Sunday’s IndyCar race at Mid-Ohio was dominated by Chip Ganassi’s team, with Scott Dixon winning convincingly from championship leader Dario Franchitti. Dixon was the man to beat all weekend, scoring his first pole and win of the year. In the end he drove away on his own to win easily – his third victory at Mid-Ohio in five years. It was also his 26th IndyCar career win and kept his remote title hopes alive as he chiselled into Franchitti’s lead and closed to within 31 points of second-placed Will Power.

“A superb job by Team Target to get a 1-2 today,” said Dixon. “To put a dent in Dario’s lead is tough, but it’s good for Dario’s fight and to get pole and win today is fantastic.”

Franchitti extended his championship lead with a solid drive to second. “Scott had one of those days,” he said. “He was in a different zip code. He deserved to win it. From the time we came here for the test he’s been on a mission.

“But a good points day for us, despite Will [Power’s] best effort at the start to spin me around. He hit me twice on the first lap, pretty hard actually going into the turn. But this is a tough race and the way the surface and tyres interact it’s easy to make a mistake.”

Power, Franchitti’s primary title rival, ran fourth through the early laps but hit bad luck. An unfortunately timed yellow flag just before he was scheduled to pit meant he had to wait a lap for the pitlane to be opened, then stop while the field was running slowly behind the pace car. As a result he rejoined near the back and eventually made it home 14th, falling 62 points behind Franchitti.

Power said he was simply racing hard with Dario when they collided on lap one. “I was just trying to get past him at the start. It was as simple as that. He went around the outside and I hit his back wheel. It was sort of similar to Toronto. I’m just racing, that’s all.”

Canadian rookie James Hinchcliffe (below) led 26 laps at Mid-Ohio in one of Newman/Haas’s cars. Hinchcliffe took the lead after he found himself on a slightly different pitstop sequence from Dixon and the other frontrunners. The rookie looked good, holding off Dixon for many laps before having to stop for fuel. Later, in the thick of the midfield, he spun off, eventually finishing 20th.

“We caught a lucky yellow and the team got us up front,” said Hinchcliffe. “But we showed we had pace today. On the radio they were telling me I had to save fuel and keep Scott and Dario behind. I said, ‘Save fuel and keep five championships behind me? No problem.’

“But the car was great and the guys were awesome in the pits. When we came in I wanted black tyres because I’d run so well in the last stint on them, but we knew they didn’t come up to temperature as quick. But then the yellow [flag] came out and pretty much everybody around me was on reds, so I knew we were in trouble. We lost a couple of spots on the restart and I was just trying to keep up and lost it in the Keyhole. It was pretty devastating.”

Six races to go – three ovals, two road courses and one street race – and if Power and Team Penske are to beat Ganassi’s operation, they need to get some momentum going.

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Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine

At the historic Milwaukee Mile on Sunday, Dario Franchitti scored his third win of the year and the 29th of his career, moving him into a tie with Rick Mears for ninth place on Indycar’s all-time winners’ list. The Scot is now also tied with Will Power for the points lead in this year’s IZOD IndyCar Series after qualifying on pole and leading most of the Milwaukee race. Franchitti was challenged only by Tony Kanaan and Hélio Castroneves, but the former crashed with 30 laps to go and Castroneves was forced to pit from the lead when his left rear tyre started losing air.

Franchitti won the title in 2009-10 with Chip Ganassi’s team, having first claimed the crown in 2007 with Michael Andretti’s outfit. So he’s chasing his third consecutive and fourth championship in the last five years. At 38, Dario is in his 14th season of racing Indycars, and following an unhappy experiment with NASCAR in ’08 he’s resoundingly established himself as IndyCar’s man to beat.

“The championship will take care of itself if we can keep winning races,” he said. “The car was fast all day but that was a tough race. Kanaan was really strong and it was a typical race with Tony. You can race with him inches apart. He gave me room and I gave him room. There’s a lot of respect.

“But then you race with Hélio and you’d think after last year’s penalty the guy would quit the blocking stuff. But he pushes you one way down against the wall and if you try the outside he pushes you up into the marbles. I don’t know what it takes for this guy to understand that blocking is not allowed.”

Graham Rahal enjoyed his best race of the year to finish second at Milwaukee while Oriol Servia kept himself in the title hunt with a strong run to third. Will Power recovered from a poor qualifying run to come through the field to finish fourth, good enough to keep Franchitti from passing him in the points.

After seven of 17 races, this year’s IndyCar championship is shaping up as a reprise of last year’s battle between Franchitti and Power. They’re both on 271 points, followed by Servia in third with 198 points and Scott Dixon in fourth with 195. In recent years Franchitti has quietly emerged as one of the most accomplished drivers in the 100-year history of Indycar racing. If he can win a third title in a row his place among Indycar’s greatest drivers will be assured.

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This year’s 100th anniversary Indianapolis 500 turned into one of the most exciting races anyone has seen at the historic track. The outcome was impossible to predict through the closing laps as the field shuffled itself while fuel strategies played out. For a while it looked like Dario Franchitti and Chip Ganassi’s team had played their cards perfectly, with the Scot stopping for fuel under a late yellow and then moving towards the front as the leaders peeled in for their stops.

But then Franchitti started running low on fuel, and instead of assuming the lead had to make another visit to the pits. That left rookie JR Hildebrand to lead the chase and he looked set to score a surprising win before it all went wrong as he lapped Charlie Kimball’s car into Turn 4 on the final lap.

“Knowing that the cars in second and third were coming [on] pretty strong I decided that rather than downshifting to risk slowing the car down coming onto the front straight,” said Hildebrand. “It was a move I had used earlier in the race to get around some slower cars but I guess with the tyres worn there were a bunch of marbles on the outside. Once I got up there, there wasn’t a lot I could do.”

