New car brings buzz
IndyCar says its new vehicle, which will start running in 2018, is safer, more exciting and cheaper to operate,
After more than a year of work and months of teasing the release of its 2018 car, the Verizon IndyCar Series finally unveiled its sleek new machine Monday. Touting it as “bolder, safer and more thrilling,” the 2018 Dallara universal body kit is just about everything Jay Frye hoped it would be.
Ahead of its public debut — the car will undergo paces Tuesday and Wednesday at Indianapolis Motor Speedway — the president of competition and operations for IndyCar discussed the features he thinks have the sport heading in the right direction.
Among the biggest positives, Frye said, is that it will cost Verizon IndyCar Series teams less money to convert their current cars than once believed. But perhaps more important is that because there are fewer and less expensive parts to the kits, the annual costs to teams for maintaining their cars will be 30% to 40% less than they are now.
The savings, he hopes, will encourage new teams to enter the series.
“You know what it costs,” Frye said. “The price is not going to go up. So we were able, fortunately, to lock in all the costs to the car, so it’s a good time to come in.”
Aesthetically, Frye continued, IndyCar has hit a home run with the retro-chic design. It has received rave reviews from fans, media members and drivers alike, and that was important after he and his team spent months looking at pictures of past iterations of Indy cars and picking out their favorite features from different eras. From there, they reverseengineered the car to give it a “historical feel but make it also a very forward-looking car.”
That was accomplished, in part, by ditching the rear wheel guards, which Frye and others believed made the car look bulky. Frye and his team also lowered the engine cover as well as the new smaller wings to give the car a trimmer, sleeker look that was made to resemble the fan-favorite machines of the early 1990s.
In its news release, IndyCar also boasted about an enhanced LED display system on each car, which previously showed what position the car was in, the time of a pit stop and when push-to- pass was being used, saying it will be more fan-friendly.
As far as making the car safer, Frye said they had significantly bolstered the side-impact protection of the chassis.
In response to a question concerning James Hinchcliffe’s and Sebastien Bourdais’ recent crashes, Frye said the improved sideimpact protection device would likely have helped reduce the severity of both. “This driver-sideimpact protection device piece is a big part of this new kit,” Frye said. “It would have addressed Hinch’s incident, and it would have addressed Seb’s incident, too, or it was areas that the car now is more robust, so it’s something we paid attention to. We made sure the drivers were involved with it.”
Among other safety measures, as previously mentioned, the wings are smaller and have fewer pieces, which should reduce the amount of debris in crashes.
As for the car being “more thrilling,” IndyCar expects that the car, lighter than before, will be faster at some tracks. And, as has been reported since the first rendering of the 2018 car was released, because many of the wings have disappeared from the top of the car and downforce will instead be generated from the bottom, handling of the car and passing should be easier.
Frye said that some of the downforce changes on the new car, long called for by drivers, were tested on old cars at MidOhio Sports Car Course recently. The results were what they had hoped for.
“We (saw that) drivers had the ability to pull up closer quicker and not run into the blanket of air or wake, and that really worked well there. So I would say probably 60 to 70 percent of the downforce is generated from the bottom of the car, where before it was 40 to 45 percent, so there’s been a big gain in that.”
Frye said what fans can look for Tuesday and Wednesday at the tests is for the series to keep checking off more boxes. It thinks it knows what it will see during the tests, but “data doesn’t drive.”
“We’re optimistic about (Tuesday), because we have all the wind tunnel testing we’ve done,” Frye said. “The drivers have been in the simulator with this car, so Oriol (Servia), Juan (Pablo Montoya) are both up to speed as much as they can be with today’s technology without actually being in the car, so tomorrow will be the first chance they get to sit in the car and drive the car.”