Jump to content

Indycar 2019

relapse98

By relapse98
in Other Sports

 Share

Recommended Posts

relapse98

relapse98 634

Posted
  • Author
Posted (edited)
2 minutes ago, Hawndoh said:

If this really is the last bump day it's a big one. 

For those that don't follow there is a push from Penske and Ganassi and others to change to locked in spots and basically no bump day. 

I see where they are coming from, but yeah, f that. Bring it or go home. If you are afraid of part time teams, nut up time.

Oh, and I'm sure they remember 28/5.

Edited by relapse98
Link to comment
Share on other sites
elfenix

elfenix 34,330

Posted
Posted
Just now, relapse98 said:

Fitting. I mean, his family literally owns IMS.

J/k, good job.

the "ed carpenter racing is the little team that could" kinda rings hollow.  although hulman's own team (which carpenter drove for) failed. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
elfenix

elfenix 34,330

Posted
Posted (edited)

it's not good for indycar that fred didn't make the field, but it's also good for indycar that fred didn't make the field.  a lot of people were "what's the big deal this is easy" after his last time at indy, and that wasn't helped by "track limits? what track limits?" at cota.  but this shows it isn't easy. 

Edited by elfenix
Link to comment
Share on other sites
wood

wood 11,230

Posted
Posted (edited)

Of course we're bummed Fernando won't be running for our first trip to Indy, but we have other guys to pull for, and this difficulty will make it all the more satisfying when/if he finally cracks it. I love his take that they just weren't quick enough and don't deserve it. Not making any excuses. Just saying they need to be better next time. Also love that he says he'd rather be there, failing, than watching on TV at home like last year. 

Some petty fans will laugh at the guy & get their licks in as they sit at home watching on their safe, soft sofas, but the guy is a pure racer through and through.

Edited by wood
Link to comment
Share on other sites
utee94

utee94 15,835

Posted
Posted
On 5/18/2019 at 6:03 PM, Hawndoh said:

Well the Indy 500 is a bit different than the normal races in that the cars are qualifying to actually get INTO the race, not just starting order. There are also teams that only run the 500 which is why there are hours and hours of practice leading up to the race.

I like it. All the work put into all of these practices leading up to actual high stakes qualifying builds enormous tension. You just don't get that in lots of other series. And you know at any second someone can hit the wall and it's all over.

No matter how slow the Williams is in F1, you know they're in the race and will pointlessly circle at the back. For the 500, a car like that goes home.

 

On 5/18/2019 at 8:23 PM, elfenix said:

the indy 500 is a different beast.  it's the oldest continuously operated race (everyone excepts WW2) at the same location in the world (predating the 24 hours by 12 years).  a national championship was built around it, but you go back in time to the 40s and it's the only paved track on the schedule.  the other races were all dirt tracks and pike's peak.  it was part of the FIA's world championship from 1950 through 1960 (then the manufacturer's championship came into being, and i'm going to assume ferrari didn't want to build one-off cars for indianapolis).  even when other paved tracks became part of the championship, indy was still the only superspeedway (most were 1 mile ovals, which just ain't that fast).  it was often the first race of the season (so the biggest event first, like nascar). so, considering all that, all the practice and all the qualifying made a lot of sense.  and it's also a rectangle with 4 distinct corners rather than most speedways where 1 and 2, and 3 and 4 aren't really separate corners. 

maybe if it were only open to those running in the full time championship they could change the long practice and qualifying schedule.  but it's not.  it's always been a part of but separate from the national championship.  which is really weird considering the tight relationship between the speedway and its sanctioning body since AAA pulled out (and that weirdness has helped lead to two splits so far in american open wheel.  could be mostly roger penske's fault).

it's nice that we have the indy GP instead of a full month of not racing in prep for a race, though. 

Yes, I know it's different.  I'm also well aware of its history with Formula 1, which is certainly very cool.

Regardless I dislike the qualifying for it.  It's ok for you to like it, bu I do not.

 

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Hawndoh

Hawndoh 2,386

Posted
Posted

McLaren fired the head guy of their Indy program.  

