That race wasn’t going to happen. Because with Honda and Toyota, and Ford/Cosworth, they weren’t going to agree to do anything.
Cart’s 2001 Texas debacle: Silent running
Michael Levitt/Motorsport Images
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Marshall Pruett | May 2, 2021 5:42 PM
Chris Kneifel: That race wasn’t going to happen. Because with Honda and Toyota, and Ford/Cosworth, they weren’t going to agree to do anything.
Robin Miller: They had a meeting Saturday night with the engine manufacturers, and somebody from the track and somebody from CART said, “Look, how about if we put a chicane in the backstretch?” They’re like, “No.” “What if we take the wings off?” “No.” “Well, what if we turn the boost down?” “No.”
They were so desperate to try and figure out a way to keep the race going.
Mike Zizzo: The concern from my side was we had such a difficult recent history with driver fatalities and severe injuries. We’d lost Greg [Moore] and Gonzalo [Rodriguez] in ’99, and that still stung for everyone. So then you have Michael Andretti, maybe the most respected guy we have in the race, talking about how it felt like he had a 30-pound weight on his chest from all the G forces. I’m not gonna lie; it scared us. We got to a point where any idea was on the table. It was as far-fetched as making a chicane out of cones, if it would make things better.
Dr. Steven Olvey: We had all the engine people and anybody that had any mechanical knowledge trying to figure out how can we bring the G curve down and have a decent race. The idea of putting a chicane on the back straight didn’t make any sense. And they wouldn’t do anything really with the engines. The engine guys went crazy. They said you’ll screw up all the engines and they won’t be any good, you’ll throw them away.
Mike Hull, managing director, Target Chip Ganassi Racing: One of the big names from an engine manufacturer stood up and should have won an Academy Award for the acting job he put on for why they couldn’t detune their engines. It was reprehensible.
Various technical changes were considered to slow the cars down, but none satisfied all the interested parties. Motorsport Images
Tom German, race engineer for Gil de Ferran, Team Penske: I don’t want to say it was a surprise, because we certainly knew we were at unprecedented G levels. And our focus really shifts at that point more to what are the realistic possibilities to slow the cars down? We didn’t really go too far down the aerodynamic route. I think we had a pretty good handle on what the options were, and there was nothing that was going to make a significant difference in G loading that we had readily available to us, at the track, to change the aerodynamics.
Another race engineer who declined to be identified for this story recalled a period during a practice session where he was unable to find the point where raising the car would reduce underbody downforce and slow its cornering capabilities:
“We ran out of bright ideas on how to take speed away, I think we wound up at a three-inch front ride height and a five-inch rear ride height. And yet we kept going faster and faster. At Indy, that would be like 0.6 of an inch.”
Tom German: So we really looked at it from a perspective of even getting way outside the box on the engine RPM or the boost level; is it feasible to do something there? It was down to the engine manufacturers to make a big change to the horsepower. But they said they couldn’t because if they’d run at lower RPMs, there were resonances ranges that hadn’t been validated; I remember that as one of the arguments that people were presenting.
Capable of delivering more than 1000hp in qualifying, the beloved 2.65-liter turbo V8 engine formula was mesmerizing for fans and drivers alike. To make such power, small fortunes were spent; it was common to replace the motors in each car, after only 100-200 miles of use, at least once per day. Modern NTT IndyCar Series engines, making far less power, can go 10 times as long between rebuilds. But on the engine front at TMS in 2001, it was high power, high stress, and short life spans.
CART’s circus lived on the edge through the willingness of Ford/Cosworths, Hondas, and Toyotas to burn through bank vaults full of cash for our entertainment. There were also limits to the adventuresome fun.
Without pre-event engine durability testing to try some of the items being floated like running at lower revs, or with less boost to cut power and slow the cars, manufacturers were unwilling to take impromptu tuning risks in the middle of an event.
To German’s point, there were valid reasons to worry about introducing new vibrations and resonances to the motors. But were those concerns great enough to be completely inflexible? And to Hull’s point, the unwillingness to compromise in the slightest manner spoke to the myopic view taken by some in the room.
As engine manufacturers worried about their motors and, moreover, giving up an advantage that might emerge if one brand’s engine performed better in a detuned state, the health of the series and happiness of its new Texan fans were forgotten.
Wally Dallenbach, retiring CART chief steward: There was a fix, but nobody could agree on it. We could have done it with a twist of a wrench. We could have pulled four or five miles an hour out unilaterally from all the cars, take away boost, put in more wing. And nobody wanted it. It got to be a [matter of] selfishness or greed. You couldn’t get one group together to support the other group. Everybody said, “Well, if you do that, I’m going to take my cars home.” Nobody could come to a common ground and say, “In order to save the event, let’s all do this.”
Dr. Steven Olvey: And so this went on went well into the night. We didn’t get out of that meeting until about 11 or 11:30.
Robin Miller: Dario [Franchitti] was out walking his dog, I was leaving the track, and I rolled the window down and said, “What are you hearing?” He goes, “It’s a cluster ****. Nobody can agree on anything.”