The RACER Mailbag, October 8

Welcome to the RACER Mailbag. Questions for any of RACER’s writers can be sent to mailbag@racer.com. We love hearing your comments and opinions, but letters that include a question are more likely to be published. Questions received after 3pm ET each Monday will be saved for the following week.

Q: Blackbird 66 Mk.1: Where do you voice or register your support for this design?

John Schira

MARSHALL PRUETT: Support=registered. 

Q: I wanted to respond to the Blackbird 66 article. What a breath of fresh air! What a display of sanity! Finally someone pointing in an intelligent direction!

iRacing and Dallara did something along these lines during the Covid era in designing and activating the Dallara iR-01 as a design exercise and subsequent use in the iRacing service. Its a fictional vehicle, has outrageous specs and takes special talent to drive at its limit. Though its of downforce DNA, the salient point is that as a project, it was just exactly the kind of first step that is postulated in this article.

I remember Dallara/iRacing saying that the final design was completed as a working set of drawings and specs that could be used as-is to build the car in real life, should someone supply some money. It’s still active on iRacing today, if you wanted a peek.

That nexus of Dallara / iRacing / iR-01 might be one point to explore along the road to furthering the Blackbird 66 as a reality.

Greg Smith

MP: The argument to peel all downforce from downforce cars is an old one, and there’s some wonderfully romantic history of Indy cars – the 1950s and early 1960s Roadsters era, specifically – where zero downforce, long wheelbases, decently powerful four-cylinder Offy engines, and tall and skinny tires made for great racing and the modest use of drifting to navigate the corners.

Within the different areas that made the cars what they were, the tall/skinny tires, which were at the cutting edge of knowledge and technology, enabled the drifting.

The unsaid part in the awesome Blackbird 66 piece is also the old counter argument to taking wings and downforce off of today’s Indy cars, and that’s what happens in the corners. The ’66 would weigh nothing and have 1000 horsepower, which is a dream. It would accelerate like a Top Fuel dragster at Indy, at Long Beach, etc. And would crawl like a turtle – compared to today’s downforce cars – through the corners.

The absence of downforce means braking zones are significantly extended, so straights become shorter in regards to acceleration. Yes, the car is a missile in a straight line, but has no downforce to slow the thing, so say hello to jumping off the throttle looooong before the corner arrives.

And with no downforce to carry that missile-like speed through the sharper turns, you’re at a low speed and needing to rely solely on mechanical grip to get through the corners. And that could be fun, provided a tire manufacturer wants to go away from everything they do today with relatively low-profile sidewalls.

The last time we had awesome drifty open-wheelers was in F1 in the 1970s (until Lotus brought ground effects and giant downforce into the game). The cars were very light, had 500ish horsepower, and also had wings – often very large wings – and the rear tires were very wide. But they also stood tall – had giant sidewall profiles – and looked and behaved like balloons. With the downforce helping to keep the cars under control, they could be driven sideways in the slower and medium-speed corners; all hail the great Gilles Villeneuve, who made his name as the world’s preeminent F1 drifter.

So, yes, if a Firestone or another brand wanted to wind the clock back 50 years with tire sizing and construction, I’m sure you could replicate the Villeneuve way with the ’66. It’s also worth noting that while the drifting was cool, the cars weren’t particularly fast in these corners, so if modern fans are good with the ’66 behaving like a dragster at the Indy 500 between the corners and seeing a steep drop in speed once they get close to the corners and softly pedal through them, this could work.

For those who are all about the speed – the visual speed and seeing Indy cars do more than go fast in a straight line – there’s a concern. I’d love to see this car come to life. I’ll be the first guy there to help build it and crew on the thing. I just don’t want folks to get lost in the romanticism of it all without acknowledging that 20-inch-wide rear tires aren’t a cure-all for the corners.

