PRUETT: 2019 loves and hates, part 1

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emailBy: Marshall Pruett | 10 hours ago

LOVE: Dragon Quest

NBC’s post-race show at Barber Motorsports Park introduced IndyCar fans to a wickedly fun new member of the paddock as Josef Newgarden’s race engineer Gavin Ward slid a dragon-themed cup into view over his driver’s shoulder. With the final season of Game of Thrones just weeks away, the goblet, dubbed the ‘Chalice of Excellence,’ made perfect sense, but why did the notoriously serious Team Penske have such a frivolous item on the timing stand?
With an Instagram account of its own to document its season inside the No. 2 Chevy program, Newgarden and the team would forge a new tradition as the chalice became a symbol of honor, given from one crew member to another as performances from race to race were deemed to be most excellent. The IG videos of Newgarden’s team, huddled on pre-grid or elsewhere, choosing the chalice’s next recipient and handing it over after giving a brief speech explaining the reasoning behind the decision, showed a different side of the Penske organization.

The brotherhood on display, along with plenty of laughs and lighthearted banter, revealed one of the best-kept secrets in IndyCar: Newgarden, crew chief Travis Law, and the rest of the No. 2 team were having more fun than anyone on the way to winning their second championship in three years.

LOVE: The Dude & Mr. It Is What It Is

Dane Cameron and Juan Pablo Montoya made for an unlikely pairing when the Acura Team Penske IMSA DPi program was assembled. The irascible Colombian and extra-chill Californian were nothing alike, had traveled completely different paths to driving Acura’s ARX-05 prototype, and looked a bit disjointed on their winless debut in 2018.

The cultural exchange continued into the offseason, where a lot of work to find common technical ground paid dividends as the Penske duo took charge in 2019, scoring all three of the team’s DPi wins on the road to delivering The Captain a championship. Along the way, the underrated American kept pace – and more – with his famous co-pilot, and JPM produced some fierce drives that belied his age.
Opposites attract in Penske’s No.6 Acura. Image by Levitt/LAT

For Cameron, it was his third IMSA championship in six years – taken in three different classes – and for Montoya, it was his first in sports cars, adding to his CART IndyCar title and two Indy 500 wins. Penske’s Odd Couple were something special last season, and if IMSA’s BoP settings don’t spoil the ARX-05’s title defense, the two could easily repeat as DPi champions.

HATE: Do My Eyes Deceive Me?

The aftermath of the pileup involving Takuma Sato, Alexander Rossi, Ryan Hunter-Reay, and others played out like a week-long episode of CSI Pocono.

On the first flying lap of the 500-mile race, Sato shot the gap between RHR on his far left, Rossi to his immediate left, and the wall on the right, the three cars tangled and frightened the hell out of those who were still reeling from Robert Wickens’ 2018 Pocono crash.

“Obviously, I didn’t get a good start – so that’s on me,” Rossi said. “But we were three-wide; Ryan was on the inside, I was in the middle and Takuma was on the outside. I can’t even begin to understand how after last year, Takuma thinks that any sort of driving like that is acceptable. To turn across two cars, at that speed, in that corner at a 500-mile race is disgraceful, upsetting and may have cost us a championship. It’s upsetting. This team works too hard to have something like that happen.”

The video evidence, and all those who weren’t driving the No. 30 Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing Honda, placed 100 percent of the blame on Sato. Feeling the wave of hate, Sato pushed back, using screen grabs of the overhead camera IndyCar installed on every car in 2019, to forge a narrative that he was innocent; Rossi turned into him, and RHR moved first, causing his Andretti Autosport teammate to react by steering right which led to clipping the RLL driver.
Pocono, 2019: One accident, multiple explanations. Image by Dziadosz/LAT

As this began to take on a life of its own on social media, bemused IndyCar race engineers started investigations of their own. With access to the basic TV telemetry information the series began feeding everyone during the race, key pieces of data like speed track position and steering position for each car could be parsed from the burst of 0s and 1s that came across to each timing stand.

Some interesting texts started to arrive once the data was processed, and the results didn’t match Sato’s version of the incident. Regardless of who owned the blame, the crash was another reminder of how often, even with Wickens’ recovery plight being followed by the entire field on a daily basis, we do not learn from history.

LOVE: The Rebellious One

At the rate she’s going, young Olivia—better known by her social media handle ‘The Retro Rebel’—will be racing’s top reporter by the time she’s in high school.

