IRL delays engine plans, hmmm….

UPDATE Well, the Indy 500 is over and we are still waiting for the IRL to announce their new engines rules that were supposedly ready to go before Indy. What is taking so long? Answer, they had no plan or it would have been announced by now. Now that Honda is the only company left, the new rules will be just what Honda's Robert Clarke said they should be – no major change from the current formula. And who are the IRL to argue. They are beholden to Honda, for should Honda also pull the plug (a la Toyota and Chevy) it would probably be curtains for the IRL. We wonder if this sequence of events was outlined all along in the IRL's much touted 5-year business plan. 05/12/05 The IRL is delaying the announcement on its 2007 engine formula until after the Indy 500. IRL president Brian Barnhart said he didn't want it to become a distraction to the manufacturers or the teams. Indy Star [Editor's Note: The IRL has always made big announcements when there was good news for the series during the month of May when all the media is present at Indy. We take this delay as meaning one of two things. Is it a further indication that Honda and Toyota won't announce they are behind IRL's new engine rules which will generate a lot of negative media and doom and gloom, or are there talks between Champ Car and the IRL going on behind the scenes thereby delaying things? After all, if a common engine platform is in the works, and the IRL is thinking production based (which will fail miserably – they tried that already) and Champ Car thinking pure racing as in Cosworth quality, there must be a meeting of the minds. Honda's Robert Clarke has already gone on record as saying they won't support a dumbed down production based engine formula. We have heard rumblings that what might be planned to try and keep Honda in the fold is for a Cosworth powerplant to be badged with an American manufacturer such as Chevy or Ford (Cosworth has a relationship with both) to compete head-to-head with Honda, and to come up with a common engine for the two series that is appealing to the manufacturers as well as the fans. We have to think that Honda would want to see a merged series as well. Since Champ Car wants to stay turbo to attract the tuner crowd, we go back to the 1.8-liter turbo idea floated by the manufacturers years ago. It's small, it's light and it's a challenge to make big HP from such a small displacement – but small displacement turbos are the future in passenger cars – decent power and high fuel mileage.]