Catchfence

The Kentucky Indy 300 and the Pennsylvania 500 offered some spirited competition to chew on between superspeedway open wheelers and superspeedway stockers, and the result of both was a pair of memorable outcomes. The Pennsylvania 500 got rained out on Sunday and thus ran at noon Monday; when it ran it produced ten yellows and thus a large helping of two-abreast restarts. The Pocono 500 in June was the debut of this new rule and it says a lot about how far the new rule has come that with the Pocono rematch the rule actually produced hard racing, with some three-abreast battles up front and several near-hits to go with numerous crashes; when it was over Joe Gibbs Racing, which had taken a bit of a hit in performance lately, took the win, this one by Denny Hamlin after as traumatic a weekend as one can imagine.

Two days before Pocono, the Kentucky Indy 300 took the flag amid the continued turmoil that has gripped the IRL this season, between the ouster of Tony George (the league’s founder) from IMS and controversy over the new schedule as well as sponsorship uncertainty. What resulted turned out to be a race for the ages and a thunderous ten-lap battle between Penske muscleman Ryan Briscoe and upstart Ed Carpenter, a race won by Briscoe by a wheel.

Yet despite all this, both races had something in common – clean air. The IRL cars used to run small wickers on their rear wings to open up more air and thus make the draft kick in more on the bigger tracks; for Kentucky these little wickers were removed altogether, with the rationale that this would open up more clean air for cars to race in.

That a sanctioning body would take away something that makes the draft kick in more on the grounds that the cars need more clean air is baffling, especially given the recent history of IndyCar racing that saw passing increase markedly when wickers and bulkier bodies were used that made the vacuum effect of dirty air bigger – several times this decade we saw Indy 500s decided because of the draft, and the plethora of wildly competitive IRL races this decade has seen – of which the Briscoe-Carpenter battle is the latest example – have come about in no small measure because dirty air was a factor in helping cars pull up to pass. Much was made about overtake buttons in the cockpits of the cars, but whatever edge they gave meant nothing – it took the old-fashioned side drafting moxie of using wheels to stop an attacker from being able to clear, and also using the rocket effect of high side banking, to win the Kentucky Indy 300.

In the end, the draft at Kentucky kicked in despite the rule change, and it would seem IRL needs to rethink that rule change to make sure the draft keeps working.

It relates to Pocono because it took a plethora of late yellows to make a race out of what had become another frustration exercise thanks to the near-unstoppable muscle that is clean air. Virtually everywhere the sport races, the mantra is always clean air – nowhere other than the plate tracks is dirty air seen as any kind of benefit for passing. And it remains obvious that the sanctioning body still can’t figure out how to make dirty air the ally of passing instead of an impediment, especially as Pocono is a track where the draft long was an important factor and passing was prevalent as a result – the only talk about dirty air for the longest time was always in relation to how effective the draft would be. There remains a lot wrong with the sanctioning body’s rules packages and the factor of not figuring out how to make dirty air faster than clean air remains among the most graphic flaws.

Back when Gillian Zucker talked about making Fontana a restrictor plate track, she was in effect shut up by NASCAR, and she explained that NASCAR cited computer models to “prove” the idea wouldn’t work. I didn’t buy that argument then and don’t now given how the sport’s real world history has worked. If NASCAR has computer modeling of this sort, I find it impossible to believe they can’t come up with a model that will make the draft faster than clean air for bigger tracks and thus take away the passing impediment of aeropush that has plagued the cars for over a decade.