I’ll have to admit, paying alot of attention to Indy Car racing has not been on my priority list for about 25 years. The live feeds of practice and the full coverage of Pole Day on Versus now provide race fans with a tremendous amount of access. For me, it has raised a great number of questions about what it is I am actually watching.

In my best Dana Carvey voice…”Back in my day”, about the only thing identical on all the cars was the pop-off valve. Now I watch every driver with an identical chassis/ engine/ tire package, and weigh the advantages of this competitive balance against the ingenuity it eliminates.

There is apparently a very strict set of specifications enforced by the IRL, and I’d love to know where I can find them. Yes, it’s very clear that the overriding concern to limit the teams’ budgets is an imperative, now more than ever. Here’s a few of the limitations that have me scratching my head:

On Versus today, Day 1 of qualifying, I was told that each team receives only one engine. So I’m left to assume that you can trade your duff engine, or your broken one in the case of Wheldon today, for a fresh Honda off the assembly line. But nearly every entrant on the list has a T car, so that means there are 25 rollers in the garage which likely won’t be seeing the track. Does this mean that Jaques Lazier or Roger Yasakawa or any of the other guys looking for a seat can’t put a deal together to get into somebody’s T car? If they can come up with enough sponsorship money to cover a Honda engine lease, will that enable them to cut a deal to outfit one of these dormant cars? If so, they better get a move-on…Doornbus seems to be doing his best at depleting the excess inventory.

Paul Tracy was able to put a deal together (thank you, Monster), and his appearance is one of the few highlights on my spotter’s guide. Along with the major league score he has to settle, he has the look and demeanor of one of the Big Boys’ transporter drivers. Gotta love it. So today, one of the commentators says that Tracy’s limited engine lease carries with it a restriction on the number of tires he can run. Huh? That’s fair to the low budget teams trying to get into show?

I’ve seen different styles of rear view mirrors on the cars, and some front wing variations at Long Beach. What other design changes can be made within the template? Graham Rahal’s crew thought they found something today, and quickly had to reverse tack. An unspecified modification on “the left rear” was approved by tech inspection, so long as the car retained that exact configuration for raceday. My guess is that they removed or repositioned the gearbox cooler, or some other component, to reduce drag for qualifying: it would prove to be too detrimental to run the race in that configuration, and back to bone stock they went for re-qualification.

So how much tuning are the teams actually doing? Honda rubber-stamps and seals the engines, right? Firestone tells everybody what the optimium tire temperatures are, so the teams just have to get there, right? A little camber change here, a few pounds of spring rate there, minor tire pressure adjustments, crank on the wing angles and start waxing. I’d like to know how much more than that is being done within the confines of the rules.

Within the confines of the cockpit, the playing field seems alot more level and alot busier. My guess was that working the weight jackers and swaybars were the most important parameters that could be altered, and today all of the drivers were hearing “work with your tools” from the team managers. So it only stands to reason that the most experienced drivers would top the speed charts, along with teammates who are privy to their instruction.

If it’s more of a drivers’ game in equal equipment, that’s a good thing. That means the little guys should have as good a shot as the Big Boys…but then there’s that three or four MPH to account for. Penske, Ganassi and Andretti have the money, maybe they just have to be alot more creative in how they can use it to keep the advantage. Are they now demonstrating the benefit of hours in the wind tunnel, finding minute improvements that result in such a large cumulative effect at 225 MPH? There are reasons why Sarah Fisher is several MPH slower than Marco Andretti. I want to know what they are, so I can understand what I am watching.

“Back in my day”, I worked a short time for a guy named Ron Dawes. Freakin’ genius. He was testing sidepod tunnel design models with a cylinder head flow bench, and developing his own design for an improved turbo wastegate. I don’t know how much of his ingenuity ever made it onto the racetrack, but I know he was chief mechanic a few years later for Buddy Lazier’s Indy 500 winning entry.

I hope Buddy can put a deal together too. I hope he has the same chance to demonstrate his craft, and his use of the tools, to fight for supremacy against the Big Boys. But I don’t think the designers and the mechanics have the same chance: the limitations of the formula are too restrictive for that. And I think that now more than ever, the secret ingredient to making the most potent concoction is obvious when looking at the speed charts. That’s why on raceday, the rich will get richer.

Andrew Bernstein