Yahoo Autos It’s time for IndyCar’s expert pool to be put to use
The NTT IndyCar Series has 27 full-time entries. On most timing stands for those 27 cars, a race engineer, assistant engineer, and performance engineer can be found. Factor in technical directors, damper specialists, aero specialists, and simulation engineers, and there’s a brain trust of more than 100 combined technical experts for the series to draw from within its paddock.
Arrow McLaren team principal Gavin Ward is among the leaders of that ensemble, and when it comes to choosing aerodynamic, suspension, and tire specifications from track to track, or performing design changes to the Dallara DW12 chassis, he would like to see IndyCar make use of its deep pool of engineering talent within the teams to assist in technical matters.
For Ward, who arrived in IndyCar late in the 2010s after a long championship-winning engineering run at the Red Bull Formula 1 team, forming IndyCar’s version of F1’s Technical Working Group (TWG) to lend the paddock’s vast and combined engineering resources to help the series improve its on-track product is a topic he started to raise within the paddock in recent months.
“There is a good collaborative discussion to be had amongst engineering minds about how to improve the series through the technical regulations by which we work,” the Canadian told RACER. “I’m not one to copy and paste what’s done in Formula 1 into IndyCar, because I think IndyCar needs to do the right thing for IndyCar. But over there, they do have a Sporting Working Group and a Technical Working Group where the teams and the series work on sporting regulations and technical regulation changes in the future.
“In that forum, we could discuss, ‘Hey, we could save some money here, because we’re all spending tons of cash on XYZ development and probably don’t need to.’ Or ‘Here’s how you would actually eliminate or make it less likely that you have big fuel saving events.’ There’s ways to do that, to disincentivize fuel-save strategies. There’s opportunities to formally assist IndyCar with many things.”
Andretti Global technical director Eric Bretzman shares in Ward’s enthusiasm for turning IndyCar’s teams into a giant support group for the series’ technical department, which has less than 10 members.
“We’ve been pushing it for years,” Bretzman said. “We’ve been pushing it via the manufacturers, because they get bogged down with a lot of the questions they get asked to help with from IndyCar. IndyCar asks Dallara for help, and they also have the manufacturers they use for help, and there are still way more of us than all of them. So that’s something we’ve been interested in for a couple of years now. We’re here to help. We’d like to help. We need to help because we’ve got to make it better for everybody.”
The Wards and Bretzmans are the first to know whether a race like July’s Iowa doubleheader – which engineers said would be bad weeks before the event – will miss the mark, or if the specifications are on the right path. Engaging some of the 100-strong group of engineers to help remove the guesswork is a regular function Ward would love to see the ensemble provide.
“One thing that was so frustrating for a lot of us is we knew the racing in Iowa was going to be terrible,” he added. “We all could have predicted it and we all knew we were walking into it.
“One of the great things about IndyCar that I’ve loved since I became part of the series was, unlike F1 where the politics and the short-sighted view of a lot of people there would drive the entire series into the ground if it was worth a tenth of second for their team, in IndyCar, there’s a strong view of the greater good and a real desire to make this racing product and the entertainment value as good as it can be.
“People are in IndyCar because they love racing, and we want to put on a good show. There’s a lot of know-how, and a lot of experience here that can help provide that. It takes working with the series, it takes working with the tire supplier, working together on the whole thing to how we how we can best go racing and minimize the days that are like Iowa.”
IndyCar returned to Nashville Speedway in early August for its second tire test ahead of this weekend’s season finale. The first test was plagued by tire issues at the oval where the Dallara DW12 has never raced, and according to Bretzman, the use of a TWG to call upon the paddock’s engineering capabilities long before a first or second test at any circuit would be worthy of consideration by the series.
“I’m thinking of our Nashville extravaganza and thinking about how we could maybe run some parts in the Penske wind tunnel, some combinations we’ve never really run before, do some experimenting there, right?” he said. “Because you’re gonna need to find a solution that we’ve not ever done before.
“I’m thinking some of the teams have stronger simulation programs in-house than others, and dedicate some sweeps to looking back to historical car weight, lap, speed, horsepower, downforce, drag, and try and work through some options.
“Try and find and extrapolate what we liked from races we liked in the past. We have tons of track data, right? We’re sitting on all the track data and the ability to analyze it with all the performance engineers at all these teams. I think we can help in a lot of places there. I think we can help a lot in component selection, the things that we would pay more for so that they work better and last longer, that are better value for us, versus the things that we just want the cheapest thing possible, because we throw them out every day.
“And IndyCar has opened up more and more parts every year in the rule book to development or remanufacture. We’re all trying to solve the same equation with a lot of the same parts, and even though we all try and be super secret, we all have the same problems because we’re working with too many of the same parts.”
Chip Ganassi Racing sporting director Chris Simmons is also in favor of a united engineering resource to support the series and saw it work, in a temporary fashion, while IndyCar’s new hybrid powertrain was developed beginning in 2022 with Ganassi, Penske, Andretti, and Arrow McLaren. But the series has not made an effort to continue or expand a TWG.
“They actually did that with four of us going back about a year and a half to two years ago, looking at some of this hybrid stuff,” Simmons said. “And that was first with the first prototype system from Mahle, which fizzled out. We tried it and we didn’t get much traction with it, but the interest is still there from our side.”
An IndyCar representative told RACER the series is open to forming a TWG with its entrants, and agreed with the notion that it would help the series to further improve its racing product. Bretzman would like to see more event-specific testing to refine the packages used across the various venues.
“I think what we’re missing right now is we should be staying after on Mondays and running some tests,” he said. “We should be booking a week at the Speedway for some testing, because we’ve yet to race the hybrid car there, where everybody takes one car, maybe four cars run one day, four cars run the next day. And we just rotate through there, and we all put miles on some combinations and start to figure out what’s looking like the best options.
“And then maybe we go back in October and do a 15-car test, see how the preferred combinations actually race and give Firestone a chance to build some options and give the aero guys some time to come up with some combinations. And we got to buy some time for everyone to contribute and come up with what’s best.
“Firestone have busted their butts to do that, and who knows, we might need some changes to make this package really work at the Speedway, or anyplace, really. We as teams can be a bigger part of helping everyone to get there if we’re allowed.”