In a flash Hildebrand was in the wall (below), and as his car skated toward the start/finish line Dan Wheldon shot past to lead the race’s final few hundred yards. It was the first time Wheldon had led all day but it was the right time to be in front as he scored his second Indy 500 victory, crossing the line two seconds ahead of Hildebrand’s churning wreck.

Wheldon first won at Indianapolis in 2005 when he was driving for Michael Andretti’s team. This year the Briton found himself without a ride but was hired a few months ago by Bryan Herta to drive his car on a one-off basis at Indy. Wheldon may not be the world’s greatest road racer but he’s an ace on ovals, finishing second at the track the past two years. He qualified on the outside of row two for this year’s 500 and was in the hunt all the way, running third or fourth for most of the distance in company with poleman Alex Tagliani, Chip Ganassi team-mates Franchitti and Scott Dixon, and Oriol Servia in Newman/Haas’s lead entry.

In the closing stages Wheldon and Herta’s team, led by veteran engineer Steve Newey, played their fuel strategy perfectly. As the 200 laps ran out Wheldon was in second place, closing fast on Hildebrand, and when he crashed Wheldon was perfectly placed to score a popular victory for a small team with only one race in its schedule this year.

“With 20 laps to go they said on the radio, ‘You’re one of the guys that can make it to the end, but you’ve got to make sure you get everything out of the car that you possibly can’,” explained Wheldon. “So I said to myself I’m going to move the weight jacker every lap to optimise every corner and adjust the rollbars to maximise everything. I was able to catch traffic without having to lift and I started pressing the overtake button. On the last lap I was trying to deal with some lapped cars in turns three and four and in the corner of my eye I saw JR hit the fence. I just carried on by and at that point I knew it was mine.”

Dan Wheldon cools down with the traditional quart of milk after his Indy win

A great win for Wheldon then, and a jump-start surely for his stalled career. Former driver Herta says his plan is to concentrate on putting together a full season for Wheldon in 2012 rather than trying to add some races this year.

As Wheldon took the flag Hildebrand scraped home in second followed by Graham Rahal, Tony Kanaan and Dixon, while a deeply disappointed Franchitti was 12th, the last driver to complete the full race distance. Team Penske’s three cars were surprisingly uncompetitive with Will Power and Hélio Castroneves finishing a lap down in 14th and 17th and Ryan Briscoe eliminated in a collision with Townsend Bell.

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Chip Ganassi’s Grand-Am team added to its already stunning record in the Rolex 24 Hours at Daytona last weekend when its pair of BMW-powered Riley Daytona Prototypes finished one-two. Defending Grand-Am champions Scott Pruett/Memo Rojas shared the winning car with Graham Rahal and Joey Hand, while Scott Dixon/Juan Pablo Montoya/Dario Franchitti/Jamie McMurray drove Ganassi’s second car. This was Ganassi’s fourth Rolex 24 win but only its first one-two. The team scored three straight wins in 2006-08 and finished runner-up in 2009-10.

Last weekend’s sweep further embellishes Ganassi’s reputation. His teams scored successive wins in last year’s Daytona 500, Indianapolis 500 and Brickyard 400, and now the Rolex 24. Some people are calling it ‘The Chip Slam’. Grand-Am team leader Pruett, by the way, now has four Daytona 24 Hours wins to his name and has been on the podium in 14 of his 26 starts in the race.

Ganassi’s previous Rolex 24 wins came with Lexus (Toyota) engines, but Chip’s Grand-Am team switched last year to BMW power. Pruett and Rojas won the championship for BMW last season and have now scored the German manufacturer’s first Daytona victory since 1976, when Brian Redman/John Fitzpatrick/Peter Gregg won the 24 Hours in a factory BMW 3.5 CSL.

Neither of Ganassi’s cars enjoyed trouble-free runs last weekend. Montoya used his NASCAR fender-banging style to good effect on a number of occasions, but that also meant his crew had to twice change the car’s nose. Joey Hand made his debut with Ganassi’s team and did an excellent job in the winning car. Last year he drove for Bobby Rahal’s BMW GT team in the American Le Mans Series and has served a long apprenticeship in open wheel and sports cars. Hand lapped as quickly at Daytona as any of Ganassi’s drivers, and recovered well from a Sunday morning pit penalty after he was mistakenly waved out too early and hit one of his used tyres.

An indication of the thorough professionalism of Ganassi’s team was a decision during the race’s second hour to change the gear clusters in both cars. Warmer weather than anticipated and a change in wind direction meant both Ganassi cars were hitting their rev-limiters on the banking, so each car was brought in under successive yellows to remove the short gears and install a new stack of ratios.

Finishing third behind Ganassi’s cars were last year’s winners. The Action Express team ran two Riley-Porsches this year with João Barbosa/Terry Borcheller/Max Papis/Christian Fittipaldi finishing a strong third after the team’s other car was delayed by a few incidents. Martin Brundle/Mark Blundell/Mark Patterson/Zak Brown were an excellent fourth aboard United Autosports’ Riley-Ford run by Mike Shank Racing (see Damien Smith’s blog).

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Good news this week for Graham Rahal and JR Hildebrand (below). This talented pair of young American racers has landed quality IndyCar rides for 2011, which is a good thing not only for them but also for Indycar racing as a whole and US race fans too. Rahal will drive for a new Chip Ganassi team with Charlie Kimball as his team-mate, while Hildebrand replaces Dan Wheldon at Panther Racing. Rahal, 21, will lead Ganassi’s new team with sponsorship from Service Central and Hildebrand, 22, takes Wheldon’s seat in Panther’s National Guard car.

