Re: 2015 Open Wheel Racing - The Devil comes to Ferrari & the return Wayward Driver!!
Re: 2015 Open Wheel Racing - The Devil comes to Ferrari & the return Wayward Driver!!
Just remember, Tony George needed to fix the sport. And all his minions and Indy 500 stooges went "Rah, Rah, Tony."
And out the other end came excrement.
They all got exactly what they deserved ... a dead sport.
Here's something that sucks for me- I figured it would be a good ideal to get interest in the sport by moving to a more stock based engine formula, but TG did that. Ouch for me.
Still- there are major problems with top end of open wheel racing- while it's always, always been expensive, there have been really strong times where one could get a pretty decent car by buying a package of stuff and putting it together. The 70s in F1 were helped a lot by companies who knew where to get a good collection of off the shelf parts and putting in a Cosworth engine. Can't do that now. The 80's were good for Indy car becuase you could buy either a March or Lola for a reasonable price, and put a Cosworth or later an Illmore engine in it. Now that's even out of range.
Now that I think about it- if I were running Indycar, I would totally abandon any races outside of North America- huge money savings. While it's great to race in Brazil- we were getting money and drivers from there LONG before they raced down there. I would also space out the races to make sense to the teams- so that IF there were accidents, there's time between races to do something. I would also totally go to Sunday afternoon for virtually all of the races- the leave Saturday night to the locals, as it's always been. Plus, having a consistent time to race helps the fans a lot.
I always thought racing was more fun when aero was less- and one of the best races was when they ran a superspeedway package on a mile oval. So make that the normal, and make the SS package even less. (keeping the nominal ground effects).
For now, I'd leave the engines alone- just to keep them stable, and to make sure who is making them can supply the field. Would like to figure out if there was a way to have the unique "stock block" engines so that the one offs can come and run Indy with an interesting package- that would be tough, seeing what Mercedes did for the pushrod engine rule. But those Buick V6's were fun, if they could only survive.
Not sure if that would work. But it would be simpler, somewhat, and attract more teams to try IN the US. Let's re-establish Indy car in the US before trying to do what CART was briefly able to do.