Yahoo Autos Disappointed McLaughlin says Nashville restarts were ‘a joke’
Nashville polesitter Scott McLaughlin was left downbeat after being unable to convert his car’s pace into victory in the Big Machine Music City Grand Prix.
Although the Team Penske driver led the first 24 laps of the race, with Pato O’Ward’s Arrow McLaren simply unable to keep pace, the field was bunched on lap 13 by a caution for an on-track mechanical failure for Dale Coyne Racing’s David Malukas. Alex Palou took the opportunity to pit, but the other front-runners did not, and while staying out was obviously the right way to go for the primary-tired runners, the teams whose drivers started out on alternate rubber were going to lose tire performance long before they ran out of fuel.
McLaughlin nonetheless pulled away from his pursuers on the restart, but the untimely yellow meant the field was still running close together when he finally had to cede his lead and pit. Thus he was buried in the pack, and when those who started on primaries such as eventual winner Kyle Kirkwood and Romain Grosjean made their stops, McLaughlin hadn’t found the clean air to make time on them, and they rejoined ahead.
What disappointed him in the closing laps is that, having passed Grosjean to run second, he didn’t have the pace in the two final restarts to tackle Kirkwood.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m disappointed, but it is what it is,” said the former Supercars legend. “I think we had a really fast car today. That first yellow destroyed a few things… You hope it doesn’t come, but it came. You take it or lose your advantage, try to reset and go again. That’s what we decided — the latter.
“We did pretty well. We were able to come back a little bit, but overall Kyle just had that little shorter stop that he could do [and] away they went. I was trying to do my best to hunt him down at the end; I just had a poor restart.
“I had no temp in my rear tires for some reason. So annoying. I don’t know what happened; I didn’t change my procedure. I’m normally pretty good on restarts, but I was terrible. Got to do a little bit of study on that. I think if I was a little bit closer, I might have been able to maybe throw a little dive bomb at him. Unfortunately, couldn’t.”
McLaughlin didn’t like the new restart zone between Turns 9 and 10, as he felt it actually bred chaos, almost guaranteeing the shunt that caused a red flag before a four-lap shootout.
“I just think from a sport perspective, the restarts are a joke. I think we need to start on the start/finish line. We cannot pass until the start/finish line…You’re always going to have these clusters that cause red flags and make us look like…
“There’s no cadence. Once there’s a yellow flag on a street circuit, it’s just a free-for-all. People [dive-bomb]. We’re well within our rights to do that. If we want to have a pure race, we could have had a 10-lap shootout, me and Kyle there at the end. Instead we’re stop, start, stop, start. The action is fantastic. We just have no race.
“I think it happens at Long Beach. We talked about doing it — about not passing till the apex of the last corner… I think when it goes green, there’s kamikazes at the back that don’t care — well within their right to throw it inside when it turns green. That’s fine. But we just have this terrible stop/start, amateurish looking finish to races.
“I’m going to speak to Jay [Frye, IndyCar president] about it and [Kyle] Novak [race director]. We just need to go apex last corner or start/finish line – make a point where you can’t pass, just to get it going.
“Look, I might be wrong. I might crash in Turn 1. What I’m saying — I’ve done it in Supercars. Formula 1 does it. Other sports around the world do it. It just gets the race going. Everyone is on cold tires. Someone is going to have a mistake.”