The BBC article I saw also said McLaren did investigate buying a seat but that Alonso basically nixed the idea before getting too far saying it wouldn't have been right to do it. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
relapse98

relapse98 634

Posted
  • Author
Posted
51 minutes ago, Hawndoh said:

Alonso basically nixed the idea before getting too far saying it wouldn't have been right to do it. 

Good on Alonso, much respect. He's a racer and knows how bad that would come off that he couldn't qualify on his own.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
relapse98

relapse98 634

Posted
  • Author
Posted

It's interesting to hear the strategy that the teams use for practice. They go out in a pack of team cars and try and figure out how their car works with each other, then like Rossi, he dropped back behind a big pack and then fought his way back up to see how it operated in traffic. Or Kaiser seeing how fast he can brake from speed to get down to pit road limit when a drive through penalty doesn't matter.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Gil Bang

Gil Bang 25,984

Posted
Posted

what a shitshow

 

 

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — The comedy of errors that doomed McLaren’s disastrous return to the Indianapolis 500 began months before Fernando Alonso failed to qualify for the race. How bad was it? A week before Alonso’s first test in the car, the team realized it didn’t even have a steering wheel.

McLaren CEO Zak Brown acknowledged Monday the team was woefully unprepared and small oversights snowballed into the final result. Bob Fernley, the head of the operation, was fired hours after Alonso missed the race and Brown returned to England to digest the embarrassment of his venture.

Brown on Monday provided The Associated Press a detailed timeline of the bloopers and blunders that led to Alonso missing the race, the last piece the two-time Formula One champion needs in his quest to win motorsports’ version of the Triple Crown.

“I don’t think we came into this arrogant, I think we were unprepared,” Brown said. “We didn’t deserve to be in the race and it’s our own fault. It’s not like we showed up and gave our best. We defeated ourselves.”

The path to missing the 33-driver field began when the car was not ready the moment Texas Motor Speedway opened for the April test. Brown had personally secured a steering wheel the previous week from Cosworth to use for the test, and the mistakes piled up from there.

“We didn’t get out until midday, our steering wheel was not done on time, that’s just lack of preparation and project management organizational skills,” Brown said. “That’s where this whole thing fell down, in the project management. Zak Brown should not be digging around for steering wheels.”

A cosmetic issue at the Texas test haunted McLaren deep into last week at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

McLaren purchased a car from technical partner Carlin, and though the car was orange when McLaren received it, it was not the proper McLaren “papaya orange.” It had to be repainted after the test, and that still had not been completed when Alonso crashed his McLaren-built car last Wednesday.

The Carlin spare was in a paint shop 30 minutes from the track, more than a month after McLaren complained about the color, and it ultimately cost McLaren almost two full days of track time. The team looked foolish as other teams were able to move into backup cars in mere hours; James Hinchcliffe crashed in Saturday qualifying and was back on track in his spare that afternoon.

Carlin was a two-car team when McLaren made its alliance but expanded to three for the Indy 500. Once Carlin took on the extra work, Brown said, the team had few resources to give McLaren.

“It was clear they weren’t capable of running three cars and serving us,” he said. Carlin entrants Max Chilton and Patricio O’Ward were the two other drivers who failed to qualify.

McLaren’s poor showing is one of the biggest failures in Indy 500 history. Roger Penske missed the show with Al Unser Jr. and Emerson Fittipaldi in 1995, a year after dominating the race. Reigning CART champion Bobby Rahal missed it in 1993, and two-time Indy winner Rodger Ward never got up to speed to make the 1965 field.

The McLaren budget for this Indy 500 was strong, every sponsorship opportunity had been sold and the venture was a guaranteed commercial success for McLaren. Brown was somewhat hands-off and focused on the critical rebuild of the Formula One part of the program. He now laments waiting too long to become heavily involved with the Indy 500 effort. He also believes he was too slow in assigning McLaren sporting director Gil de Ferran, a former Indy 500 winner, oversight of the program.

“I should have been closer to Indy but I could never compromise Formula One,” Brown said. “At 9:01 in the morning when we weren’t on track at the first test, that’s when we failed to qualify for the Indianapolis 500. We didn’t ring the fire alarm quick enough because we could have recovered after the first test.

