Recent Zanardi Interview

[christcc2]

He seems to get it. Dario and Tracy drove in the past with the CART monsters. All of the drivers with the most experience that still have a connection to CART/Champ Car are calling for the same thing.

Please please I hope Cotman listens.

http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/95688

[GolddustMini]

quite an informative article i thought, especially given the hanforth wing wearing michigan and fontana races and the parallels with current problems of pack racing

[gttouring]

This is a great point of view, I can't argue with zanardi and he has seen almost the worst of it, he survived and is living legend to me.

[Teretonga]

Thsi interview was a cracker.
A number of posters to the forum have argued there is something wrong with the Dallara that makes it 'fly' when contact is made or debri is collected.
There is a very important point that Zanardi makes about the current set up of the cars on the high speed ovals.
Because the wing angle is mandated, giving the cars more downforce than is necessary, but at the cost of higher drag, drivers have been altering the pitch of the cars, setting them up with raised noses (nose high, up to 7cm?)in order to minimise the drag effect of the rear wings. This makes them faster around a whole lap than if they were running in a flatter configuration.

It doesn't take a magician to realise that if the car is pitched nose high already. and trimmed out for minimum drag from and rear, (but still retaining the high downforce rear wing settings) that it won't much of a ripple for the front to take off. The Franchitti and Andretti somersaults were both extreme examples of what happens when even a small bump lifts the nose or unsettles the equilibrium of the car under these settings.

So the problem isn't car design (I actually doubt if a current F1 car would have stood up as well as the Dallara to the pounding that the Wheldon, Power, Pippa Mann and Hildebrand cars got at Las Vegas) but the regulations and quite frankly that is easy to fix.

Allowing even the current cars to run with optimum settings as chosen by the rivers may not have produced wheel to wheel side by side racing but it would create a far greater differentiation between cars, allowing greater demonstration of driver skill.

Bernard qnd the Hulmans really have to have a long hard look at the regulations and decide what Indycar is really about, and which way they want to go in the future.

We have lost a high profile racer from Indycar and from MotoG in each of the last two weekends. While some have held up both NASCAR and F1 as examples of 'things done properly I personally doubt it.

I don't wish anything bad on anyone but some of the comments have been downright arrogant and thats an invitation for fate to step in and close the mouths of such arrogrant uttering. We have a F1 race and a Nascar race this weekend. I just hope we don't have a third weekend in a row where we come away saddened at the loss of another.