While IndyCar hasn’t made any enormous rule changes for the 2022 season, it’s a small one it has made that has got Andretti’s Romain Grosjean excited.
Last year while racing for Dale Coyne in his rookie IndyCar season, Grosjean blamed backmarkers for costing him a fairytale victory from pole position in the Indianapolis road course race – his third IndyCar start – but one of the new rule changes revealed this week relates to this.
IndyCar will have the ability to disable push to pass for drivers more than a lap down, something Grosjean credits as a good change.
“I think I may have mentioned it last year, after maybe Indianapolis, a place where I didn’t win the race because I was getting stuck behind cars,” he said.
“I do understand the blue flag rules and I love the fact that everyone can stay in the race for a long time.
“But also obviously it’s quite challenging when you’re trying to go for the win and you’ve got a driver using push to pass to defend against you.
“I think it’s definitely a good call. It doesn’t change too much how the race will go, but it will make your life a little bit easier for the driver to lap drivers or who have had an issue or whatever.”
During the first Indianapolis road course race last year, Grosjean’s charge was slowed by a number of lapped cars, including fellow ex-F1 driver Takuma Sato who he banged wheels with while trying to pass at Turn 1, only for Sato to re-pass Grosjean a few corners later in a similarly forceful fashion.
It’s debatable and impossible to know exactly how much difference this new rule would have made in removing what Grosjean believed to be the reason he lost the race win. But it is likely to have an impact on plenty of races in 2022, especially with 26 full-time entries on the grid and the inevitable lapped traffic that will produce.
The other new rule changes confirmed this week include changes related to the pits, where a tweak means driver’s pit boxes at each race will be decided by qualifying position.
The familiar sight of crew members pushing cars out of pit stops is over too as that has been outlawed.
IndyCar has also made a schedule tweak for each road/street course round to try and guarantee drivers get 45 minutes of practice, even if there are delays in those sessions.
Grosjean will also be happy to see that every extra minute on track is guaranteed after – like most drivers – he only got one day of pre-season testing before this weekend’s season opener at St Petersburg.
Grosjean will begin life as a proper Andretti driver this week, with St Pete being his first experience of an IndyCar street course last year having switched to F1 from the previous year.
“IndyCar is quite challenging in that aspect,” Grosjean said when asked if he knew how competitive he and the team could be this year before the season opener.
“You only get one day of testing and then you go racing.
Sebring, I don’t think we can read too much into that race track, it’s more a matter of understanding the baseline set-up at Andretti, making sure my engineer Olivier can understand how the car should be run and so on.
It went really well, almost too well! I just don’t want to read too much into it, but definitely I was very happy with the day, happy with how everything worked. But again, it’s Sebring, it doesn’t mean much so I think we’ll wait for St Pete to learn a little bit more.
But definitely, I feel like we’ve got a strong package, got a good team, we can make sure we can get it to where I need it to go fast.”