Her video interviews with drivers ranging from Graham Rahal to Dale Jr have been a joy to watch and, despite lacking media credentials to ease the process, she works harder than many of the professional reporters I’ve known to crank out fresh content on a regular basis.

Passion, talent, and work ethic. I wish more were like her.

HATE: In Memoriam

We said farewell to far too many rising stars, men and women in the trenches, and legends of the sport in 2019. It’s an incomplete list, but we will miss Niki Lauda, Anthoine Hubert, Jessi Combs, Jean-Paul Driot, Betty Rutherford, Robin Herd, Dr. Robert Hubbard, John Martin, Dean McNulty, Charly Lamm, Sonny Meyer, Ron Watson, Dr. Michael Olinger, John Della Penna, Glenn O’Connor, Bill Simpson, Jim Martyn, Mickey Nickos, Junior Johnson, and more who made us smile, made us think, or made us safer.

LOVE: Light My Fire

Trans Am made more leaps to restore its former glory in 2019. It was enough to make me want to write a separate column on the subject, so I’ll keep it short and simply say that of all the forms of sports car racing available in North America, the fire-spitting TA and TA2 Trans Am cars offer the best cost-to-fun value in the country. IMSA and the SRO World Challenge folks should be very concerned.

 

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emailBy: Marshall Pruett | 10 hours ago

HATE: Route 66 To Nowhere

The post mortem on McLaren’s unfathomable failure to qualify for the Indianapolis 500 with Fernando Alonso made for a stunning read. All of the forgotten, overlooked, and mismanaged items formed a steaming pile of ineptitude in May, and for those who were alarmed by the outcome, I wish you could have joined me on pit lane a few weeks earlier during the April 24 Open Test at IMS.

The warning signs were clear for all to see that day. Once the rain-shortened test was over, I told all those around me that, having spent a significant portion of my life on pit lane as a crew member, the shortcomings on display within McLaren’s brand-new Indy 500 effort weren’t the kind that could be fixed overnight. After standing in their pit box for a good three hours, the ongoing mayhem wavered between comical and depressing. People and equipment were everywhere, but a team, however, was nowhere to be found.
Shambolic. Image by Abbott/LAT

Plenty of talent was recruited for the program, and yet, the test was an affirmation of how money and shiny assets weren’t enough to make the show. Hours were lost as an electronics specialist, one whose background included many years in IndyCar, but hadn’t been involved in the series for a decade or more, was tasked with finding a problem that stalled the car during Alonso’s out-lap and each time each time attempted to pull away for more exploratory laps in the new Chevy-powered chassis. Thrown into the mix with no time to master the various boxes and systems and data monitoring software, the McLaren recruit fumbled and fought to trace the issue as the team’s rivals turned countless miles around the speedway.

Months of supposed preparedness for the team’s debut were revealed to be well short of expectation, as McLaren’s veteran team manager, one who joined the effort in search, like Alonso, of his own Triple Crown, glared and chased photographers away with a dictator’s charm. Lost, and losing more time, I observed as he stood clear of the problem, stirring into action as McLaren’s trash attendant only when a mechanic left an empty water bottle, or similar, on pit wall.

All the while, program manager Bob Fearnley, besieged with hopelessness, remained largely out of sight as Amazon Studios’ cameras captured the mounting debacle for a documentary that has yet to air. McLaren sporting director Gil de Ferran, focused on the team’s Formula 1 effort, did his best to mask the disappointment at what he found.

The test ended, Alonso bemoaned the wasted day, and McLaren had a few precious weeks to regroup and return as a cohesive unit. As you know, it didn’t happen. Instead, tales of increasing disfunction made the rounds as official practice got under way, starting with the basics of looking after the crew who slaved away on the cars.

Three mechanics hadn’t been paid for more than a month, it was alleged, and they threatened to leave. It’s said they were written personal checks to remain engaged with the program. This, of course, coming from a team that announced two new sponsors on the day of the open test. Forget the problems with matching paint colors and spare steering wheels; when payroll is overlooked, systemic issues are at hand.

And then there was the question of priorities. I was told of outrage being expressed by one senior official at the sight of the team’s original hospitality unit; as the race team was flirting with missing the field of 33, the call was made to tear down the glamor-free hospitality compound and commission the expedited shipping of a bigger, more fanciful solution from Arizona, I believe.

