New renderings for the BAT proposed 2012 IndyCar

These new renderings have made this car really come to life. I really like this car from the nose back to just behind the roll-bar, then it makes me want to puke. The body swooping up to the back wheels makes it look very difficult for the pit crew to change the rear tires without whacking their hands into the body. The rear wing looks weak and I'm not sure what they are trying to do with the rear bumper thing-a-majig.

A couple of Crapwagon posters put it well;

ChampCar1
All these designs pretty much utilize excess winglets that are not needed, and they try to make it look swoopy and futuristic but in the end it looks like a jumbled mess. The Swift and Lola look the best out of all the designs but even they are hard to look at aesthetically.

TheStranger
The EARL is equally as unnecessary, so it is not surprising that pointless hood ornaments are being added. Remember, the primary goal with any crapwagon is to "not resemble anything CC did", whether "anything" involves safety advances or aesthetic improvements.

McQueen and Le Mans

Cool helmet for the Luczo Dragon pit crew

Let's face it, if IndyCar wants to move forward and grow they need to start looking like a modern racing series.

To do that the first step is going to be start racing a car that isn't as old as my grandma's Buick. That's a big step and hopefuly one that is in the works, but one thing that could be done right now (albeit a little step) would be to update the pit crew guys with modern looking uniforms. Luzco Dragon is doing just that with some futuristic looking helmets that are right out of F1.




KV Racing however hasn't taken a step into the future and their guys are still wearing last century's headgear. It looks like those NFL fieldgoal kickers that wear the one-bar facemask with the bar moved down around their chin. "KV Racing lines up for the extra point attempt. Hike!"




Tagliani's team is about halfway there, old helmets but a cool looking shiney gold finish.


On a side note, NASCAR is worse than IndyCar. These guys don't even tuck in their shirts!


F1's McLaren Mercedes team has everyone beat though for the futuristic look.

Shaping IRL's car of future no easy task

(by John Oreovicz espn.go.com 4-5-10)

The Izod IndyCar Series had gained some leadership and direction in terms of determining its new engine and chassis formula for the future. But the decision remains controversial.

Spurred by the unveiling of the radical Delta Wing concept, there's been a lot of recent talk about the new chassis. But things have gone quiet on the engine front.

That is, until Roger Penske, the most successful team owner in Indy car racing history, stepped into the fray when he met with reporters at the Honda Grand Prix of St. Petersburg.

Citing cost concerns for the teams, Penske advocated introducing the new engine formula first and retrofitting it into the current Dallara chassis, which has been the default chassis of the IndyCar Series since 2003.

"Let's make each step one at a time rather than two steps at once," Penske commented. "I'm all about saving costs right now for all of the teams. I'm not sure if we change cars right now we are going to put 50,000 more people in the stands."

He added: "I don't think it changed NASCAR when we went from the old car to the [Car of Tomorrow], so we just have to look at it. Our team has probably got to have seven or eight cars, so you're talking $2-3 million, plus all your parts. I think they've got to consider that."

Indy Racing League CEO Randy Bernard has met with Penske, and he seems to be leaning toward delaying the introduction of a new technical package until 2013. It's a tricky situation to balance for Bernard:

On the one hand, public perception is that the IndyCar Series badly needs a new design to replace the aged and unpopular Dallara. On the other hand, in the current economic climate, can competitors -- even well-funded ones like Team Penske and Target Chip Ganassi Racing -- afford to make a major equipment change?

One point that shoots down Penske's argument is that the new engine formula is expected to lower engine costs, whether it is the turbocharged V-6 favored by current IndyCar supplier Honda or an inline-4 being pushed by alternate manufacturers.

Bernard is counting in particular on Gil de Ferran, who has been nominated as the team owner representative for the seven-member advisory committee chaired by retired US Air Force General William Looney.

"I think it's very important for Gil to do a team owner survey to see exactly what is important to the team owners," Bernard told reporters at St. Petersburg. "Can they afford, in this economic situation right now, to move into a new car in 2012? Do they like leasing their engines rather than owning their engines? Questions like that.

"I don't want to just shoot from the hip. We could have announced a car last week, and that would have created negative vibes among our fan base and our team owners and sponsors. We need a new car for perception, but if you look at how close some of these races are, the fans love the closeness of these races. We've got something working for us and we have momentum. We have more cars now than we have in the past four years.

"This is one chance that IndyCar can continue to build momentum by making sure this process is well done and well thought out," Bernard concluded. "If the advisory committee comes back and says we need to wait until 2013, we need to think about that."

While the chassis will provide the visual identity for the Indy car of the future, the engine is probably a more important element. Once again, a number of factors need to be considered. Obviously there is the basic format. What kind of fuel should the new powerplant use? How much relevance to street car engine technology should be part of the package?

My own transportation during the St. Petersburg race week was a 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid, a vehicle I was highly impressed by after driving it. The car's transition from electric to gasoline power was seamless and unobtrusive, performance was on par with a V-6 Fusion, and I averaged 35.5 miles per gallon in more than 300 miles of varied driving. The standard V-6 Fusion probably would have returned mileage in the low to mid-20s.

You could argue that relevance to street car technology is much more important to stock car racing. Of course, NASCAR is legendary in its refusal to adopt modern technology; its spec cars still feature carburetors some 55 years after fuel injection was introduced into Formula One, and the design of basic components such as the live rear axle date to the early '60s.

