More and more people are voicing their concerns regarding the qualifying system in use for the Indianapolis 500 and, in those harsh economic times, many observers believed that four days of time trials is way too much.
Many of the teams competing, some would say most of them, are waging two battles at the same time. First, they fight to have a decent spot on the starting grid and, most of all; they are spending a lot of energy in trying to secure enough sponsorship money to be able to be on the track. There are not enough cars, sponsors or money to justify four days of time trials; only allowing 11 cars to make the show on opening day is too costly for the smaller teams. It's a waste of time, tires, engines and labour as it hurts mostly the smaller teams that can't afford to keep pounding around the track. More and more people in the paddocks believe that there should be no limitation on the number of cars allowed to make the grid on the first day of qualifying. One suggestion would be that from noon to 5 p.m. on Pole Day, qualifying should be open to everyone that wants to post a time. Whether it's 14 or 24, they're ranked in order of speed but then, at 5 p.m., the fastest 11 all get one more run to determine the pole and the other top 10 slots. Then, on the second day of qualifying, except for the first eleven, every team could have the possibility of choosing between getting back on track and trying to better their ranking on the grid or plainly keeping the place they earned on the first day and hoping they won't be bumped. Photos: IMS - Chris Jones
Recent Articles
|
Racing Multimedia
Recommendations |