This, coming from an upstart team that had sold Indy 500 tour packages to interested fans, epitomized the vainglorious approach that ultimately humbled McLaren in the coldest of ways.

It wasn’t lost on some within the team, and especially those whose paychecks weren’t readily forthcoming, that the priorities for the No. 66 Chevy entry were never centered on the 2.5 miles of pavement that mattered.

Just as some love to say ‘Indy picks its winners,’ McLaren’s abortive 2019 run at the Speedway was a reminder of how Indy also exposes its losers. The positive postscript, which came after deep introspection by McLaren’s board of directors, was to return in an alliance with Sam Schmidt and Ric Peterson. Now that’s the spirit.

LOVE: Evel Intentions

After everything you just read about McLaren at Indy, consider this: DragonSpeed team owner Elton Julian purchased his lone DW12 chassis from Dallara after McLaren received its first of two new cars. Julian’s globetrotting sports car team, pressed for time, missed Spring Training at COTA in February, and finished assembling its new Chevy-powered car just days before the St. Petersburg season opener in March. With races to run in the FIA WEC and ELMS championships, DragonSpeed also missed the April 24 Indy Open Test, leaving rookie Ben Hanley to turn his first laps at Indianapolis during the opening day of practice.

Adding to the fun, Julian’s four primary mechanics were denied entry to the U.S. due to last-minute visa issues. And with zero oval experience as a team, the decision was made to hire a race engineer who knew his way around IMS. Julian met and hired his Indy engineer John Dick the day before Hanley’s first laps, which came in the midst of scrambling to hire a temporary crew chief and mechanics.
At Indy 2019, DragonSpeed proved to be quicker than McLarenSpeed. Image by LAT

Despite all of the worrisome hurdles, the blend of old and temporary DragonSpeed team members, and their oval rookie behind the wheel, dealt with the challenges and got down to the business of racing. On a tiny budget, the team took a conservative approach in practice to avoid a costly crash it couldn’t afford, and as qualifying approached, Hanley and Dick were unleashed to find more speed. The Briton qualified 27th, ahead of drivers from Andretti Autosport, Chip Ganassi Racing, and Arrow Schmidt Peterson Motorsports. Ben freaking Hanley and DragonSpeed did this. McLaren Racing and Fernando freaking Alonso did not.

Same new cars, same Chevy engines, vastly different resources and unimaginably different outcomes.

It’s hard to imagine experiencing anything like 2019’s Indy 500 qualifying weekend again in my lifetime.

HATE: Keating Motorsports at Le Mans

It was the story of the race, until it wasn’t. Debuting its Ford GT in the GTE-Am class at the 24 hours of Le Mans, Ben Keating’s upstart team pulled off an epic victory in the gorgeous Wynn’s-sponsored car. And then the twin-turbo V6-powered supercar went through post-race scrutineering.

Whether the oversize fuel cell helped the team to reach Victory Lane, or had minimal effect on Keating’s winning outcome, is immaterial. The fuel capacity limit for the car was exceeded – and not by a small margin – which enraged the kindly Texan, but with a day or so to process the enormity of the situation, he took full ownership of the technical error and did his best to move on.
Keating’s Le Mans joy was short-lived. Image by Ehrhardt/LAT

The race strategy, which stacked the pro drivers heavy in rotation until an insurmountable lead was established, was Keating’s masterpiece. With the forfeited win, the chances of returning to rewrite a happier ending with the same strategical advantage is gone.

LOVE: Our New Steward

It’s the most obvious entry on the list. It also addresses the long-ranging fears some of us held for IndyCar and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway as legacy items owned by a wonderful family that struggled to find a united vision for its future. I know I’m one of many who exhaled deeply at the thought of Roger Penske’s team steering American open-wheel racing and IMS towards better days.

LOVE: Daily Inspiration

If the moves he made as an IndyCar rookie were captivating in 2018, Canada’s Robert Wickens has taken himself to an all-new level during his ongoing efforts to regain full use of his legs. In the year and a half since the Canadian suffered spinal cord damage in a crash at Pocono, his recovery efforts through physical therapy and rehabilitation have been absolutely mesmerizing.

Through Pocono, his rivals wanted to beat him. After Pocono, those same drivers want to be like him. His fight to regain everything he lost that August day has become our collective form of inspiration.

 

HATE: The Day The Laughter Died

Sports car fans have loved the work of PR man Sean Heckman for more than a decade, and when he told me in January that 2019 would be his final year serving up press releases for Magnus Racing and other clients, it was clear a once-in-a-lifetime era was going to end.

