Planet-IRL

Pardon Me Would you pass the Grey Poupon…

Jovy Marcelo was an up and comer with Walker Motorsports. He had won the Toyota Atlantic Series Championship in 1991, beating Jimmy Vasser by four points.
On May 15th, 1992 While on a warmup lap he car spinned out of control in turn three at Indanapolis Motor Speedway. He left behind his wife Irene, his son Karsten and an un-born son at the time, Jovy Nikolai.

The Toyota Atlantic Series continues to honor his name with the Jovy Marcelo Sportsmanship Award, Given annually to the best driver in the series which exmplifies Jovy’s Sportsmanship. (Ref)

Tony Renna was a strong contender, in fact so strong that Target Chip Ganassi Racing took a marker on him and signed him to drive in 2004. Renna’s best finish of 4th at Michigan gave him a strong outlook on his future. The whole racing world was devistated, including his financee Deb, who Tony sadly left behind.

As both drivers exemplified what a dangerous sport this is, we lest forget lessons learned from these long forgotten two.

In the recent flying adventures of Ryan and Carl at Talladega, and Tony Kanaan’s crash at Indy this year showed what levels of safety that the sport of autoracing has achieved.

However… driver etiquette has imporved greatly in the Izod Indy Car Series, almost to a point of a snooze fests and boredom. It was almost implied in the last drivers meeting, not stated, but implied, that the cars “not in the hunt for a championship” should steer clear of those contending for the title, which made for the three contenders to lap the ENTIRE field at Homestead.

NASCAR sees the world differently. While they bang and bump each other going 200 mph into a corner and some tire holder named Bubba puts in a plug of chew and says, “thats just ‘racin boys”. They do not care who is in the hunt, nor who is contending for the championship. And for me, this is what seperates NASCAR from IICS. Fans only come for one reason to the superspeedways. To see if they can watch “the big one” nor do they hold back about it. For this reason IICS tends to shy away from Superspeedways (this and International Speedway Corp.) Although Vitor Meira’s test at Daytona last year, perhaps could have creeped some new light on some possible venues.

Let’s use Indy as an example as to why we only run one 500 mile race a year. Indy takes a month to prepare for, you must pass an examination to even be on the track, and it is the most strenous race all year. It takes it out of the drivers. Why does this track take so much more to prepare for, even though tracks such as California were faster?

Lets take a look at the last Atlanta shootout: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YKFSQzH6Vk
In the weary days of IRL, that crash (if at the front) would have taken the entire field out.

Another possibility is money:The combination of lack of great sponsorship, money and engineering led many teams to play conservative this year. Too many teams are playing the odds of strategy, and the last race proved that strategy leads you nowhere if there no cautions, you can’t dial it back and hope for a crash now. I would hate to be a sponsor and the only time I get to see my product in action is when it’s stuck in a wall in turn 2. Teams can no longer be aggressive as they once were, teams cannot afford crashes which leads to drivers being discarded.

Les Mactaggart Senior Technical Director at ICS talked about the new engineering that is going to the the 2012 car.
“There have been a number of tests already on the new chassis, and while there will be some additional rules, the basic framework remains the same”. The amount of data already collected as well from crashes have led them to believe that they are safe right now.

While both the level of safety has increased over the years, the drivers have been accustomed to just being complacent for a car to be where they are, they are not pushing the outside of the envelope. Don’t get me wrong, I am a safety kind of guy and after the mild changes that Les and BB implemented, the Kentucky and Chicago race were awesome. However teams got wise to the changes and the took off. The four horsemen still jumped off into the wild wind.

Until the teams get agressive, it will very easy to predict who will be in the final four next year.