Oilpressure

As Saturday night’s DXC Technology 600 at Texas Motor Speedway came to an exciting finish, my initial thoughts were that this was a race that should please everyone, the oval fans as well as the oval haters. But all it took was one check of social media to learn how wrong I was. The fans of ovals found it boring and strung out, while the haters still hated without pointing to any real reason.

But later I saw reflections on the race from people, whose opinions I respect, which coincided with mine. I think IndyCar fans are very loyal and knowledgeable. But the very small but loud minority that takes to social media to complain about everything under the sun, gives the rest of us fans a very bad name. Some will say that I should just abandon social media altogether. Well, I wouldn’t be very informed if I did that. I just have to know what to pay attention to and what to ignore – just like any of us. I reference a couple of other glances at social media later in this post, so bear with me.

So getting back on topic, I found Saturday night’s race at Texas to be very entertaining. This is what oval racing is all about. There is no road or street course out there that can make my heart beat that hard in my chest as the last twenty-five laps did on Saturday night. It’s not that I was hoping or expecting to see sensationalistic crashes worthy of SportsCenter – quite the opposite. I was just amazed at the skill and bravery exhibited by everyone out there, throughout the evening.

I will often describe a road or street course race as not providing edge-of-your-seat excitement. Well, Texas provided just that. With twenty-five laps to go, I had no idea who was going to win or how they would do it. Josef Newgarden ended up leading the final forty-five laps on his way to taking the checkered flag, but to say he had the win in hand would be a gross understatement. He may have been up front, but there was a whole lot going on right behind him.

Early on, it looked as if pole-sitter Takuma Sato and Scott Dixon were in a class of their own. Sato led the first sixty laps, but a frightening incident on pit lane took him out of contention. Sato came in way too hot on his first pit stop. He hit his own crewman, Chris Welch, as he tumbled across Sato’s rear-wing and struck the back of his head on the pavement. I remember when helmets were mandated for over-the-wall crew members in the early nineties, and how many of them griped about it. I hate to think what would’ve happened had Welch not been wearing a helmet Saturday night. Aside from the time it took to pull Sato’s car back to his stall and slowly execute the pit stop, Sato was penalized with a stop-and-hold penalty after he went back out. The whole incident put him three laps down, and he never made any of it back up.

The race labeled “unsafe and dangerous” by many, ran caution-free until Lap 135 when Zach Veach brushed the wall exiting Turn Two, just hard enough to damage the toe link and render the car undriveable. Veach did an incredible job to keep it under control, not hit anything and finally spin to a harmless stop in Turn Three. Veach’s team would eventually repair the car and get it back in the race, albeit seventy-six laps down.

The next caution came when James Hinchcliffe got out of the groove as he came across a slower Spencer Pigot exiting Turn Two. He also clipped the wall, but it was hard enough to send him spinning across the track as he slapped the inside retaining wall headed backwards. Hinch had been running in the Top-Five most of the night. He praised his crew and blamed himself for the one-car incident.

For much of the night, it appeared this would be Ryan Hunter-Reay’s night. He led more laps than anyone (90), but he was using a lot of fuel in the process. When he first pitted on Lap 57, ahead of all of his pursuers – it was a sign of things to come. Each pit cycle showed Hunter-Reay pitting before any of his rivals, ensuring him of a four-stop race when his competitors would only be stopping three times. When he was brought in during the caution for Hinchcliffe, the guys in the booth thought that his fresh tires would catapult Hunter-Reay to the front. Whether it was lapped traffic or longer-lasting Firestone tires – the new tires didn’t seem to make as much difference as expected. Hunter-Reay finished a disappointing fifth.

Colton Herta put on a show and showed a combination of savvy and fearlessness throughout the night that is usually found in drivers ten years older than his age of nineteen. He was making his car work where few others could. But in going for the lead on Lap 229, his luck ran out as he and Scott Dixon got together and both ended up in the Turn Three wall.

At the risk of again being accused of writing The Rossi Blog, Alexander Rossi had what I think was one of the best saves I’ve ever seen in my decades of watching IndyCar racing. As Herta’s car was slowly sliding down the track, the oncoming Rossi took evasive action and just missed Herta’s front wing by what looked like less than an inch. In doing so, Rossi went from the banking to the flat apron and then back up on the banking – all with only his left hand on the wheel, as he was desperately trying to grasp it with his right. It all happened in the blink of an eye, but the slow-motion in-car camera view was mesmerizing.

Rossi, who inherited second-place with Dixon and Herta out of the race, took several shots at Newgarden in the dogleg in those final thirteen laps. But Rossi had little luck making that pass all night and he couldn’t pull it off then either. He ended up second to the guy he is chasing in the points.