Heckman won’t disappear from the sport altogether, thanks to his awesome podcast with Ryan Eversley, but in the ultra-serious sports car world, his absence will be obvious.

Given a giant green light from Magnus team owner/driver John Potter to skip the usual sleep-inducing releases most teams poop out on a weekly basis, Heckman let his snarky sarcasm loose for our regular amusement. Everyone was a target, nothing was off limits, and genuine laugh-out-loud moments were common when a Magnus release landed. If only his contemporaries were as creative or brave.

LOVE: Spicy Jack

Bitchiness is a rare visitor to the NTT IndyCar Series broadcasts, but we had an unforgettable Real Househusbands of Portland moment in September when Andretti Autosport’s Ryan Hunter-Reay speared past and future teammate Jack Harvey under braking into Turn 1.
Harvey’s fast, but he’s also capable of unleashing a devastating slow clap. Image by Levitt/LAT

The big kerblammo ruined and ended Harvey’s day on the spot. After qualifying a career-best fourth, Harvey was feeling rather spicy after RHR’s error, and as the cameras captured seconds after both cars came to rest, the Briton shot Captain America a steely look and delivered a slow golf clap to the defendant. Waving his arms in anger would have been quickly forgotten. But the golf clap? Not a chance.

 

PRUETT: 2019 loves and hates, part 1

Image by Levitt/LAT
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emailBy: Marshall Pruett | 10 hours ago

HATE: So You Say I Have a Contract?

We’ve documented the recent plight of Sebastien Bourdais and James Hinchcliffe to the point of not needing to crack those doors open again here, but let’s not forget the first contractual oddity of the year, which sent 2018 Indy Lights champion Patricio O’Ward on a bizarre journey to Austria, Japan, and back.

Signed by Harding Steinbrenner Racing in September of 2018 and presented to the world at Sonoma Raceway and again at Yankees Stadium with teammate Colton Herta, the new Harding Steinbrenner Racing driver was informed somewhere around the first of the year that there was no money to honor his contract. No racing, no salary, and no reimbursement for the aforementioned travel. Nada.

O’Ward, with the $1 million advancement prize to offer for winning the Lights title, represented approximately 1/6th of the budget puzzle. The other 5/6th were the responsibility of HSR, which wasn’t met, and by late December, it’s believed the funding to pay for a single engine lease – for Herta – became the team’s reality.
This was short-lived. Image by IndyCar

This situation has happened in the past, and if it had been handled properly, the ugliness that awaited O’Ward might have been avoided. All it would have taken was a simple release by the team, a ‘we can’t honor your contract, but we don’t want to get in the way of you searching for a new team, so let’s do this early and give you plenty of time to chase the other opportunities out there’.

Instead, as we’ve heard from a few people close to the situation, Harding’s outfit went the less awesome route of holding the kid hostage. Instead of doing the right thing, HSR allegedly told O’Ward that in order to be cut free, he would have to pay them to become a free agent!

The rumored sum was half of his Indy Lights prize – a half-million dollars – to be let out of a contract HSR was unwilling to fulfill. Talk about balls.

Like Bourdais many months later, suing a wealthy team owner was never going to be resolved in a timely or inexpensive manner, and in O’Ward’s case, the conflict raged until early February where the situation reached its peak at Spring Training. Once HSR embraced its inner angels, the Mexican was freed without paying the ransom note.

The business of racing can be a dirty thing when greedy practitioners get involved. O’Ward to, his credit, kept his head down, mouth shut, and has been rewarded with a prime opportunity as the tip of Arrow McLaren SP’s spear.

LOVE: The Flix

The final year of the decade brought a bevy of racing documentaries and a major motion picture or two to enjoy. Ford Vs Ferrari earned universal praise (no spoilers, please, I’ve yet to see it), Garth Stein’s The Art of Racing in the Rain (I also hear they’ve made a book about the movie), Netflix’s Formula 1—Drive To Survive (featuring RACER’s sexy Brit Chris Medland, no less), ESPN’s 30 for 30 feature Qualified, about Indy 500 pioneer Janet Guthrie, Adam Carolla and Nate Adams’ Shelby American doc on Carroll Shelby and his racing team (also on Netflix), Hurley, on sports car icon Hurley Haywood’s fascinating life, Blink of An Eye, on the relationship between Dale Earnhardt Sr and Michael Waltrip, the IndyCar safety doc Rapid Response featuring Drs. Steve Olvey and Terry Trammel, Gentleman Driver, made by an old friend Toni Calderon, and I’m sure plenty more hit the big and little screens in 2019. And, finally, the Willy T. Ribbs doc Uppity, which debuted in May of 2018, is days away from its digital release.

