first laps around the Nürburgring, so I thought I’d share them with you.

In 1963 Hall lived in the UK for most of the year and raced a Formula 1 Lotus-BRM for the BRP team. At the end of the year he returned home to Texas to launch the revolutionary Chaparral 2 Can-Am car and focused on racing in America until his driving career came to an end, following a leg-breaking accident at the end of the ’68 Can-Am season.

Hall’s best result from his year in F1 was fifth place in the German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring, and he’s proud of making it through his first and only race on the legendary Nordschleife without a single mistake. Big Jim spent most of the week prior to the race flogging his Mini-Cooper around the track, trying to learn it as best he could. He also enjoyed contrasting lessons from some of the F1 aces of the time – Dan Gurney, Phil Hill, Richie Ginther and Lorenzo Bandini.

“At the Nürburgring I ran into Richie, Phil and Dan,” Hall recalled. “They were in a big black Mercedes and they said they were going to go around the Nürburgring and asked me to join them. I said, ‘Wow, that would be great.’ So I went with them and got to see each one of them drive a lap. That was a real lesson. They all had a lot of ability, they were all different and I got to see all three of them do it. That was pretty exciting.

“When I first showed up at the ‘Ring I stopped at the Sport Hotel and walked in and Bandini was there with his girlfriend. I was a new guy and he looked at me and said, ‘You want to go round?’ And I said, ‘Okay.’ He was in a little Alfa Guiletta that had about a halfway back seat. I had to sit sideways in it. So his girlfriend got in the passenger seat and he got in the driver’s seat and off we went, and I can’t tell you how frightened I was! Maybe that was his intent.

“I was all cooped up in the back of this little car and we’re going around there so damn fast, and I had no idea which way the turns went or whether he was on the right or wrong side of the road. It was quite an experience for my first lap around there.”

Hall went on to finish the race in the points, and three years later his Chaparral 2D long-distance sports/racer won the Nürburgring 1000Kms with Phil Hill and Jo Bonnier driving. It’s one of Hall’s proudest achievements.

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Scott Dixon and Dario Franchitti scored a one-two sweep for Chip Ganassi’s team at the Kansas Speedway on Saturday. Until last weekend Ganassi’s IRL team had struggled through an indifferent start to the season, but his drivers were supreme on the 1.5-mile Kansas oval in the last race before the 94th Indianapolis 500 on May 30.

The Kansas race gave Dixon and Franchitti confidence going into the ‘month of May’ event – shortened these days to just two weekends. The pair were very quick at Indianapolis last year but both hit trouble in the pits and got stuck in traffic at the end of the 500, while Helio Castroneves motored to his third Indy win. Castroneves finished fourth in Kansas last weekend behind Tony Kanaan and ahead of Long Beach winner Ryan Hunter-Reay. Championship leader Will Power endured his least competitive race of the year so far, qualifying seventh and finishing 12th, two laps behind the winner. At this stage the Indy 500 looks like a repeat of recent years with Ganassi, Penske and Andretti as the clear team favourites.

The race in Kansas underlined two of the IRL’s big problems. First, restarts aside, the race was another dull display of follow-the-leader. The cars are not only clunky and outdated in appearance, but also way too constrained in power and overall performance so that they look and sound more like Indy Lights cars than proper, beast-like Indycars. As we all know, the current long-running Dallara-Honda spec car combination seriously lacks for spectacle and appeal.

The other concern at Kansas was the worrying absence of fans, with a crowd estimated at no more than 15,000 and swathes of empty seats. The IRL has struggled with crowd numbers at many races, and at ovals in particular, but has allowed itself to be pushed into an even weaker position at some oval tracks by running as a Saturday support show. In Kansas the Indycars were reduced to Busch league status as a second-line act to NASCAR’s featured Truck series on Sunday.

