Hello there, and welcome to one of the most eagerly awaited weekends in the auto racing calendar! This sport visits many exotic locations around the world. Formula One has Monaco. Sportscar racing has Le Mans. And, this weekend, IndyCar…has Detroit.
But what makes this venue so special, I hear you ask? Well, other than being very like Monaco (apart from the yachts and all that kinda thing) in that it’s a street track, it has two races. Yes, you read right, two!
This race has had something of a difficult history. After being dropped from the schedule following the 2001 event, it returned in 2007 and 2008. But for reasons lost to the mist of time (probably funding related, but it sounds better, right?) IndyCar would not revisit Belle Isle again until 2012. If this sounds like I’m copying it directly from a Wikipedia article, you'd be right. Err, no I mean, I knew this all along. Seriously.
WE INTERRUPT THIS RACE PREVIEW FOR RANDOM TRIVIA TIME:
Back in 2000, a future Dancing With The Stars champion named Helio Castroneves was trying his hand at auto mobile racing. He won his first race at this very venue, and afterwards climbed the catch fencing to celebrate. He was dubbed ‘spider-man’ and has done the same thing after his many other victories, including this time last year. But more on that later. This wasn’t copied from Wikipedia, either.
But in that short time since returning to the calendar, it has been the scene of more memorable moments (granted, not all for good reasons) than your average run-of-the-mill F1 Tilke-drome will see in ten years. Probably.
So let’s take a bumpy ride down memory lane and relive what’s happened here before. It’ll be fun, I promise.
2012
Take the ducks, for instance. You remember them, right?
“Oh F-Ducks!”
Yes, an enthusiastic family of ducks decided to get a little too close to the action during a practice session three years ago.
IndyCar, probably keen to avoid any bad publicity from PETA, stopped track activities before any harm could befall the intrepid feathered family. Reports that this was an elaborate PR stunt set up by Aflac have never been confirmed.
Muhahaha, they'll never suspect a thing!
But that wasn’t the only thing to happen that year. During the race itself, the track surface began to break up, leading James Hinchcliffe to give his expletive-filled assessment on the quality of roads in Detroit. Bleedin’ council, hey? Never doing their job properly. Tsk.
A great deal of time passed. It gave us time to reflect on the bigger, more meaningful questions, such as “how did those ducks even get on the track without the necessary passes, anyway?” Eventually, the race restarted, with Scott Dixon winning. The race finished about five hours (or what felt like that long) after it started. Yeah, it was one of those days.
2013
Perhaps to make up for the previous year’s disaster, 2013 was the first time that we had two races here. The first race was not-very IndyCar like, in that there were few cautions, and not really any controversy to speak of. Not one bizarre penalty call from race control or anything. But current Toyota WEC driver, Mike Conway, pulled off a shock result to win for Dale Coyne Racing in the Pre-Dracone era for the team.
One thing of note was professional Sonic The Hedgehog lookalike, Sebastian Saavedra, demonstrating his best impersonation of Will Power to Marco Andretti.
The following day’s race, however, was much more like the usual IndyCar we’ve come to know. An air of WTF-ness prevailed during the event, which featured more than double the amount of cautions from the previous day’s race. Not least this one, at a time when IndyCar still thought that double file restarts on street courses were a good idea.
Will Power was furious with Sebastien Bourdais, and in true Power fashion, he did little to disguise his disgust.
Unfortunately, the reigning champion was penalised for his actions, as he was in breach of article 8.4.7.5 of the ACCUS glove throwing regulations, which clearly states:
A competitor may only throw his or her racing gloves at a fellow competitor when both drivers are out of their vehicles.*
* - Probably made up.
Still, at least it led to one of the most memorable quotes of recent times:
He once was a champ, now he’s a chump.*
*- Not made up.
Simon Pagenaud took a maiden win, ahead of James Jakes and the previous day’s winner, Conway.
Also of note that weekend was AJ Allmendinger, who, on an appearance for Penske, managed the unenviable feat of completing zero racing laps over two races. Truly one for the history books.
2014
‘So what happened last year?’ I hear nobody asking.
Well, while not on the same kind of demolition derby levels of ham-fisted driving as the year before, there were still plenty of memorable moments in 2014. Where were you, for instance, when Graham Rahal nearly won a race?
Rahal had one of his rare better days of the season in race one last year, where he finished just three tenths of a second behind Will Power. That Power won on a street course was perhaps no surprise – but it was, considering he’d started sixteenth on the grid. Elsewhere, Justin Wilson climbed from nineteenth place to finish fourth. The previous year’s winners, Conway and Pagenaud, both hit troubles (with the emphasis on the hit bit) early on.