TV Coverage: Last week, I roasted Paul Tracy for being ill-prepared and not paying attention to what was going on during the Belle Isle weekend. This past weekend, I thought Tracy did a much better job and he was the Paul Tracy that I had grown to respect as a broadcaster. The three guys in the booth all demonstrated the chemistry that has worked well for them over the years.

All of the pit reporters had a good night. Kevin Lee is always on top of his game, and I’ve frequently mentioned how much I like it when Jon Beekhuis is on the broadcast. But I think Kelli Stavast is very underrated and tends to be overlooked as a NASCAR reporter who is just filling in. That may be true, but she has obviously done her homework and seems to have a complete grasp of the nuances of IndyCar and how it differs from NASCAR. I’m hoping she can continue some weekends even after NBC picks up NASCAR for the second half of their season.

Last but not least; Robin Miller brings the rare combination of humor, seriousness when appropriate and knowledge that only fifty years of experience can bring. Why he was not featured on NBC’s coverage of the Indianapolis 500 is beyond me.

If I have to have a negative, the commercials did seem a little frequent. The commercial breaks may not have been any more frequent than usual, but they seemed to last longer. I didn’t time them or watch the lap counter, but to me they just seemed longer. But I’m not going to complain as long as most breaks have the side-by-side feature. They can’t do that for the local breaks and I get that. There were only two or three during the night that didn’t feature side-by-side.

I’m also never going to complain about commercials, period. NBC does not exist to provide free IndyCar coverage to the fan base. They exist to make money. They do that with commercials. I want NBC to be eager to renew their contract when it is up in two and a half years. If it is a money drain, they won’t do it. Then who will we look to for top-notch coverage?

Good/Bad Liveries: First the good – I really liked the new red livery that Ed Carpenter was sporting with his No.20 AutoGeek Chevrolet. This was not sponsor-mandated. Instead they just wanted to change it up, not only to differentiate it from teammate Spencer Pigot’s car – but to tell it from all of the other black cars in the field. Unfortunately, the red didn’t make Ed go any faster. He dropped to twentieth on the start and eventually climbed back up to his starting position of thirteenth – two laps down.

The bad was the GESS/Capstone Turbines livery of Alexander Rossi. It’s not that the design of the livery was bad, but it was way too similar to the GESS livery that Colton Herta has been running for the last few races. You really couldn’t read the sidepods, so the only way viewers could tell the difference was that Herta had red mirrors, had red at the top of his roll hoop and the red No.88 on the sidepod extensions just in front of the rear wheels. To make matters worse, the two cars were usually battling each other at the same spot on the track. To further confuse the guys in the booth, the two cars were pitted next to each other. The announcers confused the two cars on several occasions, but that’s understandable – so did I.

Is it a Nickname? I tread lightly here, so that I don’t get lumped into those fans that don’t like nicknames (or anything else that goes on in IndyCar). A couple of weeks ago, a fan e-mailed Robin Miller’s Mailbag on Racer.com chastising him for calling Fernando Alonso “Fred”, saying it was disrespectful. Seriously? You choose that to complain about?

But just recently, I’ve noticed that Leigh Diffey has been referring to Ryan Hunter-Reay as “Captain America”. Just where did that come from? I’ve never noticed that until recently, but I heard it several times on the telecast in the last couple of weeks. Was it because Hunter-Reay referred to himself as a proud American boy, when he won the 2014 Indianapolis 500? Twelve of the twenty-two starters in Saturday night’s race were American drivers, yet Hunter-Reay is the one to carry that title? If I was one of the other eleven American drivers, I might be tempted to feel a little miffed, as if he is more American that I am. I really don’t know that I would be miffed, but I find the nickname (if you can call it that) just a little irritating.

Sato’s Mistake: During the first commercial that did not feature side-by-side, I checked Twitter just to see what was being said about the race. Takuma Sato was being absolutely ripped for his pit lane mistake. And don’t kid yourself, it was a mistake.

I’ve never driven a race car during a race, but from what I’m told – it can be very tricky finding your pit in perfect conditions, much less at dusk. When you sit as low to the ground as these drivers are, and a car is sitting in the pit just before yours – I can only imagine how tough it is to pick out your pit in a crucial situation. I will promise you that Sato didn’t do it on purpose and he and his team (and the struck crew member) certainly paid the price.

I’m not going to defend or condone Sato’s mistake, but there was no excuse for some of the fan reactions I read shortly afterward.

Penske Pattern: Team Penske has won five of the nine NTT IndyCar Series races this season, with Josef Newgarden winning three of them. But to say they have been dominating would be incorrect. It seems that when one Penske driver wins or has a good race, one or both of his teammates have terrible days.

