Indycar review: Dixon is the star – and so is the new car
Scott Dixon earned a fifth title, Will Power won the Indy 500, and yet the biggest winners in 2018 were the Indycar fans, who witnessed the most satisfying American open-wheel championship of this century
When four drivers representing three teams and both engine manufacturers go into the penultimate round of the Indycar Series deservedly in contention for the title, then something has emphatically gone well. Several things in fact, many of them linked.
While judging aesthetics is a subjective matter, surely few would disagree that this year’s Indycars, clothed in the 2018-specifcation Dallara aerokit, were a vast improvement over their predecessors. Of even greater importance than the look was the effect this new aero package had on the racing, for which Indycar president of competition Jay Frye, his VP Bill Pappas and head of aero Tino Belli should be commended for a job 85% well done. Suddenly there was passing at tracks where previously we hadn’t seen a whole lot – Mid-ohio, Iowa, Phoenix, Gateway and Sonoma. Why? 1) Because without the flicks, flaps and widgets of the previous-gen kit, the 2018 Indycar was relying far more on its underfloor to generate downforce, and that’s air relatively undisturbed by following a car closely; 2) there was an overall cut in downforce – between 15 and 40% depending on track and depending also on who you asked! – so tyres went off more rapidly and drivers made more little errors; 3) the drivers could better feel when they were approaching the limit, so were more confident to
push hard, while also knowing the car was recoverable from bigger yaw angles; 4) that reduced downforce meant lower apex speeds, particularly for medium and high-speed corners, but the reduced drag also meant higher terminal speeds on the straights. Ergo, there were longer braking zones to shed more mph from that higher maximum and lower minimum speed – and then more throttle control required as drivers went back to the gas.
Ryan Hunter-reay found the car much more satisfying, for instance, diving into Turn 4 at Mid-ohio, that tight 100-degree corner at the end of the long straight.
“In the old car it seemed like everyone hit the brakes at the same point, changed down from sixth to third at the same point, and then went back to 100% throttle at the same point,” he says. “The difference between the top guys to one of the slow guys was probably only a tenth of a second because it’s a high-grip surface.
“Now you can actually make time up on another guy by being later on the brakes, smoother bleeding off the pressure and then getting back on the gas that little bit sooner but with more care, especially on old tyres.
“It’s great, and it’s been like that at a lot of corners on a lot of tracks. The challenge has come back now the car doesn’t feel so planted and the driver feels like he can make more of a difference.
And honestly, it’s just as much hard work even if the g-forces have gone down on a lot of tracks, because you’re now doing so much more correcting when you’re running on the limit.”
The new aero package’s one drawback, according to many drivers and the more strident fans, was the new superspeedway kit. The problem in the week-long practice for the Indianapolis
500 was that, while the second car in a convoy could pass the car ahead, further down the line it became increasingly difficult to pull off a manoeuvre around the car in front, mainly due to a confidence-sapping lack of stability.
This year’s cars may have looked far more lithe than their predecessors, but they had more drag in superspeedway trim thanks to the absence of rear-wheel guards. Team owner Dale Coyne described the aero effect at Indianapolis as being “more intense, but narrower, so you tow up real fast – faster than with the last car – but when you move out to pass, you just don’t pull past at a great rate”.
On race day, single-car shunts for series veterans such as
Helio Castroneves, Tony Kanaan and Sebastien Bourdais helped persuade Indycar to allow more aero variations for the Pocono race, and further tests are continuing this off-season to find a way to make the cars more stable in dirty air at 210mph-plus.
At most tracks, however, there were simply more areas in which the elite drivers could distinguish themselves from the very good drivers, and the very good drivers separate themselves from the merely adequate. Roger Penske predicted before the season started that the new aerokit would be more demanding and thus ensure the cream rose to the top – and Indycar’s new-for-2018 race director Kyle Novak also helped make that happen. By hammering home the importance of drivers obeying local yellows, there were far fewer full-course cautions and, whenever they were necessary, if possible he would delay the closure of the pits so as not to screw over the drivers who were running longer than their rivals.