It was that kind of day when you were reminded of just how bizarre IndyCar strategies can often be, with none of the top three qualifiers finishing on the podium. It was a race in which the race result makes absolutely no sense when you look at the next year…
On that note, race two was pretty similar. Will Power was penalised for causing this opening lap melee, which included Newgarden, Rahal and Wilson.
Power spent the rest of the afternoon working his way back up the order to finish in second. But it was team mate Helio Castroneves who took the win, after Mike Conway’s strategy gamble didn’t pay off.
Meanwhile, Ganassi team mates Charlie Diabetes Kimball (did you know he had diabetes, by the way?) and Scott Dixon pulled off the day’s Houdini trick, finishing third and fourth after starting twentieth and twenty-second.
Takuma Sato, the pole sitter, ended up a lapped eighteenth.
Castroneves was therefore left to celebrate, by doing his climbing-the-catch-fencing spider-man thing that he debuted at the same place all those years ago.
I couldn't find an image of Castroneves celebrating last year, but you get the idea.
*Back to present day*
Told you it’d be fun.
Anyway, before we get on to discussing this race, let’s take a look back on the events of the last month in IndyCar land, in JHSingo’s Not Entirely Factual, Exhaustive or Particularly Informative Indy 500 review.
In truth, IndyCar will most likely be glad to leave Indianapolis this year. To say the build up to the race was not the series’ greatest moment is something of an understatement. In future years, people will come to remember it as ‘the one with the flying cars.’
But as IndyCar currently isn’t facing a lengthy and expensive court case for negligence it means:
- They are happy to promote footage of flying cars (because, let’s face it, that’s the only way a racing series that isn’t F1 gains any publicity these days anyway)
- I can make poorly constructed jokes about it without looking like too much of an a$$hole
You see, the problems began with the introduction of the aero kits. Before Chevrolet and Honda revealed their speedway aero kits to the world, Derrick Walker went on record as saying:
Blah blah boring PR fluff blah. This is the first step in making the incremental changes to our cars toward further enhancing speed, innovation and safety…records will be broken.
Unfortunately, it seems Chevrolet took the idea of cars ‘flying around the track’ a little too literally, perhaps after seeing this Honda advert. And something was being broken. Unfortunately it wasn’t records. But fortunately, it was only several DW12s.
It wasn’t long before people realised that the combination of 230mph cars, catch fencing, and air, probably wasn’t a recipe for something good, particularly after three Chevrolet cars took to the sky in the space of a week. So that was the end of record attempts for this year.
But the man that was (probably) clocking up the most air miles was Tristan Vautier. He was drafted in to qualify James Davison’s Dale Coyne car, and was then supposed to be racing at Silverstone the next weekend. But after Huertas was ruled out, he ended up racing a completely different Coyne car to the one he qualified.
With technical changes made, Scott Dixon made some last minute alterations to his...umm...onboard ballast and secured pole position.
The low point of the month, however, came when James Hinchcliffe was injured the day after qualifying, after a mechanical failure. I guess I’ll be writing for everybody when I say we hope we see him back in the car again soon.
But thankfully, after much sensationalist reporting from media, that normally don’t pay any attention to IndyCar, tried to convince us that the Indianapolis 500 was a snuff film rather than a race and should therefore be cancelled before someone was almost certainly killed, the race featured no deaths, serious injuries, or spectators being hit by flying debris.
What it did feature, was a classic duel between the championship’s two heavyweight teams, Penske and Ganassi. Juan Pablo Montoya won after a thrilling battle in the last few laps with Will Power and Scott Dixon.
As always with IndyCar though, there were plenty of memorable moments that you just don’t get in any other form of racing. The (rather too infrequent, for this poster’s liking) shots of Emma Davies Dixon. The possibility of Grumpy Cat being on an Indycar. The genuinely amusing prank three old stooges played on their young team mate. And Graham Rahal’s attempt to stake a claim to title of ‘Greatest Spectacle In Racing’ with this suit.
And so for Detroit. What can we expect this weekend? Well, who knows? Thankfully with slower cornering speeds we’re not likely to see any cars taking off unless something has really, really gone wrong. But as we’ve seen, anything can happen here. It’s even harder to predict than Dale Coyne Racing’s driver line up for the weekend, (which, incidentally, has probably changed since you started reading this) but it should be entertaining. It will definitely be more entertaining than sodding Eurovision was, anyway.
We can make a guess on what the main stories will be:
- Graham Rahal – His upturn in form this year has come as a surprise to…well, pretty much everybody who has been watching IndyCar for the past few years. But could Rahal finally get back to winning ways this weekend? He was just a shave off ending that drought at Barber, finished second in the other Indy race, was best of the Hondas in fifth in the main Indy race, and is enjoying his strongest season for a long time, so it’s not as ridiculous as it might otherwise sound.
