Milwaukee Sunday Notebook

Vitor Meira was cleared to race this morning by the IRL doctors. He was not immediately cleared last night after a hard hit, in which he punched a hole in the SAFER barrier.
The major complaint of "unified" ("unified" is the official IRL word for former Champ Car teams and drivers) teams this weekend is a lack of time. They have been working 60-80 hour weeks since they got their cars in an attempt to become competitive. They simply don't have the time to do wind tunnel testing, or on-track testing, or even in some cases, to assemble their spare cars. None of them anticipates time to catch their breath until after the Chicago race in September.
There are more than a few CART and Champ Car shirts and hats here this weekend. It turns out that Wisconsin still has lots of Champ Car fans, and many of them tell me that they read AutoRacing1.com.
When the IRL sits down with engine manufacturers this summer to look toward the next generation of Indy motors, virtually everything is open to discussion, including diesel power. Indy is keeping an eye on emerging alternative power sources, and should a group of manufacturers want to pursue biodiesel then discussions would begin on that front. Indiana has a booming soybean-based biodiesel industry, akin to the Midwest's booming corn-based ethanol industry. No word on the possibilities of turbine power, steam power, or dilithium crystal warp cores.
Don't look for changes in the Honda – Dallara formula in the near future. The IRL is aware that making the unified teams go from DP01 to Dallara to something new in the space of 2 years would spell disaster for some of the teams. Most likely, any new motor and chassis changes would take effect for the 2011 season for the Indy series, and either one year earlier or one year later for the Indy Lights.
Have a camera? Want to make the IRL people nervous? If you do, take pictures of the Indy cars when the engine covers are off. As it turns out, little black boxes are sprouting like spring mushrooms under those engine covers, measuring things like ride height (or so we're told). Then again, it's not above some of the teams to play mind games with the competition by installing bogus parts.
The engine noises from an Indy Lights car is not far removed from the sounds of the vintage Indy roadsters that are putting on an exhibition at Milwaukee. That will change this winter, as all motors are being rebuilt with a different crankshaft configuration to make them higher-revving, and therefore sounding more like an Indy car should sound. This motor has been tested on both ovals and road courses, and the crews are eagerly anticipating the change.
Should Graham Rahal win today's race, it will be the 8th time that Newman/Haas/Lanigan Racing has seen victory lane at Milwaukee in an Indy car. N/H/L is followed by Team Penske (6 wins), and AGR (3 wins). Tim Wohlford reporting from Milwaukee