Rahal drove for Newman/Haas Racing in 2007-09, scoring his first IndyCar win in the St Petersburg street race in ‘08. Lacking sponsorship, Graham has worked through a patchwork season this past year driving for four different teams. He also spent the year working hard to find a sponsor and landed Service Central, a national tyre distribution and automotive service centre chain. Thanks to this backing Rahal has been able to broker a deal with Ganassi.

“Now the pressure’s on me to succeed,” said Rahal (above), son of CART and Indy winner Bobby. “What I look forward to most is when you’re with a team like Ganassi you don’t have to worry about anything but driving the car and going fast. I’ll be able to focus on having my head as clear as I can when I show up at the race track.

“I just can’t wait. There’s a tremendous amount of experience there. Between Dario [Franchitti] and [Scott] Dixon you’ve got five championships and three Indy 500 wins, and you know that Chip only does things in the best way possible.”

Rahal’s team-mate Kimball, 25, is the son of former Indy and F1 designer Gordon and is sponsored by healthcare company NovoNordisk. Charlie finished fourth in last year’s Indy Lights championship and in 2005 became the first American in 11 years to win a British Formula 3 race.

Ganassi’s new team will be run out of drag racer Don Prudhomme’s shop in nearby Brownsburg. “That’s primarily because we don’t have the room here,” said Chip’s IndyCar/Grand-Am managing director Mike Hull, who stressed it is not a ‘satellite’ team. “Our intention is to run it in the same manner that we run our other race teams and draw from the resources that we have here.”

Hildebrand’s move to Panther comes after he tested successfully for the team last week. He won the 2009 Indy Lights title and ran two IndyCar races last season driving for Dreyer & Reinbold. He also tested a Force India F1 car near the end of last year.

Panther has been looking for an American driver to replace Wheldon, who had driven for the team for two years. The Briton won the Indy 500 with Andretti-Green in 2005 and finished second to Dario Franchitti at Indy this year, but he has been disappointing in road and street races.

Panther team boss John Barnes has been searching for an American who can perform on all types of track and believes he has the right man in Hildebrand. “We knew by lunchtime on the first day of our test that we’d found our next driver,” he said.

These signings are great news for Rahal, Kimball and Hildebrand, but they’re also very good for IndyCar. American open-wheel racing desperately needs some top-class home-grown talent to help draw crowds and media interest. Everyone hopes that with solid teams and sponsorships behind them these three drivers will be able to produce the goods.

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You have to take your hat off to Roger Penske. At a time when many American race teams are struggling to sell sponsorship, Penske has announced a string of new deals in the past week. Using the power of the Penske brand both within motor racing and beyond, as well as his superb ability as a salesman, Roger has completed a skein of new agreements for his NASCAR and IndyCar teams.

Last week Penske announced that Shell and Pennzoil would replace long-time backer Miller Beer as the sponsor of Kurt Busch’s NASCAR car (below). Both companies will also act as primary sponsor of Hélio Castroneves’s Indycar at next year’s Indianapolis 500 and on other selected events, as well as associate sponsors of Roger’s entire IndyCar team. On December 1 Roger announced that Meijer (a thriving Midwestern grocery and superstore chain) would be another associate sponsor of his three Indycars. And this week Penske announced IZOD (a clothing brand which is the IndyCar Series’ title sponsor) as an associate sponsor of his Indycars and the primary sponsor of Ryan Briscoe’s car.

From 1990-09 Penske’s IndyCar team was sponsored primarily by Marlboro, but in recent years restrictions on tobacco advertising progressively reduced the company’s involvement with the team. Although Penske Indycars continued to appear in Marlboro’s familiar red and white colours, the cars were not allowed to carry the cigarette manufacturer’s brand. Last year, after the arrangement finally came to an end, Roger’s cars were painted black and white with Team Penske logos, while Verizon came on board as the primary sponsor of Will Power’s car.

Now the team’s post-Marlboro age has arrived. In recent years Shell and Pennzoil have backed Richard Childress’s NASCAR car driven by Kevin Harvick (above), while IZOD became the IndyCar Series sponsor last year and also backed Ryan Hunter-Reay’s Andretti Autosports car for the most of the season. Grocery chain Meijer has been active for many years as an associate sponsor of a variety of Indycars, and with Verizon continuing as the primary backer of Power’s Indycar, Team Penske will enjoy a full slate of sponsorship in 2011. There’s also a chance that Sam Hornish will return to Indy racing to drive a fourth Penske entry in the Indy 500.

It was revealed last month that a new Ilmor/Chevrolet Indycar engine will appear in 2012 and of course Penske is the driving force behind the latest Ilmor/Chevy partnership. RP started his race team in 1966 and has established himself as one of American racing’s most successful and influential figures. Over the years his teams have won 332 major races – including 15 Indy 500s – and 23 national championships in numerous categories. Then there’s the Penske Corporation, described as a diversified transportation services company, which operates in more than 1800 locations worldwide with more than 36,000 employees and annual revenues exceeding US$16 billion.

Roger will celebrate his 74th birthday in February and his role in the sport remains as pervasive as ever. Other US team owners like Rick Hendrick and Chip Ganassi have achieved their share of success, but in the big picture Penske stands in a class of his own.

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It has been reported that General Motors has decided to return to racing in a big way, building a Chevrolet twin turbo V6 engine for the new 2012 Indycar formula. It is said that Chip Ganassi’s team will race a new Chevrolet engine in 2012 and that GM Racing will ramp up its motor sport involvement next year with sharply expanded support for its Grand-Am Daytona Prototype and GT teams, a similar increase in NHRA drag racing and a two-car Cadillac CTS-V Coupe team to compete in the World Challenge GT series. According to Autoextremist.com, GM’s new race programme will be announced at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway on Friday.

