Oilpressure

Math is not my subject. It never has been. My mother was a math whiz, and both of my brothers are mechanical engineers. I took more after my father. While I always considered him a brilliant man, I don’t think he was very good in math either. Algebra almost put me on probation during my freshman year in college. Accounting almost prevented me from graduating. To this day, looking at a spreadsheet filled with numbers makes my eyes glaze over and my head spin.

I have great respect for those that can look at any situation and determine an outcome using mathematics. I can’t think on my feet that quickly. It boggles my mind.

In racing, it amazes me how strategists such as Chip Ganassi Racing’s Mike Hull or Barry Wanser can come up with a fuel strategy in a matter of moments on the fly. I couldn’t come up with what they do, if I had all day to sit and analyze it. They can see how a race is unfolding and figure out just the right course of action to take, regarding tire management and fuel strategy.

I was perusing through this week’s edition of Marshall Pruett’s Mailbag on Racer.com the other night, and I saw a question that sounded so simple on the front-end, but I think the answer may be very complicated – and much more complicated than Pruett made it seem in his answer.

If we are looking to eliminate fuel mileage races, it seems it would be easier to make the race distance slightly longer. That’s much easier than reducing the size of the fuel cell, I would think.

Let’s take a random oval race as an example. If the race distance is 200 laps, and the general way of thinking says that a race should require four pit stops, some teams will try to do it in three. It might take a lot of laps under caution and some clever fuel saving tricks, but they just might be able to eliminate that fourth stop. Now, it’s boring for fans seeing a car get passed because they are in fuel-saving mode; but style points don’t count. Saving precious seconds on pit row could make the difference between first and fifteenth.

The two most glaring examples of this I can think of were Danica Patrick’s win at Motegi in 2008, and Alexander Rossi’s 2016 win in the Indianapolis 500. Neither were awe-inspiring drives with gutsy moves to pass cars. But they made one less stop than their competitors and they rumbled across the finish line first. IndyCar doesn’t award style points. This isn’t college football. Where you finish is your result. Rossi’s 2016 win counts just as much as Sam Hornish’s last-second pass of Marco Andretti ten years earlier.

But we race fans like to see speed, and we like those gutsy passes. In 1999 at Portland, Gil de Ferran was driving the Valvoline car for Derrick Walker. Everyone was trying to make it a fuel-mileage race. de Ferran was having none of that. While Juan Montoya, Dario Franchitti and all of the usual front-runners of that season were putt-putting around – de Ferran went full-rich with no regard to saving fuel. He built up a big enough lead going into his third pit-stop, that he still exited the pits in front of everyone else and won the race. That’s what fans want to see – winning a race on speed and driving ability, and not by hitting a fuel number lap after lap.

Portland was 98 laps that year, for a total of 192.766 miles. The general consensus was that it was better to avoid the added time in the pits and to conserve fuel. Fuel conservation means lack of passing. A lack of passing means less excitement for fans. You know what that eventually turns in to.

I guess you can reduce the size of the fuel cell. That would mean more pit stops. Would fans rather see more pit stops, or more passing on the track? It seems to me that if you slightly increase the number of laps, you eliminate the possibility of everyone trying to conserve fuel to minimize pit stops. Instead of having Portland run 98 laps, how about adding around 10 laps, or whatever number of laps that would make doing a two-stop race almost impossible. It is still short enough that no one would need to do for stops, but there would be no need for conserving fuel.

Some say that fuel strategies are part of what makes IndyCar racing exciting. I think that’s mostly because fuel-mileage races have become the norm in IndyCar racing. As I said earlier, I am amazed at how the race strategists can adjust on the fly and come up with a fuel strategy that works. But that’s not why I watch racing. I can get the thrill of watching a genius at work by watching a chess match or attending a spelling bee. Race fans want to see race cars race on the track, not in the pits. A good pit strategy should be one of many elements in a race – not the main element. I would like to see races put back in the hands of drivers that can go fast; not in the hands of strategists sitting comfortably on the pit box.

I remember watching that Portland race in 1999, when de Ferran went old-school and won a race strictly on speed and race craft. I remember how thrilling that was at the time. I also remember thinking how refreshing that was, and how I wished that racing could get back to that. More than 25 years later, I’m still wishing.

George Phillips

This entry was posted on October 18, 2024 at 4:03 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.