At this rate, I need to take a week off and get caught up. I’m only a year overdue on watching Born To Race: The Scott Dixon Story…

HATE: Farewell No. 5

One of the most excellent sports car entries over the last decade succumbed to insufficient funding at the conclusion of the WeatherTech SportsCar Championship season. Action Express Racing’s No. 5 prototype program was shuttered after multiple championships and Rolex 24 At Daytona wins when, in one of the strangest circumstances, NASCAR’s costly reacquisition of its International Speedway Corporation caused the fearsome No. 5 to go silent after Petit Le Mans.

As I’ve had the scenario explained to me, the AXR team, which has been funded for most of its existence by IMSA co-founder, Grand-Am founder, and current NASCAR president Jim France, was informed by the Floridian that he would be unable to continue supporting the No. 5 due to the huge debt taken on by the family after buying back the publicly-traded ISC and returning it to private ownership.

Minus the financial freedom to pour millions into the No. 5 AXR Cadillac DPi-V.R driven by Joao Barbosa and Filipe Albuquerque, the entry was scrapped. Associate sponsor Mustang Sampling, Barbosa, team advisor Christian Fittipaldi, former AXR driver Sebastien Bourdais, and the unused car number moved across to Minnesota’s JDC-Miller Motorsports where a new chapter will be written.
It’s lights out for AXR’s fearsome No.5 Cadillac DPi. Image by Galstad/LAT

AXR continues with the 2018 Prototype title-winning duo of Felipe Nasr and Pipo Derani in the No. 31 Cadillac DPi-V.R funded by the benevolent Sonny Whelen and his Whelen Engineering company. That’s the positive twist on the story. The worrying part comes with a more recent rumor that 2020 marks the final year of Whelen’s backing for the No. 31. That’s a ‘HATE’ topic I do not want to write 12 months from now.

LOVE: A Porsche And A Smile

Porsche North America’s Coca-Cola retro liveries at Petit Le Mans in George – not far from Coke’s global headquarters – was a gift of colors and creative thinking. Paying tribute to the Coke-branded Porsche IMSA GT and GTP entries from the 1980s, the white-and-red Porsche 911 RSRs clinched IMSA’s GT Le Mans championship wearing the stellar tribute designs. Also, to prove the value of this bold play to bring two iconic brands back together for a one-off celebration, all of the throwback merchandise that was created for Petit Le Mans – hats, t-shirts, posters, and stickers – sold out immediately.
A win for throwback aficionados and merchandise sellers alike. Image by Galstad/LAT

Months later, eager fans who missed out on the goodies, await the arrival of a new order to try and meet the demand.
HATE: The death of IndyCar’s LED panels.

For reasons that continue to defy explanation, every—and I do mean every—story we posted on RACER.com regarding the oft-broken, rarely functional LED panels installed on both sides of the roll hoop, generated ridiculous traffic. It became a running joke between IndyCar president Jay Frye and I with each interview.

He could reveal a massive scoop about rules or future technology, and dammit, a stupid 200-word story on the latest attempt to fix the effing LED panels double or triple the traffic seen with the bigger story. To my immense sorrow, the failure-prone information displays were yanked from the cars, for good, in August.

May they return, swiftly, and with frequent malfunctions, with the next IndyCar chassis to ensure new traffic records are set.

LOVE: The Trent Hindman Show

If you’re a fan of redemption stories, new IMSA GTD Drivers’ champion Trent Hindman ticks all the requisite boxes. The New Jersey native showed talent on Mazda’s Road To Indy, turned to mid-tier touring cars as a way to keep his career afloat after the open-wheel money ran dry, was picked up by BMW as one of its junior drivers, delivered what appeared to be strong performances for the brand, but was dropped and found himself scrambling to keep his career from running aground once again. All while kids his age were readying themselves to graduate from college. Sporadic (but impressive) WeatherTech Championship drives in 2017 and 2018 led to a full-time shot with Meyer Shank Racing, and in his first complete season in GTD, Hindman and Germany’s Mario Farnbacher were victorious. Those Jersey guys don’t know how to quit.