GM was saved from bankruptcy last year by a US$50 billion bailout from the United States government. But the company has rebounded over the past year and plans a stock offering aimed at selling 365 million common shares at $26-29 to raise $11 billion. The plan is to cut US government ownership in GM from just over 60 per cent to around 43 per cent.

The new racing programme will be an integral part of GM’s aggressive effort to promote itself as a reinvigorated, technologically assertive company. Ganassi’s NASCAR team races Chevrolets but Ganassi has held talks in recent months with Ford about switching brands. It is reported that GM’s new strategy has convinced Ganassi to remain with Chevrolet in NASCAR and make the move to Chevrolet Indy engines in 2012.

Will Chip enjoy an exclusive arrangement with GM for Indycar racing? That’s unlikely because the company has had a long-time relationship with Roger Penske, who partnered Chevrolet in building the successful Ilmor/Chevrolet Indy V8 from 1987-93. That engine won six consecutive Indy 500s from 1988-93 and GM won the race five more times with an Oldsmobile engine from 1997-2001 plus the ’02 Indy 500 with a Chevrolet-branded Cosworth engine.

GM’s return to Indianapolis will be a big shot in the arm for Indycar racing. It will be the first time since 2005 that Honda has faced competition in American open-wheel racing and it will be interesting to see if GM’s move draws other major manufacturers back to Indy.

Another question is who will partner GM to design and build the new engine? Penske probably holds the right cards through Ilmor Engineering, whose American division currently rebuilds Honda’s Indy engines. General Motors has bounced back after years of decline and the same scenario may now be on the cards for Indycar racing.

Meanwhile in NASCAR Denny Hamlin has taken the championship lead from defending champion Jimmie Johnson. Hamlin seized the lead from Matt Kenseth on the final restart at the Texas superspeedway to score his eighth win of the year, while Johnson finished ninth after a couple of poor pitstops. With two races to go at Phoenix next weekend and Homestead-Miami the following week Hamlin leads Johnson by 33 points, with Kevin Harvick another 26 points behind.

Harvick kept himself in the championship fight by finishing sixth in Texas, but at this stage the battle appears to be between Hamlin and Johnson. Hamlin celebrates his 30th birthday on Thursday and if he pulls it off he will win his first Sprint Cup championship and the first for Joe Gibbs’ Toyota team since 2005, when Tony Stewart won the title aboard a Gibbs Chevrolet.

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Scott Pruett and Memo Rojas became the first major American racing champions of the year when they scored their eighth win of the year in the Grand-Am race at le Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in Montreal last Saturday driving Chip Ganassi’s Riley-BMW. Pruett has now won a total of 30 Grand-Am races, but this was the first time he or Ganassi enjoyed winning in Montreal.

Pruett, 50, took his third Grand-Am title and Ganassi’s fourth in the past six years but this was the first time they’ve done it with BMW engines. Pruett/Rojas beat defending champions Alex Gurney/Jon Fogarty’s Gainsco Riley-Chevrolet by barely a second in Montreal, wrapping-up the title after eleven of the twelve races. Pruett/Rojas and Gurney/Fogarty have been the stars of the Grand-Am in recent years, trading the championship back and forth since 2007.

On the same day at Mosport three hundred miles to the west Conor Daly won the Star-Mazda championship in style as he took his ninth pole of the year and then scored a runaway victory, his seventh this year, to wrap-up the Star Mazda title with one race to go. Eighteen-year old Daly is the son of former F1, Indy car and sports car racers Derek Daly (below with Conor). Conor won the Skip Barber National championship in 2008 and also scored an excellent win that year in the rain in the Walter Hayes Trophy Formula Ford race at Silverstone. Conor will test a GP3 car for Status Racing at Silverstone next week and hopes to race next year in Europe.

“My passion is Formula One,” Conor says. “That’s what I want to do and to be in Formula One you have to race in Europe. The goal is to be racing in Europe next year.”

Last Saturday night’s IndyCar race at the Chicagoland Speedway was won by Dario Franchitti who kept his championship hopes alive with a brilliant tactical win. Franchitti was mired in the pack for most of the race but beat everyone out of the pits from the last round of stops by not taking on fresh tyres. Dario then drove superbly to score his third win of the year, beating Dan Wheldon and Marco Andretti across the line. This was Dario’s twenty-sixth CART/IRL win and it moves him into a tie with Rodger Ward on the all-time IndyCar winners list.

Championship leader Will Power battled for the lead most of the way but had to make a last-minute stop for fuel, tumbling to sixteenth at the finish. As a result defending champion Franchitti has pulled to within twenty-five points of Power with three races to go so that Dario has a chance of winning his third IndyCar title in four years and Ganassi has a shot at taking three straight IndyCar championships.

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Sunday’s Brickyard 400 NASCAR Sprint Cup race at Indianapolis was a heartbreaker for Juan Pablo Montoya. For the second year in a row Montoya dominated the race, only to crash in the closing laps after a fateful mistake to take on four tyres rather than two in the last round of pitstops. Stuck in the pack, Montoya tried too hard and hit the wall.

While Juan drove his wrecked car into Gasoline Alley his Earnhardt-Ganassi team-mate Jamie McMurray came through to win, just as he did in February’s Daytona 500. Heartbreak for Montoya resulted in celebration for the team as Chip Ganassi became the first team owner to win the Daytona 500, Indianapolis 500 and Brickyard 400 in the same year. “My heart goes out to Juan,” said Ganassi. “He had a great day. But this is a big, big day for Jamie, our sponsors and our team. It’s incredible. I need oxygen. I don’t know what to say.”

At one stage near the end of the race, before the final pitstops, Montoya and McMurray were running one-two. “Juan obviously had the dominant car and it’s horrible the luck that he’s having,” said McMurray. “I’m a big believer in fate, and when Juan was leading and I was second I thought, ‘This is just the way it’s meant to be. I won the Daytona 500, Dario won the Indy 500 and Juan’s going to win this race.’ I really thought it was his day.”

