Oilpressure

I cannot begin to tell you how many hours in my life have been spent watching raindrops fall on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Throughout my childhood in the 60s, we sat through entire qualifying days under the shelter of the upper deck of the grandstands. Almost sixty years later, add a few more hours to whatever that total is.

Due to my traffic delays, I did not arrive onto the grounds until about 1:00 pm today. At around 2:15 pm, the rain moved in for good. They finally called it a day, just after 4:00. They say tomorrow’s schedule will be as originally published, but not many people here are optimistic.

At least I was able to actually see cars on track for a little bit. Who knows what tomorrow brings?

After they called it a day, they brought in a couple of drivers for press conferences. The first was Graham Rahal, who offered some fascinating insights on his being bumped from last year’s Indianapolis 500. he said after very little time in the car today, he can already tell there is a much different vibe with the car and the entire team.

Next up was Kyle Larson. There is already a media frenzy around Larson, much like for Fernando Alonso or even Danica Patrick’s last run in 2018. For such a small crowd of media, most of them were all gathered around his pit this afternoon.

Larson said he did not experience any surprises in practice, but expected to be completely overwhelmed in the race. The only surprise to him was that when he came up on a car in front of him, there was nothing to tell him who he was following, unlike in NASCAR.

I will be here tomorrow at 10:00, but if there is nothing but rain and they call it, there won’t be a post tomorrow. Something tells me they may be satisfied with what they got in today. I’ve not heard that, it’s just a hunch. I think the teams want to start preparing for Long Beach. Rahal even said that his car today was not his Speedway car, it is his Long Beach car. They need to convert it back to road course consideration, and get it ready to leave for the west coast by Sunday or Monday. I don’t think teams want to risk wadding up a car on Friday.

That’s a long way of saying that unless they run tomorrow, just expect a post on Friday morning. Thanks for following along on this disjointed day. It’s been a little odd, but it’s still been fun.

George Phillips

This entry was posted on April 10, 2024 at 3:57 pm and is filed under Indianapolis 500, 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.