TBK-Light.com

The line-up is (mostly) complete - Coyne will run Jack Harvey and Colin Braun at St. Pete. Harvey will complete most of the season excluding Thermal, Long Beach, the 500 and Toronto. For these races, Nolan Siegel will drive the #18. At the moment, Braun is signed for St. Pete and Thermal only.

Coyne is smart, frugal and quite a survivor. But he’s confounding. He finally won a race with Justin and Bill Pappas and then couldn’t keep them together. He then brought them back together for 2012, but now Pappas has gone again. Coyne did manage to win Detroit last year with Mike Conway, no testing, a solid little squad and the engineering of John Dick and Pappas. But now both those engineers are at RLLR. Dale doesn’t believe in bidding wars so maybe that’s his strength.

But there are challenges ahead with the hybrid engines, team franchising and Honda seemingly with one foot out the door headed for NASCAR and no way Chevrolet picks up the 15/16 engine demand that will be left in that wake

Who was behind this idea, just a random user on twitter?

IndyCar team owners and drivers alike are really unhappy with how heavy the Dallara DW12 has become; it will reach a modern high when the series go hybrid. And that comes with a tiny, short, narrow, and comparatively light 2.2-liter twin-turbo V6 engine formula. A big component of what makes an IndyCar go as fast as it does is the absence of weight compared to a sports car or stock car.

Most of the GTP engines and pretty much all of the GT3 engines are much bigger, heavier, taller, wider, or longer, if not all five of those things at once. So if lightness is what makes an IndyCar perform like it does, the thing that will kill its performance is making it really heavy. The only workaround is to add a bunch of extra horsepower to try and offset the extra weight, but there’s a tipping point where only so much power can be added to mask that weight.

The DW12 was never designed to carry anything other than that tiny 2.2-liter motor, and the rest of the car is built around it. To consider using GTP/GT3 engines, an all-new car would be required that can accept all the different shapes and sizes. That can be done. But then we come back to the current car, with the tiny motor, becoming super-heavy when it gets all of the hybrid gear installed.

Bolting in a GTP or GT3 motor would take the weight into uncharted territory, which would only worsen the problem. More weight means a slower car, and one that hates to stop and turn.

So, yes, you could pull those IMSA motors over to IndyCar, but unless you design a new chassis that’s hundreds of pounds lighter than the DW12, and that’s not realistic, it’s hard to figure out how the insanely heavy cars would be anything other than a competitive embarrassment.

At that point, it would be easier to buy GTP cars, cut the fenders off, and call them IndyCars.

Then they came for the street courses they make money on.....