McMurray and Ganassi’s joy aside, the big story at Indianapolis was the many empty grandstand seats. Ticket sales for the Brickyard 400 have been in decline for many years, but this year witnessed a sharp drop, with between 80,000-100,000 of the Speedway’s 257,000 seats remaining empty on a hot, humid race day.

The decline in attendance is not unique to Indianapolis, of course. Most NASCAR races have suffered a steady fall in ticket sales over the past four or five years. NASCAR peaked in 2005 with more than 4.6 million spectators for all 36 races. Three years later NASCAR’s annual draw totalled 4.2 million, followed by a more precipitous fall last year to 3,892,000. Based on this year’s first 19 races a further decline of 300,000 is projected, down almost 30 per cent from 2005. TV ratings are down in equal proportions. TV viewership has been in decline for three or four years, and has lost another 10 per cent of the audience this year.

Responding to feedback from a 12,000-member fan council NASCAR has made a series of rule changes over the past 18 months. They’ve thrown out the little rear wing in favour of a more traditional spoiler, introduced double-file restarts and the guarantee of green-white-checker finishes rather than ending races under a yellow. The move has produced plenty of wild finishes and multi-car wrecks, as has NASCAR’s recently-minted ‘Have at it boys’ philosophy.

Some tracks have begun to cut ticket prices this year, yet the decline in attendance and TV ratings continues. Everyone is wondering what’s it all about. Is it the economy, or the bland, spec car-like ‘Car of Tomorrow’? Or is it the poor performance in recent years of Dale Earnhardt Jr, by far NASCAR’s most popular driver?

Everyone is searching for a silver bullet to recapture NASCAR’s magic formula. In fact, NASCAR’s third-generation boss Brian France says he’s prepared to try almost anything, including knock-out eliminations with a final, one-race play-off for the championship. Would that the solution was so simple.

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Following Formula 1’s Bahrain season-opener Motor Sport’s readers were among race fans around the world who made it clear how disappointed they are with Grand Prix racing’s 2010 edition. We’ve heard the same complaints for years – boring racing, no passing, and cars which all look the same running on an incredibly featureless, soul-sapping track. As many people asked: what happened to the FIA’s special overtaking group? Obviously, they failed miserably in their task.

Some people ask why CART’s old Indy or Champ Cars and the IRL’s current Indycars put on a better show with closer racing and more passing. One reason is that when F1 went to flat bottoms more than 20 years ago CART stayed with a Lotus 79-style ‘tunnel car’. Mario Andretti insisted that flat-bottomed cars were much too pitch-sensitive and more difficult to drive in close quarters, therefore discouraging close racing and passing. Mario’s concept was an integral element of CART’s and then Champ Car’s rules until the latter’s demise in 2008, and was the primary reason why Champ Cars put on a better show.

Of course, the IRL went down an entirely different route. Contemporary IRL cars are seriously restricted on horsepower and downforce, and are designed to run around in a pack. Passing is extremely difficult but the cars do tend to stay close together much like in a NASCAR restrictor-plate race. Yet the IRL’s formula has proven spectacularly unpopular as the series struggles to draw crowds to most races and its television ratings have plunged to miserable new lows.

A key element in the IRL’s formula is the massive amount of drag designed into the cars by the rules. In discussing the new Delta Wing Indycar concept Chip Ganassi told me that designer Ben Bowlby emphasised the excessive amount of drag required by the IRL’s rules. “Ben pointed out to me that an Indycar has more drag than a stock car!” Ganassi exclaimed. “I said, ‘How can an open-wheel car have more drag than a big, full-bodied NASCAR?’ That’s not the way it should be. But that’s how we, as rule-makers, have allowed it to be.”

Surely the people who write the rules have defined far too many of the specifications for today’s racing cars, F1 included. Darn near every element of the cars are specified by the rulebook. Today, there’s no room to create something that’s at all innovative like a rear-engined Cooper-Climax or a Lotus 79. Instead, we’re supposed to drool over the latest aerodynamic refinements to wing endplates and so forth. But these things are way too arcane, if not trivial, for most race fans. Clearly, people are tired of watching the same basic package that we’ve seen for the past 20 or more years.

Something radical is desperately needed, and that’s why I think the Delta Wing concept is a great thing, just to shake up everyone’s thinking. This spirit drove the sport for most of its history but there’s no longer any room for out-of-the-box thinking. If Colin Chapman was alive today, he’d shake his head and walk away, disgusted with the spec car syndrome that has infected the sport at every level, F1 again included.

Of course, if the rules were to be opened up F1’s team principals would complain that it would be too expensive and would result in too many different solutions and probably in one concept proving much quicker than anything else, making all others obsolete. No doubt there’s some truth to this riposte, but that doesn’t mean the sport isn’t in dire need of inspired technical leadership to recreate itself in a way that intrigues and excites more of us.

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Last year’s season-opening Rolex 24 Hours at Daytona featured a tremendous battle through the final three hours between Juan Pablo Montoya and David Donohue. Donohue scored the biggest win of his career as the 42-year-old overcame Montoya’s unrelenting efforts, using his Riley-Porsche’s superior power to take the lead from Montoya with 40 minutes to go and holding on to win one of the most exciting Rolex 24 Hour finishes in recent history by just 0.167sec.

Donohue’s Brumos Riley-Porsche is again among the favourites to win this year’s race, as is Montoya, who returns with Chip Ganassi’s two-car team of star-studded drivers including Dario and Marino Franchitti, Scott Dixon, Justin Wilson, Scott Pruett and Memo Rojas. Ganassi’s team won the race three years in a row from 2006-08 but has switched from Lexus to BMW engines this year.