“I am angry at myself because I was uncomfortable all the way up to the first test and I should have followed my instinct to get more involved.”

Many of the issues were beyond Brown’s control.

The car had an electrical issue in last month’s test at Indy and an employee was taken off the team for the error. Alonso had another electrical issue on opening day for the 500 and the alternator and wiring loom had to be replaced. Alonso crashed on the second day, and McLaren missed all of Day 3 rebuilding the spare from Carlin that was finally the proper shade of orange.

Fast Friday showed the car still needed speed, and Alonso went into qualifying on shaky ground. His first qualifying run was sabotaged by a tire puncture — which wasn’t detected beforehand because Brown said the team had purchased incorrect tire sensors.

Alonso wound up one of six drivers in the “Last Row Shootout” on Sunday and the panicked McLaren team begged and borrowed across the paddock for any assistance available. Alonso went out to practice Sunday with an entirely new setup, but in the frantic changeover a mistake was made in converting inches to the metric system the English team uses and the car scraped and sparked on his first lap. It had to be fixed and Alonso got in just five more laps before rain ended the session.

When it came time for Alonso to make his final last-gasp qualifying attempt late Sunday afternoon, the Spaniard was given a car that Brown and de Ferran were concerned might not perform.

“Gil and I went to the motorhome and told Fernando: ‘We are going to try this, but this could go well or really wrong. Are you comfortable?’” Brown said. “And Fernando said, ‘Let’s go for it.’”

Alonso agreed that he never backed away from the challenge.

“We went out with an experiment that we did overnight. We changed everything on the car because we thought that maybe we need something from the mental side different to go into the race with some confidence,” Alonso said. “We went out not knowing what the car will do in Turn 1, but you’re still flat. So we tried.”

The new setup and assistance from other teams indeed got the car up to speed, but Alonso was knocked from the field by 23-year-old Kyle Kaiser of tiny Juncos Racing. McLaren discovered after the qualifying run that the car had the wrong gear ratio setup.

“We actually had a 229 (mph) car but we had 227.5 gearing, so we beat ourselves again while we almost made it,” Brown said. “We really did put it all on the line and you could feel the anxiety. There was some real heroism in that. I don’t want the world to think McLaren is a bunch of idiots because while we did have a few, we had some real stars.”

Alonso has rejected an offer from the team to purchase a seat in the Indy 500 field for him.

What’s next is a careful lookback as Brown figures out McLaren’s future at both the Indy 500 and the IndyCar Series. He still wants to field two full-time entries in the series but isn’t sure yet how much of a setback this has been. He believes McLaren will be back next year at Indy for a second chance.

“I feel an obligation to the fans and sponsors, we let them down. We didn’t fulfill our promise and I think they need more than just an apology,” Brown said. “There will be repercussions for those who don’t deserve to work for a great team like McLaren. We will look at what we learned here and the list is a mile long. I hope people appreciate that we go for it, we are racers, and Fernando is a star and we are not quitters. We want to come back.”

___

  • Like 2
  • Haha 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Prepuce of Doom

Prepuce of Doom 21,097

Posted
Posted

It takes a lot of balls to publicize in such expansive and comical detail the many ways they managed to step on their dicks, but Zak can suck his own butthole with all that "people who don't deserve to work at McLaren" shit. Take more ownership of the situation than just acting like you're jumping on the grenade when you're really just pushing people overboard. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
relapse98

relapse98 634

Posted
  • Author
Posted (edited)

Holey crap, I didn't realize the mighty McLaren completely potatoed it the entire way through. That's embarrassing.

Aren't these the people where you used to be able to eat off the floor of the factory because they were so anal retentive?

Edited by relapse98
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
 Share
Go to topic listing


Football ... Basketball ... Baseball ... Other Sports ... Futbol ... 🤫995🤫 ... Gambling ... Movies & TV ... Music ... Hobbies ... Lulz ... Food & Travel ... Daily Texan ... Business and Markets ... Cloak Room ... Help ... For Sale ... Board Discussion ... Subscribe!... Donate!... Advertise... COOKIE MONSTER!

×
×
  • Create New...