- The Chevrolet/Honda battle –Despite negative media coverage, Chevrolet’s testing of their new light aircraft was actually pretty successful. But at Detroit, they’ll be keen to return their focus to racing, as seen in the event’s name: Chevrolet Indy Duel. Whether this means that the Hondas won’t be allowed to compete is only something we can speculate about right now.
- Debris cautions - What’s that sound? Is it the collective groan of the poor overworked Dallara employees as five more front wings, which took hours of painstaking work to make, are destroyed after an overambitious lunge into turn three? Well, given what’s happened here for the previous three years, quite possibly.
- Dale Coyne’s driver line up – Any guesses as to who it will be? Will DRACONE/Grumpy Cat/Somebody You’ve Never Heard Of be back, by
populardemand of Coyne’s accountants? Stay tuned.
Dracone fans, I kid you not.
Championship standings:
1. Juan Pablo Montoya – 272
2. Will Power – 247
3. Scott Dixon – 211
4. Helio Castroneves – 206
5. Graham Rahal – 204
6. Josef Newgarden – 173
7. Sebastien Bourdais – 161
8. Charlie Kimball – 160
9. Marco Andretti – 151
10. Tony Kanaan – 147
Weekend schedule (subject to change aka please don’t shout at me if it’s now different):
Saturday, May 30, 2015
7:30 a.m. Gates Open
7:30 a.m. – 8:00 a.m. Pirelli World Challenge Qualifying – Race #1 (GT/GTA)
8:15 a.m. – 8:35 a.m. TUDOR Championship Warm-Up (P/PC/GT Daytona)
8:55 a.m. – 9:25 a.m. Verizon IndyCar Series – Practice #2
9:35 a.m. –9:50 a.m. Pirelli World Challenge Pre-race ceremonies – Race #1
9:50 a.m. – 10:50 a.m. Cadillac V-Series Challenge presented by the Metro Detroit Cadillac Dealers – Race #1
10:50 a.m. – 11:05 a.m. Pirelli World Challenge Post-race ceremonies
11:05 a.m. – 11:55 a.m. TUDOR Championship Pre-Race/Recon Lap/IMSA Hot Lap Experience (by invitation only)
11:15 a.m. – 11:45 a.m. TUDOR Championship – Open Grid Fan Walk – Pit Lane
11:55 a.m. – 12:05 p.m. TUDOR Championship - Formation Laps
12:05 p.m. – 1:45 p.m. Chevrolet Sports Car Classic presented by the Metro Detroit Chevy Dealers – 100 min.
1:45 p.m. – 2:15 p.m. TUDOR United SportsCar Championship Post-Race Ceremonies
3:00 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. Verizon IndyCar Series pre-race
3:30 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. Chevrolet Dual in Detroit presented by Quicken Loans – Dual I (70 laps)
3:50 p.m. (estimated) Green Flag waves
5:45 p.m. (estimated) Verizon IndyCar Series post-race ceremonies (near Start/Finish area)
Sunday, May 31, 2015
8:00 a.m. Gates Open
8:35 a.m. – 9:05 a.m. Pirelli World Challenge Warm-Up – Race #2 (GT/GTA)
11:25 a.m. – 11:55 a.m. Verizon IndyCar Series Qualifying – Dual II (split groups)
11:55 p.m. – 12:10 p.m. Pirelli World Challenge Pre-race
12:10 p.m. – 1:10 p.m. Cadillac V-Series Challenge presented by the Metro Detroit Cadillac Dealers – Race #2
1:10 p.m. – 1:25 p.m. Pirelli World Challenge post-race ceremonies
3:00 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. Verizon IndyCar Series Pre-race
3:30 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. Chevrolet Dual in Detroit presented by Quicken Loans - Dual II (70 laps)
3:50 p.m. (estimated) Green Flag waves
5:45 p.m. (estimated) Verizon IndyCar Series post-race ceremonies
All that leaves me to say, is that if Graham Rahal does manage to win, there’s one way and one way only that will be appropriate to celebrate such a momentous occasion. That is to get up from your sofa (or wherever you happen to be watching the race from) and Rahal rave your heart out. Especially if you’ve remembered to put him on your fantasy team.
If you’re so inclined, why not record it on your telephone (it is law of the internet that I tell you to film this horizontally, rather than vertically) so strangers on the internet you’ve never met before can judge…err, I mean, compliment you, on your raving skills.
Happy raving.
H/T to Afterburner for helping me with the formatting of this post.
Edited by JHSingo, 27 May 2015 - 13:59.