Another favourite is Bob Stallings’s Grand-Am championship-winning Gainsco team. Once again defending champions Alex Gurney and Jon Fogarty will be joined at Daytona by four-time NASCAR champion Jimmie Johnson and former CART champion Jimmy Vasser. The Rolex 24 is one of the few Grand-Am races the team has not won, but Gurney is optimistic about its chances at Daytona.

“Obviously it’s a really big challenge,” he says. “Ganassi has won that race a lot of times and we’ve learned a lot from watching those guys. I think that race tests how good your team is more than any other. There are so many things involved and you’ve got to be on top of everything. Just knowing the things that [can] break on the car and having disciplined drivers who stay out of trouble, all those things are going to make a difference. I think we’re in a position where we’re ready to win it. We’ve got all our ducks in a row.”

The team’s only change for 2010 is a switch from Pontiac to Chevrolet engines, a change in branding rather than equipment. “Last year showed you need the power when three or four cars are on the lead lap and you need to pass,” says Fogarty. “It’s so tough. You need everything going for you to win that race.”

Team owner Bob Stallings is very impressed with NASCAR champion Johnson (below). “Jimmie is a really talented driver,” he says. “The first time we put Jimmie in the car it was raining and I was scared to death because I didn’t know if a Cup driver could drive in the rain. And he was awesome, just really outstanding. He’s fascinated by our kind of racing. He feels that when he gets in our car he has a chance to win.”

Gurney couldn’t be happier to have Johnson and Vasser back for Daytona. “It’s definitely a good thing,” he says. “There are no unknowns and that makes a big difference for this race. We don’t have to worry about how these guys fit in the car or how the driver changes work. It makes it a lot easier and we’ll all be less highly-strung.”

Fogarty agrees: “Having Jimmie and Jimmy back, the same old crew, is great. They’re both super-capable and they both want to win it really badly.”

The weather forecast for northern Florida this weekend is for clear skies and mild temperatures, so the race should be run in ideal conditions under a full moon. Here’s hoping for another fierce battle and an interesting result.

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Hélio Castroneves and team-mate Ryan Briscoe traded the top spot back and forth during the six hours of Pole Day qualifying at Indianapolis last Saturday. On a windy afternoon nobody could challenge the Penske pair, with Castroneves eventually edging his team-mate by half a second over the four qualifying laps. Hélio averaged 224.864mph to Ryan’s 224.083mph.

Briscoe was faster than Castroneves on their first qualifying runs early in the afternoon, but both went quicker later in the day after withdrawing their original cars and speeds. This is Castroneves’s third Indy 500 pole and the 15th time that one of Roger Penske’s cars will lead the field away at the Brickyard.

“The car was too comfortable on our first run,” said Castroneves. “We worked together and made the cars a little more on the edge, a little quicker. It’s a lot of fun when you push the limit and everybody works together to do it. This is a team effort and this team is the best.”

Added Briscoe: “The cars were so good straight off the truck and that gives us a lot of confidence to really trim out the cars for qualifying. It’s been exciting and it’s such a great feeling knowing we’re going into the Indy 500 with very strong cars.”

Castroneves was acquitted on federal tax evasion charges last month and is delighted to once again be a free man able to pursue his chosen profession. “I feel at home here at Indianapolis,” he said. “I just have to thank everybody for the warm welcome I’ve received. It’s like a big family. Racing is my life – it’s what I love and I have to thank all the fans. It means a lot.”

The biggest challenge to Penske came from Chip Ganassi’s cars. Dario Franchitti completed the front row with a run at 224.010mph while last year’s winner Scott Dixon was fifth fastest, just 0.1sec slower than Franchitti over the four laps.

“It would have been nice to be on pole,” said Dario. “But we’ve won from third on the grid before, so hopefully it’s a good omen. Honestly, that was most of the speed the car had in it today. We got hit by a couple of gusts of wind which cost us, but we just didn’t have the speed to match the Penske cars. Those were definitely the craziest qualifying laps I’ve driven here. With the wind and everything, we were hanging it out today.”

Graham Rahal qualified an impressive fourth, splitting the Ganassi pair for Newman/Haas/Lanigan. Rahal had to scrub his original qualifying run because the team wanted to run a slightly different configuration for the race, and he was without a spare car after team-mate Robert Doornbos crashed two – one on Friday and the second on Saturday morning. As a result Doornbos will have to qualify next weekend.

“The car was really nice,” said Rahal. “It had maybe a bit too much understeer. But we got through our run safely, which is what we needed to do. It says a lot for the work this team has done and how much we’ve improved the car over the last year.”

IRL points leader Tony Kanaan was the fastest of Andretti-Green’s four cars. Kanaan qualified sixth and will start the 500 on the outside of row two. Team-mates Marco Andretti and Danica Patrick will start from the third and fourth rows respectively. Also among the first-day qualifiers was Will Power, who put Penske’s third car on the outside of row three.

Fastest in Sunday’s qualifying was rookie Raphael Matos, who lapped his Luczo-Dragon entry owned by Roger Penske’s son Jay at 223.429mph. Matos starts the 500 from 12th on the grid. Paul Tracy was second fastest on Sunday at 223.111mph and will start the race from 13th. Tracy made a couple of qualifying runs on Saturday but was bumped from the top 11. He made two more runs on Sunday before he was satisfied.

Justin Wilson was fourth fastest on Sunday at 222.849mph, qualifying behind Vítor Meira. After making the field on Saturday, Wilson was disqualified for being underweight. Justin re-qualified in good order on Sunday and will start from 14th place in the middle of row five. Also among Sunday’s second-day qualifiers was 2005 Indy winner Dan Wheldon, who crashed on Saturday. Wheldon came back to qualify at 222.777mph and will start from the outside of row six.

