Overheard at Pocono – Saturday
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| Alexander Rossi's team works on chassis setup |
It’s a few minutes before 5 p.m. here at Pocono Raceway. Final practice for tomorrow’s ABC Supply 500 is rained out and there will be no warm-up Sunday morning. So we figured, we’d catch everyone up on a few items we’ve gathered today here at Pocono.
To begin, we hear IndyCar is heading back to Texas Motor Speedway in 2019 with a multi-year agreement soon to be signed. Interestingly, the contract reportedly comes without an ‘exclusivity’ clause, as TMS President Eddie Gossage's previous stance was that IndyCar would not race at TMS if it scheduled another race in Texas.
However, the Indy Star rumored that IndyCar has offered a cheaper sanctioning fee and/or made other financial arrangements which, in theory, would cover any losses TMS takes should IndyCar schedule another race in Texas.
At the moment, IndyCar has 15 confirmed races for the 2019 schedule: St. Petersburg, Long Beach, Barber, two races at Indianapolis, the doubleheader in Detroit, Road America, Iowa, Toronto, Mid-Ohio, Pocono, Gateway, Portland and Laguna Seca.
Mark Miles confirmed that IndyCar’s race schedule would remain at 17 and said he expects to announce a mostly complete calendar around Labor Day.
We hear that IndyCar is in talks with three tracks and that up to two could possibly be added to IndyCar’s schedule. Mi
AR1 bumped into INDYCAR Director of Engineering Jeff Horton today. Amongst Horton’s many projects has been the development of a windscreen for Indy cars. Horton said the series is currently waiting to receive two new versions of the windscreen from PPG. While INDYCAR is not a priority customer of PPG at the moment, Horton noted that he hoped the series would be able to test the new windscreens this fall. And if all goes well, the series hopes to run a windscreen full-time by next season. Furthermore, the windscreen is apparently going to have tear offs to prevent against the accumulation of oil, insects and the like.
Last, Horton indicated that Formula One may be interested in adopting a similar apparatus to the IndyCar windscreen, as drivers have complained about the imperfections of the halo currently in use in F1.
As you likely know, we at AutoRacing1 have advocated for greater consolidation in the junior formula racing ranks. In particular, we have put forth the merits of IndyCar adopting the FIA standard. We ran this idea by Dan Andersen earlier today and he agreed with our basic premise.
He also was keen on Honda taking over the engine supply for the Road2Indy ladder from the departing Mazda. Honda supplies the SCCA F3 and F4 engines and Andersen was in agreement that replacing USF2000 with F4 and replacing ProMazda with F3 makes a lot of sense
A Honda spokesperson said that scenario is interesting, but the biggest issue is in SCCA the drivers get much more track time than an IndyCar weekend. That could be overcome with some standalone F4 and F3 events.
We spoke with Ed Jones, driver of the No. 10 NTT DATA Chip Ganassi Racing Honda. Jones told us that while he would like to be back with Ganassi in 2019, he is as of yet, unsigned.
Former Chip Ganassi Racing driver Sage Karam is here this weekend. The 2013 Indy Lights Champion and native of nearby Nazareth, PA finished 26th in this year’s Indianapolis 500 driving for Dreyer and Reinbold Racing. He made an effort to run in his hometown race this weekend but was unable to generate the necessary funding.
While Karam was obviously disappointed to not be running this weekend, the efforts to land a ride for Pocono may not be in vain, as Karam may run next weekend’s race at Gateway.
“It could happen," said Karam, who sounded cautiously optimistic.
While were unable to confirm what team Karam may be driving for, as of now, Harding Racing has no driver confirmed for next weekend. We shall see.