Radical Texas IndyCar changes explained

A hotly anticipated IndyCar season is well underway, but it kicks up a notch this weekend with the first of only three oval events, at Texas Motor Speedway.

It’s where the 2020 season began in June after the coronavirus pandemic hiatus, and one of the fastest and often most exciting events on the calendar.

The Race highlights everything you need to know amid more changes than usual.

Kanaan, Fittipaldi and a regular win contender

For those turning up for your first IndyCar race of the season, perhaps you’ve heard about the brilliant rookie class led by ex-Haas Formula 1 driver Romain Grosjean?

Unfortunately he, and more unusually in a way, NASCAR legend Jimmie Johnson, both miss the ovals this year. The third driver in the class – Team Penske’s treble Australian Supercars champion Scott McLaughlin – is the only one of the group present.

Don’t switch off though. Johnson is handing his car off to the legendary Tony Kanaan, who should be extremely competitive at this track and with a Ganassi team that last year had one car that won (Scott Dixon) and another car that would have won had it not crashed (Felix Rosenqvist) last year.

Pietro Fittipaldi (pictured below) makes his IndyCar return subbing in for Dale Coyne’s Grosjean, under happier circumstances than when he filled Grosjean’s seat after the latter’s Bahrain Grand Prix crash last November at Haas.

Fittipaldi was 11th on his last oval outing, in his rookie year at Dale Coyne in 2018, but missed Texas mid-season after his huge leg-breaking Spa sportscar shunt that he was lucky to get back to racing from.

Also joining the field is team owner Ed Carpenter, as he reclaims the car Conor Daly drives on the road courses. Daly was sixth with Carlin last year and will race for that team again here, while Carpenter was fifth last season and will no doubt be a factor again.

Aero changes explained

Ahead of Texas and the Indianapolis 500 this year, IndyCar has trialled a number of changes which have been 18 months or so in the making in a bid to allow the current car and aero configuration to follow more closely in dirty air.

Especially after adding the aeroscreen for last year, teams have struggled to follow closely and the new device specifically took away the effectiveness of front wing tweaks, because the canopy is heavy and high up towards the front of the car, inducing understeer.

The current IndyCar has a hole in the floor next to the sidepod which was inserted to help stop the car remaining or flipping in the air during a crash. This hole takes away downforce, but for Texas and the Indianapolis 500 this hole will be smaller.

“There’s a handful of new options that are available to us this year,” said Arrow McLaren SP managing director Taylor Kiel when asked by The Race.

“There are some new parts for 2021 and then there are some old parts that are now optional.

 

“If I told you what we’re going to run, I’d have to kill you.

“I think anytime IndyCar makes a technical change – or any motor racing series – that opens up some opportunity for teams to maybe find something that somebody else hasn’t so I’m certainly looking forward to that.

“The one good thing for us as with most of the field is that we tested here. So we’ve got a pretty good idea of where we want to start.

“But I think the track conditions and the weather will dictate kind of where we evolved from there.”

With only an hour’s practice to experiment (more on that shortly) expect most teams to have made their decision pre-weekend. The teams did test with this configuration at Texas at the end of March, which will have given them an idea of how to proceed although temperatures and conditions will play a big factor this weekend.

Will side-by-side racing return?

“Sadly, it’s going to be a one-lane race,” said AMSP’s Pato O’Ward when asked by The Race about track changes. A thick layer of the black PJ1 compound put on the track for NASCAR was slippy for IndyCar, but removing it has not totally solved the problem.

“[The second lane] was still a no-go zone whenever we were there at the test.

“Maybe something magical has happened in the past few days that might allow us to make it two lane, but I highly doubt it.”

Fans hoping for a return of some of the more spectacular Texas races will be disappointed, but last year’s race was still entertaining regardless and this year’s – with the aero changes and some other elements we’ll highlight shortly – shouldn’t simply be written off because cars won’t be five-wide, even if that’s what many people want.

Fresh rubber to burn

Firestone is bringing a new tyre for this Texas race. Well, we say new…it was tested in 2019. Unfortunately the coronavirus pandemic intervened and the tyre wasn’t used last year.

It was tested at the venue almost two years ago and again by teams in March this year. In unrepresentative conditions, comparisons or rating how much of an improvement it was were moot.

Let the guesswork begin

In 2019, drivers and teams got three hours of practice – two on Thursday and one on Friday – before qualifying. In 2020 and 2021, there’s just a single hour (75 minutes for rookies) practice before going into qualifying, with just two hours between!

UPDATE: Practice extended to 90 minutes, qualifying cancelled after rain delay

Not only is that so much less time on track, it’s less time between sessions to mull things over. So teams are going to have to roll off the truck fast, or prepare to be off the pace, which is certainly not difficult in current IndyCar.

In addition, practice on Friday has been delayed by over and hour and a half, and it’s unclear what impact that will have on the gap to qualifying.

Either way, there’s really no room for any error in this new normal thanks to the coronavirus pandemic.

Qualifying: Cancelled!

A rain delay halted practice for over an hour and 30 minutes on Saturday. Therefore IndyCar has cancelled qualifying and extended Saturday’s practice to 90 minutes.

The order for Saturday night and Sunday’s race will be set by the IndyCar points standings from the first two races. You can see those below:

Driver Standings

Rules make for grim reading if you crash

It’s been popular in the past – especially at the blue-riband Indianapolis 500 event – to have a low-downforce set-up for qualifying and a more conservative race set-up on ovals.

However, drivers won’t have that luxury again this year as their cars will be into parc ferme conditions following qualifying. That means the cars need to qualify in a set-up configuration acceptable for the race.

It might be a disadvantage for most drivers to not have the opportunity to have more downforce for a flat-out qualifying run. However, with just an hour’s practice, it will help the more inexperienced oval racers who won’t have to find a separate qualifying and race set-up like they would at Indy over a month within the condensed Texas schedule of a few hours.

“We were just talking about that today, parc ferme, obviously we will be qualifying pretty much on race condition stuff. I think we start the race on our qualifying tires,” explained McLaughlin.

“It does take one less complication out of it for me to learn. For me, it’s probably nice to have the whole month of May basically to prep myself for trimming out qualifying, getting confidence in that department.

IndyCar returnee Fittipaldi added: “For me it’s better that way, just to keep that variable out of it. I’ll be able I think to learn more like this without going into really any unknowns.”

In conclusion, we have a host changes to the car and tyre that won’t have been tested as a package in the conditions we get at the weekend, not much time to trial changes in shortened practice, no forgiveness for a crash in practice and an extremely condensed schedule.

With the fine margins separating the IndyCar field at the moment, it’s shaping up to be an intriguing affair in Texas.