This is one of the many issues that the IRL’s new CEO Randy Bernard is tackling. Bernard is up to his ears trying to determine the correct new Indycar formula for 2012 (it may have to be pushed back to 2013) but he’s also trying to bring back some of the better races from CART’s heyday. Over the last 10 years in the midst of the CART/IRL civil war the combination of CART, Champ Car and the IRL contrived to destroy no fewer than 36 races – 18 oval tracks, nine temporary or street circuits and nine permanent road courses have vanished or been driven away from Indycar racing.

The fans and media in these markets have been badly abused by Indycar racing and Bernard is trying to find which of these venues might be ready to gamble on bringing back the IRL. He’s been talking to road courses like Laguna Seca and Elkhart Lake, and ovals like Milwaukee and New Hampshire. If the IRL is to rebuild its lost identity it’s essential to leave tracks like Kansas behind and return to venues such as these four. Here’s hoping Bernard can convince the tracks to take the gamble.

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Here’s a lesson for the FIA and Formula 1. In 1998 CART introduced a new rear wing called the Handford Device for its two 500-mile races on the high-banked Michigan and California superspeedways. It was used only at those two tracks and was the result of conversations between Newman/Haas aerodynamicist Mark Handford and CART’s technical director Kirk Russell about how to improve overtaking and wheel-to-wheel racing.

Serious competition in CART in the preceding years between four engine manufacturers, two tyre companies and four car builders meant performance had shot up. Qualifying engines with 1000bhp began to appear and lap speeds increased at all tracks. But as speeds went up the quality of the racing declined, and Handford proposed a solution.

With conventional wings it was becoming more and more difficult to pass on the big speedways as drivers encountered a churning wave of turbulence as they tried to overtake. Handford’s solution was the Handford Device, a flat plate rather than a wing that created zero downforce but left a hole in the air, enabling a following car to draft and slingshot past.

“The cars made a lot of downforce from the [tunnelled] underbody but the rear wing was a non-downforce-producing device,” Handford says. “We came up with a gadget on the rear wing that created drag but not downforce. Its wake, which was very big, was neither swept upwards nor downwards. When the next car came along it ran into a hole in the air and got a huge tow. I suppose it was exciting because whoever was in the lead on the last lap was guaranteed to lose.”

Indeed there were a record 62 lead changes during the 1998 Michigan 500 and the season-closing California 500 was similarly hectic. But the Handford Device lasted only a few years before the CART/IRL war resulted in the Michigan/California tracks switching to Tony George’s series, where they played host to the very different Indycars.

“What you need is a situation where the guy behind, who has neither track position nor clean air, at least has a drag advantage,” says Handford. “If you follow anybody you’re always going to end up with dirty air, but if you have less drag you’ve got a fighting chance of drafting the car in front. That’s exactly what you get in motorcycle racing.”

Handford is baffled by the FIA’s narrow thinking on this subject. “There’s a very narrow view in F1. They need someone to say you have to get away from flat bottoms [on the cars] and put downforce in the underbody and take it out of the wings. If they did that I think it would become much more exciting to watch.”

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The opening weekend of qualifying for this year’s 92nd Indianapolis 500 takes place this weekend. Favourites for the pole must be Scott Dixon and Dan Wheldon who have been the men to beat on oval tracks so far this year in Chip Ganassi’s pair of Dallara-Hondas. Other pole contenders include 2001 and ‘02 race winner Helio Castroneves and new team-mate Ryan Briscoe with Team Penske, and Tony Kanaan, Marco Andretti (above) and Danica Patrick (below) at Andretti-Green Racing.

Thanks to the unification of IndyCar racing thirty-four drivers are entered at Indianapolis this year and the field is a little stronger than in recent years. On the other hand, the previous two winners Dario Franchitti and Sam Hornish are missing from the field as they have moved their careers, for better or worse, to NASCAR. The only previous winners entered this year are Wheldon, Castroneves and Buddies Rice and Lazier.

Five Brits are entered – 2005 winner Wheldon, Darren Manning, Justin Wilson, Jay Howard and Alex Lloyd. Wilson, Howard and Lloyd are rookies, although Wilson has some oval experience from his four years in Champ Car and is the number one driver of course, at Newman/Haas/Lanigan, replacing Sebastien Bourdais in the team’s McDonald’s car.

