IndyCar teams tired of being fleeced by Dallara

According to this speedtv.com article, IndyCar team owners are tired of being overcharged for replacement parts by Dallara and they are not going to take it anymore. And after months of little to no progress being made, a more solution-minded dialogue has slowly started to build.

But with patience in the paddock beginning to wear thin, and according to multiple sources, owners are willing to solve the problem on their own if the series fails to bring costs down in a timely manner.

After detailing the cost overages for the series at Long Beach in April, owners met with the series at Iowa for their latest round of discussions and held firm to their call for a 40 percent reduction.

The series reportedly negotiated somewhere between a 10 and 20 percent reduction with Dallara, which the owners rejected last weekend, and now Brian Barnhart, who is leading the initiative on behalf of INDYCAR, is looking for ways to get closer to the 40 percent mark.

This is the same Brian Barnhart who announced he was sole-sourcing the entire car to Dallara before AR1.com pressured him on the subject in the media center at Watkins Glen before a room full of people, saying why would you do that and not put it out to open bid and get the best price and design. So he formed the ICONIC committee that he was on and influenced and the end result was that the entire car, sans the bodywork, was sole-sourced to Dallara anyway. So Barnhart ultimately got what he wanted.

Dallara (and probably Barnhart) came up with some cockamamie pricing that brought the purchase of the new car in cheaper than the old one, but no one required a replacement price list be submitted by all the companies as part of that bid, so Dallara is now fleecing the team owners bank accounts charging exorbitant prices for parts…..parts that can be manufactured locally in Indy for far less money.

The Tony George and Brian Barnhart legacy is alive and well in the IndyCar paddock.