Doing 275 mph from Turn 4 to Turn 1 at Indy would be mind-blowing for drivers and fans to experience. Seeing drivers hammer the brakes soon after the Start/Finish line and limp through Turn 1 at 175mph? That’s the part I struggle with.

Figure out a compromise on tires to allow drifting, and maybe that’s the magic fix that brings the ’66 concept to its full potential. Something needs to tie the straights and corners together so it isn’t a case of explosive speed followed by deploying the parachute, over and over again.

Otherwise, the all-fun on the straights and comparatively-slow-as-hell everywhere else feels off.

Q: Please, please, please, someone build a racing series based on JR Hildebrand’s Blackbird 66 Mk.1. As a a lifelong fan of non-wing sprint cars on dirt, there is no purer form of racing than over-powered cars scrabbling for traction. Seeing Hildebrand’s (and Gurney’s) cars in action would be magical. 

Ned Smith

MP: Amen. 

Q: I was enthused to read Hildebrand’s piece on the Blackbird. I have thought for years that removing or, at least restricting, wings and downforce would improve racing in several ways, including allowing cars to more easily follow and pass and allow a larger range of driving styles to be competitive. If braking distances increase, I think that would also make for better racing. Most of us don’t drive cars with huge wings or other downforce-producing devices, so things might be more intuitive as well.  Arguably, power unit characteristics become more important, so perhaps it would increase manufacturer interest.  If IndyCar were to go in this direction, it would provide an obvious differentiation from F1 and negate the notion that they are a lesser category.  

What are your opinions?

Might a reduction in aerodynamics allow lesser-funded teams closer to their well-funded competitors? How would you expect the sanctioning bodies, teams and drivers to react?  Or have they already? How would one structure a conversion schedule if the approach were accepted?

Jack

MP: I love the concept, with the questions raised above as the only caveats. Also, it’s amazing how differently a concept is received when it doesn’t look like an adult toy.

My late friend and hero Dan Gurney, who JR cites as the inspiration for the Blackbird 66, was centrally involved with the DeltaWing design created by Ben Bowlby, and like JR’s car, its core concept was one of high performance through an absence of big aero and a deep commitment to extreme drag reduction.

The DeltaWing made downforce, of course, but only enough to corner with the best of its rivals. Where the ’66 differs most is the use of a raging engine; the DeltaWing went the Colin Chapman route with lightweighting as another core tenet; it had a tiny and bespoke four-cylinder turbo from Ray Mallock Limited in the back and wasn’t looking to go full-rocket like the ’66.

In general, no, reducing things does nothing to help smaller teams draw closer to bigger teams. The brief periods where the playing field is slightly leveled is when a brand-new formula is introduced. And that’s due to the zeroing of time and knowledge between all teams with that new formula. Once the bigger/better/wealthier teams have enough time to learn and master the cars, which happens at a faster rate for them, they pull away from the smaller teams. They also tend to have a head start on the learning process since they have more people, and more money, and more expertise. You’ll get a small team or two that will overachieve and bring some early surprises, but it doesn’t last.

The article is a week old, so I wouldn’t expect a fun and awesome concept to make a meaningful impact on how IndyCar, or F1, or any other open-wheel series goes about its planning for the future. F1 has a new formula on the way for 2026 and IndyCar is well down the road on its new car for 2028.

Bowlby and Chip Ganassi built a DeltaWing prototype (it was a show car, to be accurate, not a functioning vehicle), brought it to the Speedway during the month of May, and put it on display at the base of the Pagoda in 2010. It had plenty of onlookers, more than a few (myself included) who loved the radical approach to what the next Indy car could be (while acknowledging its likeness to the Ace and Gary-mobile from SNL’s Ambiguously Gay Duo cartoons), and it was summarily rejected by IndyCar.

If the ’66 is going to have a chance in the real world, it needs to be built and run and demonstrated as something amazing to adopt by sanctioning bodies, which is still unlikely to happen since F1 and IndyCar prefer to do their own thing, or for a wealthy lover of racing to invest in and form a new racing series using the ’66 formula.