This has been a tough week for Newman/Haas/Lanigan because the team’s most experienced and respected man Davey Evans was brutally murdered in an Indianapolis bar last Saturday night. Evans, 63, had worked for Carl Haas’s race team for forty years, going back to the original Can-Am and Formula 5000 series. Born in Sudbury-on-Thames, Evans started his working life in 1959 as a teen-aged engineering apprentice with HWM Motors. He moved on to Maranello Concessionaires before finding work at Lola Cars and then becoming a key man in America in Haas’s Can-Am and Formula 5000 teams before the creation in 1983 of the Newman/Haas CART team.

For many years Davey worked at Lola during the winters building Haas’s cars. Evans was an old-school artisan who could construct almost anything. He was not only Newman/Haas/Lanigan Racing’s most experienced crewman, but also probably the longest-serving man in the contemporary IndyCar garage area.

“I have a tough time accepting it and I’m sure everyone else feels the same way,” Mario Andretti commented. “It’s such a waste of a wonderful life. For some meaningless human being to take another life that meant so much is a total travesty. There are very few people that I’ve known in my life who you could say, ‘I don’t think this guy had an enemy in the world.’ All the years that I’ve known and worked with him, whether it was with Carl’s Can-Am team or through Formula 5000 to all the years with Newman/Haas, Davey was always there with a smile, always kind. What can you say? He was a friend for life.”

Two memorial services were held in Indianapolis this week for Evans as many who knew him paid their respects to one of the sport’s most-liked men, fated to lose his life in deeply tragic circumstances.

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The inaugural Formula 5000 race in 1975 at Long Beach.

I’ve enjoyed the pleasure of covering all thirty-four Long Beach Grands Prix, from the inaugural Formula 5000 race back in 1975 through eight Formula One races from 1976-’83 and twenty-five CART or Champ Car races from 1984-2008. This year’s race was Champ Car’s swansong in the beachside California city as the defunct organisation’s Panoz DP01-Cosworth turbos raced for one last time before the unified Indy Racing League arrives in town next year. So Long Beach ‘08 marked the end of a quarter century of the sweet sound of turbocharged engines wailing through the sunny California air and as the drivers cruised into the pits at the end of the race and the turbocharged engines – the signature song of Indy car racing – fell silent, the moment brought tears to some eyes.

For the next year or two, the familiar whine of Cosworth’s turbo V8 will be replaced by the harsh, coarse noise from Honda’s much less powerful, naturally-aspirated V8 IRL engine and there’s no doubt that the vast majority of fans and competitors would love to see the IRL adopt a more powerful, turbocharged engine formula as part of its new formula for 2010 or 2011.

1976 Grand Prix of Long Beach, California, USA. March 26 – 28 1976. Niki Lauda (Ferrari 312T), 2nd position.

Like Mario Andretti, I’m among those who believe the new IRL formula must create spectacularly fast and demanding cars to drive. We think there must be a much greater difference between straightaway and cornering speeds. We also believe the new formula must inspire competition between engine and chassis manufacturers as well as adopting some serious elements of green technology. Over the upcoming month of May at Indianapolis I will discuss these issues with many people in the sport and will write about these conversations in the pages of Motor Sport later this year.

And as I reminded many people at Long Beach this year, back in 1975 at the inaugural Formula 5000 race – won by Brian Redman in a Haas/Hall Lola T332C-Chevrole – the garage area boasted no fewer than forty-two cars built by eight different car constructors. Thirty-nine of those cars started the two qualifying heats and because Bill Simpson’s Berta didn’t make it the first Long Beach race featured seven different car builders making this year’s race pale in comparison.

Brian Redman with the trophy from the Formula 5000 race in 1975.

If American open-wheel racing is to enjoy a resurgence under the IRL’s unified banner it must rediscover this essential nature of the sport. The IRL’s new formula for 2010 or 2011 must dispel the banalities of spec-car racing and attract a trove of competitive engine and chassis builders. That’s the only way Indy car racing and Long Beach will thrive again.

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