‘LIKE FORMULA FORD, BUT 10 TIMES AS FAST!’
“IT WAS STRANGE HAVING TO FIGHT SO HARD NOT TO LEAD. IT GOES AGAINST EVERY PRINCIPLE YOU’VE LEARNED”
If ever there was a time CART’S Indycar races resembled NASCAR, it was during the early years of the Handford device, with 63 lead changes the headline feature of its dramatic debut at Michigan in 1998.
Forsythe Racing’s Greg Moore managed to finally break the tow – “a stroke of genius”, reckoned Dario Franchitti – to win the race in the final laps, but the mercurial Canadian and the Chip Ganassi Racing duo of Jimmy Vasser and Alex Zanardi had perfectly demonstrated what could be expected from the Handford device.
The slipstreaming would launch a car into a closing-speed advantage of 10-15mph, which made breaking clear difficult.
Walker Racing’s Gil de Ferran, who went on to set a closed-course speed record of 241.428mph with the Handford device at Fontana in 2000 – a mark that still stands today – makes a comparison with 10-car FF1600 slipstream-fests at Silverstone.
“It was a similar thing, but 10 times the speed!” he says. “It was unbelievable: you got behind someone and literally could feel the car speed up. It was difficult to gear the car, because the difference between having air in your face or not was enormous. If you had three cars ahead, it was even bigger.”
Vasser adapted well to the Handford device’s draft-racing characteristics at Michigan and Fontana, where he was consistently among the quickest drivers, but the 1996 champion was not remotely a fan of the artifice from the moment it was mooted as a solution to slow the cars.
“You didn’t want to lead because you’d use more fuel, so you would try to fall back into the pack,” says Vasser. “On a couple of occasions, there was an accordion effect in with the closing rates and somebody tried to essentially back up the pack by lifting. It was really anti-engineering, wasn’t it? It wasn’t pure racing, you couldn’t just pull away.”
Bobby Rahal retired from racing at the end of the Handford’s first season in 1998 and remembers the device as unnatural for drivers.
“It was strange having to fight so hard to not lead,” he says. “It goes against every principle you’ve learned as a driver. We’d just be in huge packs going around at three-quarter speed, and not wishing to do the work of cutting into the air at the front. Then of course in the last two laps everyone went crazy!”
But Franchitti, then of Team Green, refutes claims that it turned CART into the pack racing that had become commonplace in the rival Indy Racing League during the same period.
“When you were racing at full speed there wasn’t a pack,” he recalls. “You couldn’t get close enough in a corner. If there were two cars in front of you, you had to be careful as to where you positioned the car. Pack racing was a product of the
IRL – we didn’t really have that in the
CART series, I don’t think.”
But the trapped air generated by the Handford device did create other, unforeseen problems.
“The air going through the sidepods was trapped and looking for an outlet, and it would end up coming from places like the slot where the sequential gearbox was,” he says. “I’ve still got scars on my legs from where I was embroiled in a race at Michigan, and that was because the air became stalled behind the Handford.”