In Indianapolis last week Tony George (above) and the IRL announced they are convening an industry roundtable to determine the new IndyCar formula for 2011. The roundtable will be headed by retired Ford racing executive Neil Ressler and will kick-off on June 24 with discussions with engine manufacturers, car builders and other members of the racing industry. The aim is to form a consensus among the key potential stakeholders in the IndyCar series on what the new formula should be.

One of the few prominent people in the IndyCar series who has a clear vision of the new formula is Bobby Rahal. A three-time CART champion driver and successful IRL team owner, Rahal’s business empire includes fourteen automobile dealerships in Pennsylvania. Rahal is adamant that the new formula must begin to embrace the wholesale move across the automotive industry to build more fuel-efficient cars.

“I think first and foremost, whatever formula that is adopted, it should have relevance to the retail automotive environment,” Rahal (above) says. “I think the formula must have relevance to where the automotive industry is going in the future with regards to power plants.”

Rahal believes a type of cellulosic ethanol should be selected as the fuel for the 2011 IndyCar formula. He also thinks kinetic energy recovery systems (KERS) or any kind of hybrids should be looked at for adoption by the IRL in 2014, or thereabouts, but no earlier. He’s convinced that it would be far too costly to introduce that kind of technology to IndyCar racing at this stage of the game.

“Longer term, we probably should go to flywheels,” he remarked. “But that’s maybe five, six or seven years down the road. You’ve got to be realistic.”

Rahal sees a twin turbo, 2.0 or 2.2 litre V-6 engine as the ideal power plant for IndyCar racing.

“I think turbocharged, small capacity engines are the way to go because that’s the way the automotive market is going,” Bobby observes. “It’s already there, in fact, and with the turbocharger, especially if it’s a one-engine series, you can turn the boost up or down depending on the type of circuit and have varying levels of performance.

“With a turbo you don’t have to worry about the noise issue when you go to street circuits or places like Laguna Seca where increasingly, you have noise limits. Just about every road course in this day and age is facing noise limits and a turbo is the best way to address those.

“I’d make it a twin turbo rather than a single because it gives better response and better performance. And a V6 has fewer parts. We did a study some years ago at CART about the difference between a V6 and V8 in terms of parts, and it adds up. You’ve got a smaller crankshaft, two less connecting rods, and eight fewer valves. So it starts to add up.”

Rahal agrees with Mario Andretti and many others in the sport who believe the balance between downforce and horsepower must return to where it was some years ago with more power and less downforce.

“The power-to-downforce ratio needs to be the inverse of what it is today where you have too much downforce and not enough power,” Rahal. “The number one benefit of more power and less downforce is that it gives you separation so you don’t have people running around stacked on top of one another. And number two is that the good drivers will be able to show themselves.”

I have to say I agree with Bobby all the way down the line and I hope the IRL gives his ideas serious consideration.

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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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The men from Ingolstadt were in sombre mood at the end of the 2008 Sebring 12 Hours. For the first time this century they failed to win. Worse still, it was the men from Stuttgart who were first to reach the chequered flag. It could have been worse, it could have been the men from France.

Yes, there were chinks in the Audi armour at Sebring. But it could have been worse, it could have been Le Mans.

There is much to be done before June. And it will be done. Words were not minced in the debrief on Saturday night, nor in those that followed on Sunday. On Monday morning they were back at the circuit, gearing up for a 12-hour test. There will be no rest.

“There were technical problems, ones we had never had before,” said Dr Wolfgang Ullrich, “and there were some driver errors. We had to change the front discs on one car – that’s never happened before. We had to change a turbo on the other car, and there were issues with the front suspension. All these problems came our way this weekend and there is already a full investigation into why this happened.”

