Most race fans think driving an Indy car on the 2.5-mile Indianapolis Motor Speedway is a piece of cake. Look: there are just four corners and they’re all taken flat out! Mmmm… Reality is quite different from that.
The set-up of the car essentially dictates the speeds reached on an oval. A badly set-up car will never run at the front of the pack. Auto123.com recently spoke with Canadian driver Alexandre Tagliani, the driver of the new FAZZT Racing Team. This year, the cars reach average speeds of some 226 mph.
“For me, Indianapolis is the track that offers the greatest number of challenges at all levels,” Tagliani told Auto123.com. “Tag” finished 11th last year at Indy and was named Rookie of the Year. “The Dallaras are not fitted with the big wings you see on the road courses and on the one-mile oval,” Tagliani continued.
“The superspeedway wings are very small and almost flat. They generate very little downforce. In fact, they generate just 2000 pounds of downforce at full speed while the car only weighs 1656 pounds. So we’re really driving on the edge. I can tell you that we’re not going around the corners flat out,” he added. The veteran added that contrary to common belief, the four corners are all different. “On a small oval, the corners are quite long and you have time to feel the car getting loaded while you turn in,” Tagliani explained. “You have some time to react if something goes wrong because the banking of the track keeps the car balanced in the corners. Here at Indianapolis, it’s the complete opposite. The corners are all 90 degrees left-handers and they are very short. There’s a banking of 9 degrees but just at the apex of the corner while the rest is flat. When you enter a corner, what you see straight ahead is a concrete wall. When you turn in, you have no time to react. If you turn in too early or too late, boom, you’re in the wall. The cornering phase is extremely short. If something happens, it will happen at the apex and then there’s nothing you can do to control it. You just react to it,” the driver said. Tagliani explained that a fast car must have good mechanical grip while generating very little aerodynamic drag, so it reaches a very good top speed. Unfortunately, this makes the car very twitchy to drive. Ride height is also critical. When the tires heat up, tire circumference increases and ride height also increases, therefore changing the aero balance of the car. All of this must be well known and calculated by the engineers. “We must change the set-up of the anti-roll bars and the weight jacker while driving around the race track,.” Tagliani added. “This is not easy to do between corner 1 and 2, and between 3 and 4 because it’s very short and we only have one second of so to do the adjustments. There’s also another thing: the Indianapolis speedway is so vast that conditions change for one place to the other. The direction and the force of the wind also change from one corner to the next. And when there are 250,000 spectators sitting in the grandstands on race day, the air moves differently. This creates funnels of wind that alter the road handling of the car. It’s really weird. The track is also very sensible. If one cloud passes in front of the sun, track condition changes, as well as grip,” Tagliani described. The Canadian concluded about his chances at Indy “Although we ran a pretty conservative set-up over in Kansas, the car worked very well on that short oval, which is a good sign for Indy. The FAZZT Racing Team worked hard to streamline the bodywork of the car to reduce drag. This year, I know the track and its subtleties. And I’ll have the chance to have a teammate in Bruno Junquiera. With two cars on the track, we’ll be able to collect twice the data,” Tagliani concluded.
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