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Aleshin is a financial liability and AFS brings sponsorship.

Didn't he have some visa trouble before Elkhart Lake?

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

Who is Sebastien Saavedra and why does he have sponsorship when Sage Karam hasn't? Like Schmidt's repair bills will be lower now.

Former Indy Lights champ?

Am I missing a joke here? Karam sounds more of a liability than Saavedra

It took him a year, but Truls has now scrounged up enough cash to get his driver another Ganassi test.

http://www.autosport.com/news/report.ph ... dycar-test

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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.

Well, Karam seems genuinely talented, while Saavedra have mostly wrecked cars near the back since 2011.

Cool about Rosenqvist. I hope Ganassi takes him seriously enough to consider him for a seat.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/2018-ind ... ris-beatty

Blog post by one of the designers. Explains the ideas behind the design. Also answers why the bumber guards were removed (ineffective, created more debris).

This looks really good. I just wish the nose was a bit more round at the edges, a bit more curved, and a less bulky front wing for road courses, but I'm nit-picking at this point. Superb design, can't wait to see the liveries.

Idiots.

It's only taken 21 years to get back to where they never should've left.

I find it hard to agree. I'm not saying I dislike the car (I've always been a fan of the DW-12) or the updated aero, however 21 years ago the cars were bigger, had much more power and there were multiple chassis as well as power plants and tyre manufacturers. This is a single spec chassis with two engine manufacturers and a control tyre.



This.

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

I was speaking about the aesthetics of the cars but I see your point.

It looks great, but dropping the guards because they were ineffective seems a lot more of a cost thing than making them work.

Can't help but feel a spec series is still the wrong way to go

The hottest topic in every single series of racing I follow is cost. It's just gotten so far out of hand across the board and Indycar is no different. Do I want the good ole days back of 4 chassis and 5 engines and big salaries paid by those suppliers? Sure.

There's just one problem... No manufacturer wants to spend the money to develop all that and Indycar itself doesn't want to start a chassis war that will drive costs up for the teams. Buying a new car every year isn't cost effective when teams are bitching about buying aero parts now for a car they've owned for years.

How do you open it up so others chassis' can compete and still keep costs reasonable? The aero kits were a failure. You open it up to other Chassis' at this point and you're going to have the same problem, just more expensive.

Competition should drive the costs down (no guarantee it will though), but it's a helluva gamble just at the point Indycar is finally start to dig itself out of the hole it made.

A 3rd engine manufacturer would be a great place to start. Perhaps think about a second tire supplier, but that might get ugly fast. They need to build on what they have first and worry about getting it all back how it should be in due course.

IndyCar and the teams want a 3rd manufacturer.

Essentially nobody however wants a 2nd tire supplier.

Back in the tobacco days, a document leaked out of Penske's racing budget. Roughly $10-$15 million per car per year in the mid 1990s.

Nowadays, the top teams reportedly spend -- at the top -- about $8 million a year per car (source). So less than it took in the old days... not *even* counting inflation. And there's still concerns about cost.

These days, they've got less sponsorship opportunity (tobacco is a no no). Attendance is down for the sport of racing as a whole. Automobile manufacturers are less interested in the fastest car and more interested in electric tech or self-driving. For certain tracks, we're kind of at the speed limit already (eg we don't want a repeat of CART @ Texas 2001.)

I'll "take what I can get" because, while it would be nice, I see a return to the 1990s unrealistic at this point. In particular, the manufacturers have to want to pursue pure speed to get that ball rolling, and that just doesn't seem to fit what car companies are wooing investors with right now.

Yeah, hopes of a CART renaissance is 100% wishful thinking on my part. It's silly to ignore the fact that IndyCar has actually been pretty great over the past few years with the DW12.

The racing has been good but the problem is, the series is in much worse shape marketing-wise. It's basically impossible IndyCar becomes the top racing series in America again and it has nothing to do with racing. In fact, NASCAR has serious "racing" issues right now but the entire marketing success doesn't depend on the quality - or lack thereof - of sheer racing.

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07.04.1968 - Flower of Scotland when will we see your like again?
01.05.1994 - We'll never forget...

All of motorsports is in the same boat, back in the day when there was only a few live sports shown on TV, motorsports was the 'extreme' sports, nowadays you can watch someone jump from a balloon on the edge of the atmosphere live on the internet, the is sooo much more content that is now accessable

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"An idea whose time has come cannot be stopped by any army or any government"


3x TBKL rFactor Hillclimb champion