The final 11 places in the 33-car field will be determined next weekend, and the race takes place the following Sunday on May 24.

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Dario Franchitti is happy to be back running at the front of IndyCar racing after a year in the wilderness in NASCAR. The Scotsman confirmed that he’s going to be a top IRL championship contender this year by scoring a decisive win in the streets of Long Beach last Sunday. Franchitti started from the outside of the front row but made a poor getaway before working his way to second behind early leader Will Power. A keen pitstop call by Franchitti’s team during the race’s first full-course yellow enabled Dario to get out of the pits ahead of Power who drove a faultless race without a radio to finish second ahead of Tony Kanaan.

“I made a terrible start and Justin (Wilson) and (Raphael) Matos passed me,” Franchitti reported. “But I knew the car was quick and I got past both of those guys and we were running second to Will. The tyres were performing well and the car felt really good. The guys pitted me early and we got track position on Will and during that second stint we were saving fuel.”

Dario made the point that fuel-saving means you have to simply drive the wheels off the car. “People think when you’re saving fuel you’re driving slowly, but you’re not because you’re actually braking later and trying to carry more speed through the corner to make up for your lack of speed on the straight. That’s difficult, but after the last stop I was pulling away from them. I was still saving fuel but the car was great and it allowed me to drive exactly as I wanted to.”

Franchitti last raced in the streets of Long Beach in 2002 during the CART days and he was delighted to score his first win in the California street race. “It’s great to win here in Long Beach,” Dario grinned. “To win here back in the unified IndyCar series and with a great crowd who were really enthusiastic is great. I think the competition level has gone up. Everybody can see how strong it is all the way through the field.”
Franchitti drove for Team Green during his CART days before moving to the IRL with Andretti-Green Racing in 2003. He won the IRL championship and Indy 500 with AGR in 2007, before trying NACAR last season with Chip Ganassi’s team. “I needed to do something else,” Dario said. “I’d been doing this for a long time and I needed to try something else.”

The experiment turned sour however and Ganassi asked Dario if he wanted to come back to Indy Car racing with his team. “Both Chip and I went through some pretty tough times last year,” Franchitti remarked. “I went over to NASCAR with him and he couldn’t find a sponsor. It was very tough because both of us had been used to having success.

“I didn’t expect it to be as bad as it was but that year away showed me what I was missing. Chip had an awful lot to work on in NASCAR last year and I lost my drive and a lot of people lost their jobs. So it was a tough year and it’s great to be able to come back to the IndyCar series and win here with Chip.”

After two of fourteen rounds Franchitti leads the IRL championship with 84 points followed by Power on 69, St. Petersbrg winner Ryan Briscoe on 67 and Kanaan in fourth place with 65 points.

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After a year with Newman/Haas/Lanigan, Justin Wilson will drive for Dale Coyne’s longtime spear-carrying team in this year’s IRL Indy car series. Lack of sponsorship meant Wilson lost his ride with Newman/Haas/Lanigan at the end of last season. Justin has been searching for work all winter and Dale Coyne has decided to throw the 30-year old Brit a lifeline. Wilson will test one of Coyne’s Dallara-Hondas during this week’s two-day IRL ‘Spring Training’ at the Homestead-Miami Speedway and hopes to sign a contract with Coyne either today or tomorrow before the test begins.

“We’re working towards moving forward but we haven’t signed a contract yet,” Justin said on Sunday. “It’s not official, but hopefully we can finalise things before the test. But we’re going out there with the idea of moving forward together. I’m looking forward to it.

“It’s not reliant on sponsorship,” Wilson added. “Dale’s working on some things and if they happened it would allow us to do even more.”

Coyne (above) recently hired Bill Pappas (below) to be his chief engineer. Pappas has a wealth of Indy car experience with a variety of teams including Jim Hall, Derrick Walker, Chip Ganassi’s teams and Panther Racing. Pappas spent last season in NASCAR with Michael Waltrip’s team but has decided to return to Indy car racing with Coyne’s small team.

“I like what Dale is doing with the team and I’m really impressed with Bill Pappas,” Wilson commented. “Bill is what you need to get organised in this series and make the most of it. Dale is committed to it and to going out there and proving what he, Bill and I are capable of doing.”

Bruno Junqueira (below with Coyne) – also an ex-Newman/Haas driver – drove for Coyne’s little team last year and Junqueira probably will continue with the team although the Brazilian has not yet reached an agreement with Coyne.

“Bruno is obviously one of Dale’s options and I would like that,” Justin said. “I think it’s likely Bruno will be there – he’s a good guy and good driver. Dale wants two good drivers and I think myself and Bruno would work well together.”

Coyne’s operation will be the fifth team Wilson has driven for in what will be his sixth year racing in America in either Champ Car or the IRL. Coyne’s team may be a backfield outfit, but Junquiera has shown it’s possible to get some reasonable results with it. Justin deserves better but the rocky world of Indy car racing has dealt him a difficult hand. Maybe the underdog role will play to Wilson’s strengths as both a test driver and racer.

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This weekend should be quite a thrash at Indianapolis as everyone who failed last weekend to make the field for this year’s 92nd Indy 500 tries to take one of the remaining twenty-two places in the starting line-up. Chip Ganassi’s drivers and team put on a great show last Saturday to beat Team Penske and Andretti-Green Racing to this year’s Indy 500 pole. Scott Dixon (below) and Dan Wheldon qualified one-two with a pair of mid and late-afternoon second attempts which pushed Ryan Briscoe to the outside of the front row ahead of team-mate Helio Castroneves who will start the race from the inside of row two.

