TBK-Light.com

Are you thinking of IRL maybe? The regulations varied, but CART never had flat floors and always had some level of ground effects. A feature that Motorsport magazine ran on the Reynard 97i (which is a good read) mentions how the height of the tunnels and the freedom aft of the rear wheel centreline was reduced, but some late 90s/early 00s shots show that it wasn't a fundamental change:

Unspecified Lola, looks less sophisticated than the below example so probably late 90s:


2001 Lola:


When the DP01 was launched, they made a big thing about how the height of the tunnels was increased again:


IMHO, the reliance on underbody aero compared to IRL is a key part of why Champ Cars never seemed as prone to taking off. IRL (at least late in the life of the series) had similar tunnels, but much shallower and accompanied by a much bigger tray area on a much bigger floor:



I can't find any earlier pictures, but I'm pretty sure they didn't change much.

Yep, for some reason the IRL wanted to do every goddamn thing different to CART (all ovals, naturally aspirated engines, topside aerodynamics instead of ground effect, the list goes on and on)

I used to have a link bookmarked where an aerodynamics engineer explained it in detail, but it's long gone now so let me try to remember the thrust of it

The IRL cars ran round with something called Negative rake.
Basically, they had so much downforce cranked onto them to try to stage-manage those side-by-side finishes they used to crow so much about, that the engineers would raise the front nose as high as they could to try to reduce the drag as much as the could in favour of straight line speed.
That's fine when you're running on your own, but as soon as you get even a gust of wind under there, it has a lot more surface area to pick up and send flying

That's why not only did the superspeedway pack racing, wheel to wheel wrecks happen but also stupid, 120mph accidents like Hornish backflipping on a piece of debris that wouldn't send any other car over at that speed, or that time they nearly launched Mario Andretti over the fence completely, again of a minute piece of debris left from a just crashing car.

It was all a side effect of the stupid amount of downforce the series wanted, because they wanted NASCAR style pack racing without thinking through the consequences.
NASCAR cars can take the hits of bouncing off a wall and each other at 200mph, Indycars cannot.

Thank God the current INDYCAR has reversed that direction, I'd rather watch a dull oval race than bite my fingers through one of their pack racing shitshows again

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RIP Birmingham Wheels: here's some of the crash videos I recorded when it was there:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIaKIE ... 5t9d5PvoHA

Twitter:

http://www.twitter.com/paulhadsley

Schmidt was interviewed by Motorsport.com today
https://www.motorsport.com/indycar/news ... 77/?nrt=86

Never seen the Briscoe/Barron Chicagoland accident before. Holy fuck that was violent. Go to 4:58 for slow motion. Everyone seemed so nonchalant about Briscoe's condition.

Handling major and possibly fatal accidents must be one of the hardest things to do right in commentary, because most of the time it's done so badly. Scott Goodyear there comes off almost like a kindergarten teacher handling the whole thing with kid's gloves, not even hinting at the seriousness of the crash. Mike Joy's been one of the best over the years but lately has started putting on a sort of fake shaky-voice thing for anything even remotely scary looking. The days of Ken Squier knowing each driver's wife or mother's name and telling inspiring anecdotes (or random comparisons, he could go either way) about the driver while we waited for good news seem a very long time ago.

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I just miss Paul Page. He was so down to earth and real. I'm just glad he was there in 1999.

After 1999, I took a racing break until 2001 because 1999 sucked so much for various reasons.

Yeah, this sort of thing really shows you who has the communication skills to go with the stream of words. In F1 it's the difference between Murray Walker putting on his calm, measured voice vs. Eddie Jordan telling people that Felipe Massa was fine...

Scott Goodyear is a terrible commentator, with any luck NBC won't employ him.

Yes @

gkmotorsport I was talking about the IRL cars in relation to the flat floors, as @

codename_47 says they seem to want to go in completely the opposite direction of CART, typical bloody mindedness of a trust fund idiot.

What amazes me about that footage is:

- it takes until 4:30 in the video for any of the commentators to express any concern about the well being of any of the drivers involved
- during the Eddie Cheever interview, while the slow-mo replay is on, Eddie says "It could have been a very very bad accident". I'm guessing he hadn't seen the footage before making that statement

They treat the situation as if it is entirely normal.



It was just a 'bump on the chin', Eddie had it on good authority that he was fine...

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BTCC Pick Em's Champion 2010
Formula Fun Cup Champion 2013
http://www.the-fastlane.co.uk

Going back to fences;



https://racer.com/2018/08/22/robin-mill ... ing-hpd/2/

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Dan Wheldon ¦ 1978-2011
Marco Simoncelli ¦ 1987-2011
Jules Bianchi ¦ 1989-2015
Justin Wilson ¦ 1978-2015

Yeah, I know he's mad and I don't care. I do not care. I did not care then. I do not care now. I'm here to race him.

Interesting article I found, speculative and slightly dramatic like a lot of them tend to be, but has some good insight from an orthopedic surgeon as to what the described type of injuries can mean, and also what to interpret (or not) from what we've seen and read so far.

https://eu.indystar.com/story/sports/mo ... 050436002/

Marshall Pruett mentiones this in his podcats with Leigh Diffey as well. He estimated that a medium size oval would cost around 40 mil or so.

lol, Raytheon. Maybe they could get it installed for free if Raytheon could be the series sponsor.

The IndyCar Imperial Slaughter Series powered by Raytheon

All Indycar needs to do is prove aspects of the series can be weaponised for military use and BOOOOM, never ending government funding via Raytheon.

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BTCC Pick Em's Champion 2010
Formula Fun Cup Champion 2013
http://www.the-fastlane.co.uk

BOOOOM is either highly inappropriate or completely appropriate there

Flat bottom cars is a huge contributor to “flying”. It has also made for the ugly car designs we see today. Keep in mind a lot of the looks of these modern cars comes from the officials making all the flat bottoms. Once they made that a rule, the aero designers started to figure out other ways to get the same amount of downforce. On F1 cars the nose went up to allow the air to move under it to get the high speed air to complement the low air pressure under the car to create the air pressure needed. The cars have almost if not the same amount of downforce, but then they became better at sailing when that big ol' flat bottom got rotated and up in the airflow. So, they put the big ass shark fins on the sports cars.

It originally said something slightly different, however I altered it to say BOOOOM because of the military context

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BTCC Pick Em's Champion 2010
Formula Fun Cup Champion 2013
http://www.the-fastlane.co.uk

That's the most important part of the article, Sam Schmidt sees him back in a racecar.

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"Indy doesn't give you a second chance. You have to earn it."

by the extent they're removing grandstands from the recent ovals, soon they'll be able to make tarmac runoffs for oval tracks

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Motorsports trend for 2024: everything is a bad taste joke now

Don't give them any more ideas....