St. Petersburg saw Newgarden win, with Will Power on the podium and Simon Pagenaud finishing seventh. That was the most complete day for Team Penske all season. COTA saw Newgarden finish second, but Pagenaud was nineteenth and Power twenty-fourth. The IndyCar GP at Indianapolis saw Pagenaud win, but Power was an unremarkable seventh and Newgarden fifteenth. At the Indianapolis 500, Pagenaud won and the other drivers had decent days, but Helio Castroneves was a disappointing eighteenth. Without going through the whole season – you get the idea.

It was the same on Saturday night. Newgarden won the race, but Pagenaud was never a factor and Will Power was an afterthought for most of the night.

Dynamic Duo: There are several teams of driver and either engineer or race strategists out there. Tony Kanaan and Eric Cowdin have worked closely for the better part of two decades. Sébastien Bourdais and Craig Hampson have had a special relationship that started in their days together at Newman/Haas. Scott Dixon and Mike Hull can practically finish each other’s sentences.

But at this point in time, I don’t know of a duo with a better working chemistry than Josef Newgarden and Tim Cindric. Without the two of them working together, Saturday night’s win would have gone to someone else. It was Cindric who made the call for an alternate pit strategy that ultimately put Newgarden out front. But it was Newgarden who fought off multiple challenges and kept the car in the lead. This was truly a case where one does not win without the other.

In my Opinion: This seems to be a view not shared by many, but when I saw the Dixon-Herta incident developing live – I thought it was Herta’s fault. In fact, I didn’t even think there was a possibility that Dixon could be at fault. I couldn’t really get a sense from the booth which way they were leaning, but when Dixon apologized for the incident – I was wondering what I had missed. Then in Herta’s interview, he was saying that Dixon didn’t do it on purpose – but it was his fault nonetheless.

I went back and watched the replay and I still think it was Herta’s fault. I thought it was a very ambitious and optimistic move that had no chance to work. I thought Dixon was following the normal line and Herta should have backed out of it. The only mistake Dixon made was not recognizing the situation. He was racing for points in the championship and was looking at a solid second-place finish that would back up his win at Belle Isle a week earlier. Herta is completely out of the championship and even Rookie of the Year. He was going for broke searching strictly for a win. Instead, he finished eighteenth and Dixon is now eighty-nine points out of the championship lead.

Hertamania has swept through the IndyCar fan base. He is the new sensation because he is young and very talented. It almost seems that fans are wanting him to succeed so much that they are unwilling to assign blame to him for anything.

After the race, Dixon’s wife, Emma Davies-Dixon, tweeted out “Shame @ScottDixon9 gave an interview before he saw the replay.. he feels a lot differently about the situation now. Just glad both drivers are ok. Such a shame for Scott and Colton. Both possible winning cars for sure. Onwards…”

I have no axe to grind here. I like Herta and I like Dixon and would have been happy had either of them won or came in second. But the way I saw it, I thought Herta was to blame for Saturday night’s incident that took them both out.

Drive of the Night:  There were several drivers that had excellent performances on Saturday. Conor Daly was with a struggling team that was unknown to him. He started back in nineteenth, but worked his way up to eleventh. Marco Andretti started on the last row, but worked with the car all night and finished tenth. Alexander Rossi started eleventh and finished second, and contended for the lead in the closing stages. Any of these drives are worthy of being called The Drive of the Night. But in my opinion, the most impressive drive was turned out by Santino Ferrucci for Dale Coyne Racing. In only his second career oval start, the young American from Connecticut started eighteenth and finished fourth. Ferrucci has now passed Felix Rosenqvist in the Rookie of the Year battle and gave us the night’s best drive.

All in All: I thought that Saturday night’s race was the perfect definition of oval track racing. The cars were spread out enough so that there was no pack racing. But cars were certainly able to pass, even for the lead. The Hinchcliffe-Rossi-Herta battle just before Hinch crashed on Lap 219 was about as good as it gets. Lap after lap, you held your breath as they swapped positions hoping that no one made a mistake. When Hinchcliffe finally did make a mistake, it was his own doing and did not involve the other two.

There were only three yellows involving only four cars and no serious injuries to any drivers. The most serious injury was to Chris Welch, the Rahal Letterman Lanigan crew member that was struck by Sato in the pits – and he appeared to be fine in his TV interview.

There was strategy involved that led to Josef Newgarden’s race win, and a flawed strategy that led to Ryan Hunter-Reay having fuel issues. And the defining moment of the race was brought about by a driver going for it rather than sitting back and collecting points.

So, all in all – what was there not to like?

The NTT IndyCar Series now gets a much-needed break after five weekends in a row or track activity. But that doesn’t mean they are going on vacation. On Wednesday, teams are headed to Road America for an open test in preparation for the race there in less than two weeks. There’s no rest for the weary.

George Phillips

This entry was posted on June 10, 2019 at 4:02 am and is filed under IndyCar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.