Q: I’ve mentioned this before, but it seems like this marketing idea can have some legs now. With FOX being an IndyCar partner now, how about IndyCar use some of that leverage to put a show car or two at every NFL stadium? QR code on the cars with the IndyCar schedule, as well as ticket buying opportunity for the nearest race or the 500. Seems like a natural to me.

Vincent Martinez, South Pasadena, CA

MP: It’s a great idea that becomes feasible at the start of the 2027 NFL season.

Until then, teams will be using their Dallara DW12s to race, and once the season finale happens in late August/early September of ’27, you’ll have 100-plus DW12s with no purpose and no significant value, which makes blanketing the country with Indy cars for promotional purposes an option. Who pays for all of the ongoing transportation, setting up, and activations from event to event? That part needs an answer.

For most teams right now, they have at least one show car, but those tend to be in use at sponsor functions and whatnot throughout the offseason. When we hit the offseason in 2027, right as the NFL season is starting, there will be fleets of DW12s that can be deployed to every NFL stadium, college football stadiums for FOX’s Saturday games, MLB parks as baseball’s season winds down, and anywhere else FOX Sports will have its cameras. 

Q: I read a note published to explain what Ed Carpenter Car Parts means. Ed Carpenter has a business that makes special parts only for his IndyCar race cars, not for public sales. It did not clarify exactly what that means. I assume it means the company has designers and fabricators in-house who design parts to replace the original bodywork provided by Dallara to improve aerodynamics.

Some of the other teams do the same type of fabrications (I believe RRL, Andretti, Penske, Ganassi have capability to make custom components to gain small advantages in speed). There have to be rules established by IndyCar and maybe Dallara for safety reasons regarding the limits in replacing certain components. Neither corporation would want to suffer the bad press created by a replacement component failure resulting in injury to anyone at the scene of a crash.

My question is, what are the constraints for making and using custom-made replacements that may include suspension components? 

T. Grimes

MP: When writing in to cite and reference something, it helps to share a link to whatever it is, since there’s no context to whether this ‘note’ was posted yesterday or 10 years ago. I couldn’t find it via Google, as well.

I have no knowledge of ECR starting a second business to make IndyCar parts for its main business. Every team has a machine shop and composites shop to handle the manufacturing or repair of whatever is needed related to their cars and support equipment.

Depending on the year and era, teams have been allowed to make lots of the components on their Indy cars, and then we have the current state of affairs where teams are not allowed to make most things for their Dallara DW12s, including suspensions, with exception for anti-roll bars.

Q: To suggest an alternative for IMSA’s FCY in response to the concerns of the King of Lower Ellsworthia, why not just keeps the pits closed for FCYs?  I know, the teams love the ability to pit, but the problem of these longer FCYs is the enormous delays due to the shuffling of the cars and classes.

So, screw ‘em. Keep the pits closed. If you need emergency service, those rules apply. Otherwise, you can pit when it goes green. It’s fair for all the competitors, and eliminates a minimum of two laps (and maybe more) for every FCY procedure.  

Is it less of a visual spectacle? Maybe. But I’ll trade the mayhem of a full pit battle for extra green flag running every time.

Also, for reshuffling cars, in Super GT I remember the series parking the GT500 class on the main straight, then letting the GT300 class pass them and come around so that the grid could be reshuffled in a single lap. IMSA could do the same. And then if they wanted to take care of lapped car wave-arounds as well, after the GTP class parks on the main straight, make the GTD classes park on the back straight, and then the wave-around cars can just cycle to the back of their respective classes. Then restart the classes in sequence and they can all join up as a re-formed and sorted field within a single lap. Or is that too ambitious?

