re: 2025 Indycar and IMSA Thread (Indycar Toronto)

Very interesting tidbits from this weeks Unverified

- Arby’s is coming on as primary sponsor for Prema for the 500.

-Schwarzy winning the pole may have saved the teams long term chances. Apparently rumors on the team being sold

- Denny Hamlin may be starting an Indycar team and running the double in 2027

- Jimmie Johnson looking to buy into an Indycar team

- current team principal looking to move into another team as co- owner

-multiple investors looking to buy into or start Indycar teams (I could see Coyne selling soon)

- Honda furious about the latest Penske scandal

Good to see more sponsors coming on board. The series has a lot of potential, I just feel like it’s still run as a mom & pop operation.

Maybe. Tim may move over to NASCAR Penske in some fashion. This is more about saving face in IndyCar. They all knew it had to be done.

Tim is out of there … I could see Andretti , ECR, or Prema picking him up when the dust settles

Does anyone else want Austin?

My takeaway is that there's probably not a car in any form of racing on the planet Earth that is totally legal and not a team in any form of racing that isn't going to push and even break the envelope in an effort to win, but when you are busted you take your medicine without complaining; if you own the series and a team as well you're held to a different, higher standard; and in any corporate operation if the underlings embarrass the guy whose name is on the shingle, the underlings generally wind up out the door.

Cindric’s tweet: sounds like a lawsuit is incoming

Tim is gonna sue Roger?
Bold strategy.

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Article with details of what happened.

motorsport.com

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Thanks for posting that. I had previously seen that headline but didn't bother to click on it. But it's very informative. These are my takeaways from the article:

1. There is an explicit list of parts that "may be blended to reduce uneven surfaces and gaps. Hard edges may be tapered or blended," and the attenuator was not on that list. So it's clear to everyone that you can't touch the attenuator.

2. I do believe that Penske did it for aesthetic reasons. I feel like they've always been very anal about image, and this fits in with that. If the timing was that the modification first appeared at the Indy 500, it would have looked worse.

3. I agree with the article that the biggest problem here is with the technical inspections that should have noticed this last year. If they had discovered this anywhere other than the Indy 500 it would have been a minor incident. But since everyone knows that finding speed at IMS is about every little detail, this looked bad.

4. By the rule book, they should have stayed in the top 12. But since Penske owns the series and the Speedway, I think it was the right decision to put them at the back of the field, because the optics are so bad with this incident and St. Petersburg put together. And I think Penske needed to fire people because of the multiple incidents, despite Cindric saying he "had a clear conscience."

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I would like to see an independent engineering firm perform a flow analysis to determine if an advantage was gained.

I have to believe Dallara has already done the testing.

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It would be interesting to see, considering how critical it is at Indy to reduce drag.

But in the article, it appears that everyone is of the opinion that it doesn't help:

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Smoothing out bodywork on a race car will often lead to speed as it can allow air to flow in a smoother manner over the car and reduce drag so the first assumption is that a smoothed out attenuator could be a performance gain but discussions with industry experts prove otherwise.

Discussions with engineers, body fit specialists, and drivers all led to the conclusion that there isn’t laminar flow across the sides of the rear attenuator which means that the airflow over the car isn’t close enough to the side of that attenuator for a rough step or smoothed out transition on those pieces to make a difference to the airflow coming off the back of the car. The fact that the modified attenuators were found on road courses as shown in the images above also appears to corroborate these theories since the modified parts were installed outside of ovals where drag isn’t a focus as much as we see it at places like the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

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