This was Dixon’s eleventh IRL pole but his first at Indy and the first time a Ganassi car has been on the pole at Indy since Bruno Junqueira (below) turned the trick in 2002. The team’s one-two sweep also was a bit of redemption for Ganassi’s team after enduring an unhappy pole day last year.

A disappointed Andretti-Green team couldn’t hit the right combination for qualifying but the team’s four cars will still start fifth (Danica Patrick – below), sixth (Tony Kanaan), seventh (Marco Andretti), and ninth (Hideki Mutoh). With last Sunday’s rainout only the first day’s eleven qualifiers are set for the 92nd Indy 500. The other three are Panther Racing’s Vitor Meira in ninth, Vision’s Ed Carpenter in tenth with Luczo-Dragon’s Tomas Scheckter completing the first day’s qualifiers. Only eight other drivers made full, four-lap qualifying runs on the rain-shortened opening weekend at Indianapolis and despite the unification of Indy car racing it will be a struggle to fill the field with thirty-three reputable cars and drivers.

Meanwhile, Ganassi’s team appears in good shape to make a serious run at winning its first Indy 500 in eight years, since Juan Montoya dominated the race back in 2000. Dixon was second last year, of course, and Wheldon finished fourth in ’06, his first year with Ganassi’s team. Ganassi’s managing director Mike Hull (below with Scott Dixon) compares the working partnership enjoyed by Dixon and Wheldon to the team’s great days ten years ago with Alex Zanardi and Jimmy Vasser.

“Zanardi and Vasser were meant for each other at that point in time, and I think Dixon and Wheldon are meant for each other at this point in time,” Hull remarked. “They aren’t anything alike, except for one common thread – they both want to be better today than they were yesterday. They haven’t lost sight of where they came from and they don’t feed off each other. They learn from each other. Their diversity in approach is probably a benefit. That’s certainly helped us in the past, like with Zanardi and Vasser.

“The more unselfish you can be as a team-mate, or for that matter, a team member, the more your eyes are open each day to learning. And that’s what Scott and Dan have in common. If they can continue down that path, no matter what they do with their lives, they can look back and say they achieved a lot, and that’s where they are as two people racing for us today. Their driving styles are a bit different, but they’ve learned to compare their styles to understand how to help each other.”

Hull says Dixon and Wheldon (above) have learned to drive their cars loose with the tail out in qualifying.

“In order to achieve a really fast lap at Indianapolis it takes a lot of experience,” Hull observes. “You can give somebody the setup that Chip Ganassi Racing had on Saturday afternoon and the driver may be able to drive the race car, but can he drive the car across the short chutes the right way to get the speed that he needs? Scott and Dan have got to the point in their careers where they can do that and they’re doing it together and that compounds your ability to get to the next level.”

As Dixon, Wheldon and the other top eleven qualifiers prepared this week for May 25th’s 500-mile race, the rest of the field – all the former Champ Car teams included – have been preoccupied with simply finding the speed necessary to make the race. Don’t expect any of them to come close to challenging the established IRL teams at Indianapolis this year.

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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 first unified Indycar race of the 21st century took place last Saturday night before a modest crowd at the Homestead-Miami Speedway. There were many good things to see, including a fierce battle at the front and watching Marco Andretti drive such a strong race on a track where he has fared poorly in the past. In the end, Scott Dixon (below) showed that he and Chip Ganassi’s team will once again be serious championship contenders by taking pole and coming through to win the race with a near-perfect performance after Tony Kanaan ran out of luck in the closing laps. It was also clear that the IRL continues to be all about its three big teams – Ganassi, Andretti-Green and Penske, who entirely dominated the evening.

The tough task facing the former Champ Car teams was made equally clear. French rookie Franck Perera (below) was the fastest of this group, qualifying 15th on his debut with Eric Bachelart’s Conquest team, while Oriol Servia was the best finisher in 12th place, five laps down. Perera finished 14th, six laps down, while Justin Wilson was 15th and seven laps back in his first race with Newman/Haas/Lanigan.

These guys are expected to be in better shape on the St Petersburg street circuit this weekend, but let’s not forget that the top IRL teams have spent years and many millions of dollars in the wind tunnel and elsewhere developing, testing, understanding and dialling in these cars. With limited resources, minimal testing and a brief switch back to their Panoz DP01s for Long Beach before the long month of May in Indianapolis followed by 12 races in 15 weeks, the ex-Champ Car teams face a long and challenging season.

So after all the anticipation and white heat surrounding the unification of Indycar racing we are faced with the realisation that nothing much has changed. Ganassi, Andretti-Green and Penske are clearly on top of a spec-car series with little emotional appeal that is filled with largely faceless drivers. There are few names, no superstars, and the only notable blip the series might enjoy is if Marco Andretti were to win a string of races and challenge for the championship. And, of course, the former Champ Car teams face an embarrassing struggle, which is not likely to improve their hopes of selling any serious sponsorship, nor encourage long-suffering Champ Car fans to turn out to support them.

And what about Paul Tracy (below)? It’s ridiculous that he’s not in the field. He’s the biggest draw by far, the only guy with a real persona and a predilection to speak his mind. He may be near the end of his career on street circuits and some road courses, but like any driver he’ll continue to cut the mustard on ovals well into his forties. Let’s not forget some of Paul’s ferocious recent performances at Milwaukee in Champ Car’s final years at the venerable track, when he showed everyone what it’s all about with some superbly aggressive outside passes.

As Tracy says, he would love to go back to Indianapolis with a properly competitive car and team to attempt to avenge his loss there in 2003. With the right car, Tracy would bring some flavour and excitement to the Indy 500 that it hasn’t enjoyed in many years. But right now he’s sidelined as his lawyers try to find a way to buy Tracy out of his contract with Jerry Forsythe, who has decided not to run his team in the unified IRL series. In the meantime, the 39-year-old Canadian is a pedestrian.

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