Duncan, Ottawa

MP: I’ve had the same thought on closing the pits and making everyone pit when it goes green. Something to consider on why IMSA doesn’t do that is the size of its cars – namely the long and wide prototypes – and the size of the pit boxes they have to use are most races, which is in the range of 19-20 feet long. Some events have longer boxes in the 22-foot range, but those are rarities.

Why does this matter? We get into a serious numbers problem whenever there’s three or four classes competing and the entry list is 35 to 50-plus cars deep.

We see how excruciatingly tight things can be at many IndyCar races with 27 cars with a lot of steering lock to get in and out of the pit boxes. Double that amount of cars, and with fenders, you don’t get the extreme steering angles to play with like open-wheelers, and that’s a recipe for a lot of problems getting into and out of pit boxes with an entire field of IMSA GTP/P2/GTD Pro/GTD cars pitting at the same time, and places a lot of crew members on the lane and in the cramped spaces cars use to navigate their way in and out of the stalls.

So that’s why they split the classes and avoid jamming everyone in together and risk teams losing lots of time, not to mention having a huge mass of humanity on the lane. I know it was done this way in the past and folks managed. Knowing how everything is so tightly regulated today with minimum pit stop times and managed refueling times, where nobody is willing to surrender a fraction of a second – which is different from the mindset when everybody pitted at the same time – I understand why it’s done this way.  

Q: Any rumblings in regards to Honda’s relationship with IndyCar?  There was a point earlier this year where it was the dominant story in IndyCar. I’m hoping it’s a good thing that we haven’t heard a peep of recent.

Will Zoeller

MP: When I last asked about two weeks ago, Honda was still evaluating. As I frequently need to remind myself, we also haven’t heard from Chevy on its formal commitment to supply engines beyond 2026. 

Watch this space. Matt Fraver/Penske Entertainment

Q: Following the letter last week about the IMSA yellow flag situation, I have a question. When there is a situation where there is a FCY, why can’t the pace car simply pick up the leader and the others hold station behind the leader as they run? And if the leader, or anyone else for example, decides to pit during the FCY, then they come out where they come out, and that’s where they stay.

If the leader pits, the pace car simply picks up the next car behind it, even if it is a lapped GT car, for example. Chances are they would box, too. Then when the mess is cleaned up, we go racing – no wasting time aligning the classes.

They race anywhere from a sprint to 24 hours dealing with class racing, so they should be able to deal with restarts all mixed up. They are single file restarts anyway, so it should not be that difficult to do. Hoping they find a solution.

Dan

MP: To every ‘why can’t they’ question, my immediate response is, ‘They can if they want to.’

There’s no reason they can’t do what you suggest or others suggest. It’s a matter of whether they like the idea or want to change from whatever they’re doing right now on whatever topic. 

Q: I was watching a report about Dan Wheldon’s accident, and the comments raised a question about his entry in Las Vegas, given the challenge of starting last, etc.

The question that arose is whether he was the only driver to accept the challenge, and if there were other names considered?

Regarding the 2026 season, don’t you think it would be ideal for Rahal LLR to sell its charter for No.30 and invest in the other two cars, or since they lost the IMSA program, can they now focus more on IndyCar again? 

Emerson Czerkawski, São Paulo, Brazil

MP: There were others being considered, including Travis Pastrana. RLL’s sports car team has won more races over the last 17 years than its IndyCar program, so that side of the house is something to hold onto and find a new manufacturer to hire as its factory team.

The No. 30 had its worst season to date, and there have been rumors of the team looking to sell its charter, but those are false. The team is testing Mick Schumacher on Monday at the IMS road course. Graham Rahal and Louis Foster have multi-year deals and are locked in for 2026. The only reason to test Schumacher is to see if he likes the car and would want to join Rahal and Foster next year. Said another way, if the team was looking to get rid of the third car, it would serve no purpose to spend money on running Schumacher.

With that in mind, it’s clear to me that RLL is trying to find a driver who will restore what it lost when Christian Lundgaard departed for Arrow McLaren. Axing the third car only makes sense if it can’t find someone to bring it forward in the field.  