When a car has a major problem at Sebring, it passes through the pits and “goes behind the wall” as they say down Florida way. When Marco Werner’s Audi went behind the wall, and into its paddock garage, I went to watch the mechanics go to work on changing the turbo on the engine’s right bank. After a few minutes I was aware of a person standing very close behind me. Looking over my shoulder, I came face to face with a man dressed in Peugeot fireproof overalls. This man proceeded to take a video camera from his pocket and record the surgery to the back of the R10, pausing only to jot some notes onto a small pad. The atmosphere was somewhat tense but he remained expressionless as he filmed over my shoulder. As soon as the work was done, and a swarm of mechanics began to re-fit the bodywork, the Frenchman sidled away. Espionage is alive and well. “It happens,” an engineer told me afterwards. “It is very open house in the paddock here and you can waste a lot of time and effort in trying to stop this kind of thing.” There were a lot of people working on that car, all highly focused on not losing too many laps. Maybe one extra person, looking at the onlookers, might just be a worthwhile idea.

Both Audi and Peugeot went to Sebring to try and break the cars ahead of Le Mans. And both teams succeeded. “If something is going to fail, it will fail at Sebring,” said Dr Ullrich. “It is the toughest race we do. So, we go away, we learn, and we get it right.”

And then, of course, there is Peugeot to worry about. The new car was very quick all week in Florida, not reliable, but very fast. The duel of the diesels – Audi TDI versus Peugeot HDI – is well and truly on. We are on the cusp of a classic battle in sports car racing. If both teams have reliability at La Sarthe in June, the race will be sensational.

On Friday, in the heat of the Sunshine State, the Peugeot was fastest in qualifying but was not awarded pole. What? How so? Well, the session was red-flagged after a huge shunt that damaged the concrete barriers that surround much of this airfield circuit. Nothing unusual so far. But then IMSA decided not to re-start, and instead of giving pole to the quickest car so far (Peugeot) they averaged out all the times from Thursday and Friday and it was the Audi of Allan McNish that came out on top. Had the qualifying run its course, the story may have been different, but probably not.

“There’s no question the Peugeot has outright speed over one lap,” said McNish, “and really they should have had pole. But we are confident of our race pace and our strategy. The battle is on, though, you’d better believe it, and we have work still to do.” He was right about the race pace. Despite losing time in the pits, McNish, Rinaldo Capello and Tom Kristensen climbed back through the field in the evening and into the night, taking second place behind the Penske Porsche, which ran like clockwork. The Peugeot led from the start but was soon in the garage, finishing this gruelling test of endurance many laps down on the leaders.

Sebring is a four-day party for the 100,000 fans who travel from all over the USA to make this event a most extraordinary happening. Camped out in tents and motorhomes, they make the Sebring infield their own for the best part of a week. It is surely the rowdiest and most bizarre motor racing party on the planet, smoke from the hundreds of barbecues drifting across the circuit, a cacophony of rock and country music sometimes drowning out the cars, and a lot of whooping and hollering from the rooftops of trucks, campers and enormous jeeps. This is down-home America. Forget Boston or Manhattan, this is party time down South. Creedence Clearwater Revival blasts out into the night, very scantily clad girls get them well revved up for the annual bikini contest, and there is beer, a very great deal of beer. “Helps ugly people have sex,” one fan told me. “There’s 24 cans in a pack, one for each hour of the day, man.” And in among this mayhem is a motor race. Down in the ‘zoo’ – otherwise known as Turn 10 – there is some serious frolicking, not all of it fully clothed. They have fun, these people, and they love their racing, especially the throaty roar of the Corvettes. They’re not so sure about the whooshing, whispering diesels and Peugeot fans seemed to be thin on the ground. “We hate the French, you know,” one group of ZZ Top lookalikes told me. Right, I see, I said.

Team Audi does not hate the French. But they do respect them right now. We are in for a very exciting Le Mans. The R10 will take a lot of beating – it is a supremely good racing car – but Peugeot is coming.

Sebring 2008, the 56th running of this classic contest, resulted in Hans Stuck, Derek Bell and Roger Penske being inducted into the Hall of Fame. Everybody was very happy about that. And Roger Penske was the happiest of them all on Saturday night.

Motor Sport Magazine - The original motor racing magazine