Last Week in Motorsport

Indy Rock
Indy Lights
Rounds 1 & 2
Streets of Saint Petersburg
Saturday & Sunday, 28-29 March 2015

Indy Lights, the second-highest rung of the Road to Indy ladder system, is revamped for 2015 with a new car, the Dallara IL-15, replacing an eleven-year-old design that was rugged, but heavy & increasingly obsolete. As with most feeder/development series, Indy Lights uses a single make of car, so that all the drivers have equal equipment, thus providing a better platform for evaluating driver performance: Dallara chassis, Mazda-badged (A.E.R.-developed) turbocharged four-cylinder engine, Cooper tires. Two races are contested over most weekends, in support of the top rung of the ladder system, the IndyCar Series, & to give the young drivers as much track time as feasible. The new car has attracted a team new to the series, but vastly experienced in the single-seater/open-wheel junior formulae of Europe: Carlin. Carlin teams currently compete in both GP2 & Formula Renault 3.5, the two principal feeder series in Formula One; GP3; Formula Three; Formula Four; & Formula E. Indy Lights is their first venture on this side of the pond.

Carlin's Emirati driver Ed Jones (of British extraction & accent) utterly dominated both races, starting from pole & leaving the rest of the field far behind & out of sight on his way to victory. The podium for both races was identical: Jones on the top step, 2014 season runner-up Jack Harvey of Schmidt Peterson in second, & 2014 Pro Mazda Champion (the rung below Indy Lights) Spencer Pigot of Juncos in third. Since I mentioned that Jones is Emirati, I should also mention that Harvey is British (supported by the Racing Steps Foundation) & Pigot is American.

Carlin's other driver, Max Chilton (British, while I'm at it), a veteran of three seasons in GP2 & two seasons in F1 (albeit with backmarkers Marussia), finished twelfth & fourth in the two St. Pete races. While on paper an experienced F1 pilot should be able to school the up-&-comers in a series like Indy Lights, Chilton has less experience on America's circuits than many of those he's racing &, being new to America's peculiar brand of open-wheel racing, is unfamiliar with rolling starts. Of course, the same is true of Chilton's teammate Jones, who dominated utterly. (Everywhere else in the world, standing starts are always used in single-seater racing. I love my country, but standing starts make for much better racing than rolling starts, & I am irked that for 2015 IndyCar has abandoned its too-brief experiment with standing starts at certain road course/street circuit races.) It should also be noted that Chilton's main drive in 2015 will be with Nissan's new L.M.P.1 program for the 24 Heures du Mans & the World Endurance Championship (W.E.C.).

Beyond Thunderdome
International V8 Supercars Championship
Round 2
Tasmania Super Sprint
Saturday & Sunday, 28-29 March 2015

The V8 Supercars have been hard to find on American television since the Speed channel became Fox Sports 1 in the third quarter of 2013, but seems to have found a new home on the C.B.S. Sports Network, which is increasing its motorsports coverage. Bully for me!

Little seems to have changed in the time I've missed, & that is all to the good. Though contested as the Australian Touring Car Championship, the V8 Supercars formula utilizes rear-wheel drive & naturally-aspirated V8 engines, instead of front-wheel drive & turbocharged four-bangers used in most other touring car series (the World & British series, W.T.C.C. & B.T.C.C., being the most pertinent examples). The V8 Supercars thus most closely resembles N.A.S.C.A.R. Cup cars—except that the Aussies can turn both right & left. Australia is a vast but sparsely populated continent-cum-country, meaning most of its motorsports venues are quite small. The shortest road course in America used for major-series racing is Connecticut's Lime Rock Park, at one & a half miles in length. (We're not even going to discuss the horror of short-track oval racing.) The Symmons Plains Raceway, on which the Tasmania Super Sprint was contested, is about a mile & a half long, by no means the shortest track on which the V8 monsters battle. The frenetic pace at which the big, heavy V8 Supercars tear around such wee circuits is one of the many charms of the series. Australian touring-car racing has traditionally been a duel 'twixt Holden (General Motors) & Ford of Australia, but no longer. Twelve of the twenty-five cars competing at Tasmania were Holden Commodores, while only five were Ford Falcons; four were Nissan Altimas, two were Volvo S60s, & two were Mercedes-Benz E63s. Ford is set to withdraw from the series completely at year's end.

Red Bull Racing Australia (Triple 8 Engineering) remains the dominant team, winning all three of the Super Sprint's races: two one hundred-kilometer (sixty-two mile) races on Saturday, both won by triple Series Champion Craig Lowndes ('96, '98, & '99), & a single two hundred-kilometer (one hundred twenty-four mile) race on Sunday, won by reigning sextuple Series Champion Jamie Whincup ('08, '09, '11, '12, '13, & '14). I was surprised to learn that American motorsports giant Team Penske now has a controlling interest in Australia's Dick Johnson Racing; I'd be happy to cheer for the Captain (Roger Penske) & double Series Champion Marcos Ambrose, returned Down Under from an almost decade-long self-imposed exile in N.A.S.C.A.R., except that their car is a Ford. Boo! Hiss! Boo!

I'll never have the passion for V8 Supercars that I do for Le Mans, Formula One, & IndyCar (on a good day), but it is an enjoyable series that I am glad to be in a position to follow again.