Q: Are the IndyCar teams allowed to mix-match tire compounds? For example, put two hard compound tires in the back and two softs in the front? Or put two soft compounds on the left side of the car and hards on the right? Or even better, put a hard compound on the front right and softs on the other three? Please advise.

Bob Gray, Canoga Park CA.

MP: They are not. 

Q: Will the off-season moves put Andretti back into the mix? With the technical alliance between Andretti and Coyne bring VeeKay back into the fold?

Dino, New Hanover, PA

MP: So far, it’s losing Nathan O’Rouke from the No. 26 timing stand in favor of a shop-based engineering role, so in the short-term, no, I can’t see how that makes the team stronger. He’s one of the best race engineers in the series, and will certainly help the team in whatever role they create for him, but I wouldn’t expect it to have an immediate impact. It’s just a question of timing and when O’Rourke’s revised contributions will be felt.

Same for Rob Edwards, who holds onto his team leadership role until the end of the year and then shifts to an overarching chief performance officer position that covers all of TWG Motorsports’ program, except for F1. He’ll be new to that role and defining its scope at the same time, so like O’Rourke, it’s hard to say an immediate uplift will be experienced in IndyCar.

Ron Ruzewski, who’ll take over from Edwards in January, is the only person whose change I expect to have an instant influence. He’s arriving from Team Penske where his title was managing director, and that’s the same title held by Chip Ganassi Racing’s Mike Hull, which speaks to how important Ruzewski was to Penske’s success. He’s been given the title of team principal at Andretti, which is just a different name for what he was doing at Penske.

His deep race engineering background and technical director-level stature at Penske will be a new facet for the leader of Andretti’s IndyCar program, so that’s a gain, and then you have the obvious part, which is knowing Penske’s playbook inside and out. All the ways Penske prepares its cars for the Indy 500 and does whatever it does to be special everywhere else is in the memory banks of the person in charge of Andretti’s three-car effort, which includes Will Power, who Ruzewski worked closely with at Penske.

The only downside is Ruzewski’s on gardening leave until the end of the year. If he was able to plug himself into Andretti today, there would be a larger opportunity to shape its offseason engineering R&D program and any other areas he sees as needing input. Starting on January 1 will push that timeline back, but yes, the team should be more competitive with him in the house.

VeeKay is off to Juncos Hollinger Racing.

That’s the smile of a driver who knows he has a ride for next year. Chris Owens/Penske Entertainment

Q: I have followed the Cadillac F1 news  and the announcement of drivers. The part that I haven’t heard anything about is Herta the test driver.

Is he lined up to a F2 team for next season? Are any of the current teams interested to having him with them or is there going to be a new team for him to drive for?

Michael Kraemer

CHRIS MEDLAND: The last information I had was that the team was not yet fully confirmed, but there was a shortlist of three. Drivers have to bring budget to a seat in F2, so there was a suggestion that perhaps some of the numbers being quoted were inflated, leading to it taking a little longer to finalize.

It will be an existing team as there is no announcement of a new team entering F2 next year, or a current one being sold/rebranded (though it can happen at short notice). I believe the majority of teams were very interested in running Colton, but some were also slightly wary of the increased scrutiny and pressure that could come alongside that.

Q: Colton Herta hasn’t announced which F2 team he is driving for next year, which is going to have a big impact on expectations, but what does a good year in F2 look like for Colton next year?

On one hand Herta is a lot more experienced at racing in a high level compared to the average F2 driver, but on the other he has less experience at the tracks compared to almost everyone else in the field.

Is it realistic for him to be a title contender?

Will, Indy

CM: Honestly, no, I don’t think it’s realistic for him to be a title contender. That’s not down to a lack of talent, but experience compared to those who will be fighting for a title. You’re right that the team he ends up with will play a major role – you need the equipment to be reliable and to have good engineers around you – but I personally would view next year as a learning season for Colton to gain track experience and get to know the car and environment again.