Rejoice, then, all those who enjoy pure racing: almost without exception, the 17 events were won on merit. Only at Portland, when Zach Veach spun and stalled at a hugely inopportune moment for team-mate Alexander Rossi but at the ideal time for Scott Dixon to make up ground from the first-lap pile-up, did we see a truly lucky winner (Takuma Sato). And so the top five in the championship standings – Dixon, Rossi, Will Power, Hunter-reay and Josef Newgarden – accurately reflects the best drivers of the year.
It should really have been a group of six, the missing man from that group being Robert Wickens who, despite being a rookie, had a pole (scored on his debut!) and several podium finishes before his appalling accident at Pocono. The absence of Indycar racing’s most
startling rookie since Sebastien Bourdais’s arrival 15 years earlier was felt keenly at Schmidt Peterson Motorsports and throughout Indycar over the final three races. We wish him well in his recovery.
Spec aerokits not only eliminated excuses for underperformance, but also emphasised the differences between the engine characteristics. Honda had better low-down torque at 1.5-bar boost, as seen at Long Beach and Detroit, and also superior fuel economy on superspeedways at 1.3-bar boost. Chevrolet and Ilmor prioritised top-end horsepower in order to (successfully) chase Indy 500 victory, a little to the detriment of reliability. Long before the season was over, each of the three Penske drivers was on his fifth engine and was therefore ineligible for manufacturer points. Therefore HPD, with Ganassi and a thoroughly revived Andretti Autosport team in its books – together with a more reliable engine – was onto a winner and truly deserved its first manufacturers’ title since the 2.2-litre regulations were introduced back in 2012.
But what gave Dixon the edge over his four title rivals? In short, consistency, the absence of significant errors on race day, and an ability to make the most of every opportunity. Just twice this year did the #9 Chip Ganassi Racing car finish outside the top 10
“WICKENS WAS INDYCAR RACING’S MOST STARTLING ROOKIE SINCE BOURDAIS’S ARRIVAL 15 YEARS EARLIER”
“NEWGARDEN WAS MASTERFUL AT TIMES, BUT HE COULD BE LEFT BEWILDERED BY POWER’S PACE”
– at Long Beach thanks to a tactical blunder by the team and at Iowa Speedway when he was among several frontrunners who never found a set-up that worked throughout a whole stint. Across 17 races, Dixon finished in the top five in 13 of them, including nine appearances on the podium. Rossi, Power and Newgarden all matched his win tally of three, yet they accumulated ‘only’ 10, eight and six top-fives respectively.
“Dixie just never has a bad day,” says Power as he recalls four mistakes on his part and a couple of mechanical issues, the combined effect of which blunted his title challenge, despite attaining an absurdly brilliant average starting spot of 2.7.
“He’s always there,” concurs Rossi, who in his third year with Andretti Autosport blended speed with aggression, carried out a couple of ‘impossible’ fuel strategies and impossibly brave passing moves, but also made a few significant blunders, including right at the start of the double-points finale at Sonoma.
For Penske’s reigning champion Newgarden, the year was odd – he led the most laps (Dixon was only fourth in that list) but his three wins were the only occasions on which he visited the podium. He was masterful at times – Barber Motorsports Park, Road America – but there were also days when he was left bewildered by Power’s pace, either in qualifying or across a race stint, so that occasionally his presence in a race went almost unnoticed.
Hunter-reay, as usual, had a season that fluctuated between awesome and awful, and it was the first time since he joined Andretti Autosport in 2010 that he was outqualified by a team-mate across a season (it was 10-6 to Rossi in the races where the grid order was decided by speed). But being Hunter-reay, 2012 champion, it was also never a surprise when he had the edge over Rossi. If he could ever get luckier, he’d take the title fight down to the wire.
Where he’d undoubtedly have to beat Dixon. The five-time champion denies feeling that any driver has to go through him in order to win the Indycar championship, but the stats would suggest otherwise. Three times in the past six years he’s emerged on top, and this was the most convincing of them all.