Formula car racing, on the other hand, has always been about new and advanced technology -- which often carries a higher price tag. But it also provides open-wheel racing with a bit of cache for serious gearheads who love to watch the development of the latest and greatest technology. It also offers car manufacturers an avenue to filter racing technology into their road cars and genuinely prove the adage "Race on Sunday, sell on Monday."

These are the questions the IndyCar technical advisory committee -- and ultimately Randy Bernard -- must grapple with. And with a decision on Indy car racing's future technical direction expected by June 1, time is running short.

Another Swift concept for the 2012 Indy car

Ok, now actually this car has got me hooked a little bit. If this one were to become reality I might actually come back to life. This one seems futuristic but at the same time not so far out of bounds that it makes you laugh. This one has caught a lot of people's eyes it seems since it was revealed and I wonder if we may have a winner.

Indy Car paint jobs, St Pete Grandprix

From above these cars actually don't look half bad. But.....


(Hideki Mutoh)


(Alex Tagliani)


(Takuma Sato)

look at them from street level and you'll remember why you hate them so much.

Bourdais too talented not to be racing

(by John Oreovicz espn.go.com 3-22-10)

With all due respect to Hideki Mutoh, in an ideal world, he would not be driving for Newman/Haas/Lanigan Racing in the Izod IndyCar Series this season.

Instead, the famous open-wheel team would field cars for its 2007 driver lineup of Sebastien Bourdais and Graham Rahal, both of whom have only limited racing programs lined up for the 2010 season.

Rahal tested Sarah Fisher Racing's Dallara-Honda Indy car at Barber Motorsports Park this week in preparation for the two race starts he expects to make for SFR. Meanwhile, Bourdais is racing a Peugeot prototype in the Mobil 1 12 Hours of Sebring, one of his rare scheduled outings for the French manufacturer.

It's easy to conclude that if NHLR founder Paul Newman was still alive, the team would have Rahal and Bourdais as its drivers and would be beginning to challenge Team Penske and Target Chip Ganassi Racing for IndyCar Series race wins on a regular basis. But Newman's death also effectively killed off NHLR's sponsorship agreement with McDonald's and the team's ability to attract other major sponsors, leaving it with no choice but to cut back to one car funded by Mutoh's Japanese backers.

Bourdais raced in the CART/Champ Car World Series from 2003-2007, winning 31 of his 73 races starts and four consecutive series championships. That performance finally earned the now-31-year-old Frenchman his break into Formula One, but after one and a half mostly disappointing years in F1, he was dropped in mid-2009 by the Scuderia Toro Rosso team. Bourdais rounded out 2009 by scoring a couple of race wins in the Superleague series, a minor-league European open-wheel formula.

Bourdais' perceived failure in F1 just gave international critics of Indy car racing more ammunition for their argument that the American single-seat scene is nothing more than a joke. He joined Michael Andretti, Alex Zanardi and Cristiano da Matta as U.S. open-wheel champions who flopped in F1. CART champions Jacques Villeneuve and Juan Pablo Montoya were more successful in their transition to F1, but also arguably failed to achieve their potential on a long-term basis.

The common denominator between Zanardi, da Matta and Bourdais is that they were all extremely active in terms of working with their engineers to get the most out of the car. In F1, they were forced to adapt their driving to the car they were given, with little or no input into changing the car setup. In American racing, drivers and engineers work in partnership, rather than hierarchy.

"In Champ Cars we also had a lot more things to play with in terms of car setup than we do in Formula 1," Bourdais said in an interview with ITV in 2008. "F1 is very much optimized, and whether the car functions or not, by design -- by concept -- it's not adjustable. Everything on the suspension is the way it is; if you want to change the castor, for example, you need a new suspension. So that limits the influence and the impact of driver comments in some respects. It's very different, and obviously when you fight a problem, it's much harder to find solutions and it takes much longer as well."

It's fascinating to speculate how Bourdais would fare if he was able to return to America with a team like Newman/Haas/Lanigan. Now that more than half of IndyCar Series races are run on road or street courses, he would obviously be a force on those tracks. But it's easy to forget that Sebastien won four of his eight oval starts, seven of which came against an admittedly depleted CART/Champ Car field. He was headed to a top-5 finish in his only Indianapolis 500 start (2005) when he was taken out in a late crash.

Craig Hampson, who was Bourdais' engineer at NHLR from 2003-07, believes that Bourdais was rapidly improving as an oval driver.

"Sebastien did struggle at Milwaukee the first couple of years, but I think the Indy 500 effort [in 2005] helped him at Milwaukee greatly," Hampson told me a couple of years ago. "You could tell at Milwaukee that he got it. ... He understood what to do now and what the car's capabilities needed to be so he could do well in the race.

"For sure the best win for me [in 2006] was Milwaukee, because we sat on pole at a place where people really didn't expect us to and we far and away had the fastest car. We had some adversity in the race with the cut tire, but we came back from that. It was a pretty entertaining race with Nelson Philippe, and all in all that was our finest moment of the year."

Bourdais will compete for Peugeot in the 24 Hours of Le Mans in June and probably at the ALMS Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta in the fall. But other than that, he has nothing else lined up for the rest of 2010 -- a travesty for one of the most talented open-wheel drivers to come along in recent years.