Then I’d expect him to be fighting for the title the following season, before looking to step up to F1 in 2028. That would allow Cadillac to find its feet, too, and the experience of Valtteri Bottas and Sergio Perez to really help with the team’s development before considering any changes to the line-up.

Q: The next set of F1 rules seem to be getting more and more negative publicity (even with, I imagine, F1 putting pressure on drivers to limit any negative commentary to the press). But looking forward to the following set of regulations, is it time for F1 to be less prescriptive?

For example, with the success of the cost cap, could this be expanded to engine manufacturers too, but they are then given freedom on engine size and type? Then teams would have more notable strengths and weaknesses. We could see V12s and V8s vs smaller turbo V6s. With a strict cost cap, teams won’t be allowed out of control spending and development.

For the overall car, reduce the minimum weight to 550kg, for example. It might not be possible to reach that weight, but if teams have to pass the strict crash tests then teams can develop much smaller lighter cars or ones that are slightly larger (but still smaller than current generation).

Finally, could there be more testing options, if teams want to do testing then there is an associated cost and they must also sacrifice wind tunnel and CFD development time. This opens up different strategies etc.

This will never happen but would be nice to have more open rules and cars that are identifiable to a team even if they are painted black. (Final point: Can the FIA force teams to have the cars in gloss/chrome finish?  The matte colors and amount of carbon makes the schemes so much duller).

Richard, UK

CM: I do love the idea of freedom for engine manufacturers, and it has been discussed in the past, but the concern is one type of engine would emerge as the dominant one, and either you’d have to develop the same size, or pull out of the sport if that wasn’t in line with a manufacturer’s wider approach. The only way to realistically avoid that happening would be through Balance of Performance (BoP), and as prescriptive as F1 has become, that is something it isn’t keen on.

You’re also right Richard that 2022 did see the cars become more prescriptive than in the past, but that was to both try and encourage closer racing and limit how much a car was influenced by dirty air. You might not believe it, but both have been achieved – the entire grid is regularly covered by less than a second over a qualifying lap – but in creating a closer field, there aren’t the performance differentials that lead to overtaking.

Without those, then a smaller amount of dirty air has a bigger impact, because the cars are already closely matched. For example, if you lost 0.5s per lap running behind another car five years ago, but had a 1.0s per lap advantage, you’d have a better chance of overtaking. Whereas now, if you lose 0.25s per lap behind another car, but only have a 0.5s per lap advantage, the pace advantage is not big enough to make a move.

Variety in car design and engine specifications would create bigger differentials to allow more overtaking, but that would also open up the potential for even more races where there are big gaps between cars.

It’s always going to be imperfect whether you go for the more prescriptive route or less, but where I totally agree with you is that the cars should be smaller. Very simply, that gives them more room to race in on existing tracks, which definitely wouldn’t hurt.

On your final point, technically the FIA could do that if they wanted – they could write it into the regulations! Which I think was sort of suggested at one point, in the form of mandating a percentage of the car that couldn’t be carbon. But making it easier for teams to meet the weight limit would also have a beneficial impact on liveries.

THE FINAL WORD
From Robin Miller’s Mailbag, October 8, 2014

Q: Last week during the press conference for the Japanese GP, all the drivers were asked what the most powerful car they had driven by age 17. Sebastian Vettel mentioned that he tested a Champ Car at that age. This would put it around 2004 or ’05. I’ve never heard anything about this test, so do you have any information about where it was and who he was testing for

Artem, Kitchener, ON

ROBIN MILLER: He was the Formula BMW champion and earned a test in Derrick Walker’s Champ Car at Homestead’s infield course. Here’s a quote from Walker: “He was bloody impressive and I told somebody ‘That kid could be Formula 1 champ some day.’” Good call, D.W