Very Sensible Indycar Series Brought to you by Verizon
Round 8 of 18: Texas Motor Speedway
Oh boy!
(Mail your best captions to Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, care of 1968)
Track length: 1.5 miles
Number of laps: 248
But that makes: 372 miles
So why is it: It's in kilometres.
Lap record: 236.68 mph / 5 lateral Gs (Paul Tracy, Reynard-Honda)
Everything, they say, is bigger in Texas. President Lyndon Johnson, standing at six foot five, was so big that Bobby Kennedy knew about his intention not to seek re-election before his own feet did. Other big things from Texas include cattle, Houston, Big Oil and the state of Texas itself.
But for those of us who happen to be European, Asian or Miscellaneous, and whose first and only experience of Texas was Texas BBQ-sauce flavoured Pringles, the only relevant feature of Texas is of course Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth. There is also the remarkably dangerous Houston street course which the Indycars visit later this month but we can safely ignore it for the time being, if not forever.
The first thing for you to get your head around is that despite everything, or indeed Everything, being Bigger in Texas, Texas Motor Speedway is not. It's deceptively medium-sized.
The second thing is that it's going to be at night. Night in Texas, so that's some sort of super-night in Europe. Seriously man even the race broadcast doesn't start till 1am UK time. I'm declaring this one a pyjama race.
The third thing? Well it's an oval I guess. You must know the drill by now. Only turn left. No “technical” sections, which is to say the sections which require the less exciting kinds of driving skill like braking and changing gears. First three quarters of the race are meaningless, like a weekend in the summer holidays or indeed a long stretch of unemployment.
Thou hast teased me long enough, English. Whence might I find the race schedule?
Below. It's a two-day event, like you care. All times Central (read: Texas, -6 hours time).
Friday, June 6
10.00-11.15: Indycar first practice
14.00-15.30: Indycar second practice, or qualifying or whatever
18.45-19.15: tiny Indycar final nighttime practice
20.00: What? NASCAR Truck race?
Saturday, June 7
12.00-19.30: Time passes.
19:30: Firestone Indycar oval race for 600 kilometres is go! Go!
I can't remember whether Texas sucks or not
You're not alone, brave stooge. Texas 2012 was a proper barnburner of a race, whereas Texas 2013 was like watching a film under the false impression that there's going to be this huge twist at the end where Valhalla burns and deities get twilighted, only to discover during the credits, after the MPAA logo has been and gone, that maybe you'd got it confused with The Godfather or something.
2012 saw everyone fighting for grip, and strong performances from Graham Rahal and Will Power before they were taken out of contention by a crash and a penalty respectively. In 2013 Firestone brought some odd tyres to the race and Helio Castroneves pretty much disappeared off to record his first win of the year. If you think that sounds pretty much how Detroit played out last weekend, you'll forgive me for writing pretty much the same thing week by week in these threads.
More matter, with less art
Truth is no one knows what sort of racing we'll get on Saturday night. That's one reason to stay up and watch, although as the class of 2013 will testify, it's a bit of a shit one. Better to focus on words like “on”, “the ragged” and “edge”, which seem to come up a lot whenever a driver talks about what it feels like to drive an Indycar around Texas.
Some of the reasons for this, I'm guessing, are historical. One of the special little horrors of 2011's Las Vegas disaster is that there's an alternative universe – one of millions admittedly – where that kind of thing happened every weekend. The close-packed, throttle-wide-open racing that the bozos at HQ trumpeted as evidence of the IRL's superior “product” was such a frequent visitor to Texas that it had its own reserved seats (but not in the front row, natch). There's also the wariness every open-wheel fan attaches to Fort Worth after the totally-correct-decision-coming-after-a-string-of-totally-wrong-ones that was the 2001 CART near-miss.
So from 2012 onwards the game at Texas has been to force teams to run comically low levels of downforce and cackle as they slip around like some sort of woodland animal on ice. In 2012 the victims were the drivers, who spent the night correcting slide after slide when they weren't crashing into the wall in fast but pointedly single-automobile accidents. In 2013 it was the tyres, and the racing, that suffered. Lap times from one end of a stint to the other looked like they came from different sports, and Castroneves, who handled his tyres best and had a slightly illegal floor, dominated.
There was a tyre test in April but aside from two facts – Scott Dixon was quickest and that it's even harder to drive with 20 mph winds gusting around you – we people on the outside didn't learn much. Expect a lot of pre-race fannying around with wicker bills as the series tries to give enough downforce to keep the tyres happy, but keep enough of it off to stop “the wankers at the back”, as Will Power terms them, from coming to the front.
Did someone say wicker bill?
Yes. Not to be confused with Wicker Bill, which is what Texans fill with Yankees and West Coast Democrats before burning him at the State Fair.
Montoya watch
Juan Montoya, fresh from his fine for being underweight at Detroit (bet he's framed it and sent it to Ron Dennis), is excited and apprehensive about the weekend. Here's a quote from Autosport's paywalled but excellent article about his Indycar return, written in preview of the Indy 500:
"The big ovals are fine," Montoya says. "I think I'm going to struggle on the small ovals. We'll see when we get there. But I have a lot of balls, so bravery is not an issue.
"We went testing at Texas, and I was a little concerned because the car was a handful. I went into Turn 1 and the thing is snapping down the straight, and you're trying to go in there wide open, and I'm like, 'I know these guys are going to be running wide open so I'd better run wide open'.
"Then when we got to the lunch break I found out I was the only guy going wide-open."
Tough bastard!
Any other business
Jim McElreath, a name which is sure to mist the eyes of anyone who's spent a day on Youtube watching old Indy 500 broadcasts, is going to be giving starters' orders on Saturday. Wanker Will Power seems to have transferred his curse to Jack the lad Hawksworth, and leads the championship from a young-looking Helio Castroneves and All-American Klutz Ryan Hunter-Reay. Bruton Smith has not yet made his annual statement that he doesn't really see a future for Indycars at his track but it's surely only a matter of time.
Edited by Risil, 05 June 2014 - 16:56.
