part 2 battery car racing is a pile of crap at the Indy 500 2025


Firestone delivered on IndyCar's request for greater differentiation between its tire compunds, but it seems to have inadvertently been to the detriment of the racing. Joe Skibinski/IMS

The series’ best drivers are unable to attack the steering wheel, and each other, with the same daring road/street course passes that made for such great racing previously.

“The heavier any race car gets, the less forgiving it is for minor corrections," notes Andretti Global driver Kyle Kirkwood. "If you think about a 1500-lb open-wheel car versus a heavier sports car, you think of something nimble, fast, very direct. If you have a small snap (sideways moment), it’s a quick snap, a quick grab, and you're continuing on.

“Sports cars, on the other hand, if you start to slide, you just get a big, lazy slide. Now we're falling in between those two with the added weight. It’s a lazier car with added weight, no matter what you do power-wise. It doesn't matter if you put a 5000-horsepower engine in it -- if you add 100 lbs, it's going to be slower in the corner. That's just a given fact.

“And in some ways, you can't push the absolute limit, because as soon as you get to the edge, the car tips over more than what you had in previous years. The lighter the car, the more nimble it is, the more you can catch it, the more that you can push and get away with it. So now you're falling into this realm of needing to keep it at 99 percent, not 105 percent like you've seen in the past.

“It's mostly because it's just less forgiving," Kirkwood continues. "If you push to that 105 percent and you're all over the wheel, like maybe you've seen with Pato (O’Ward) in recent years, that's not actually the fast way to drive it anymore. You need to be smooth, concise, not sliding the tire with the way the weight has gone. And the weight distribution with where the weight lives is probably the bigger factor. It has migrated the type of driving that you have to do to get lap time out of the car.”

Those who prefer cars tuned with slight oversteer, or drive in a manner that induces the oversteer, have found a smaller margin of error while dancing on the edge with the 100 pounds, which Kirkwood describes as no longer playing above 99 percent. But we’ve seen some small oversteering moments since the hybrids arrived; it’s just a case of the frequency being greatly reduced.

Ed Carpenter Racing's Alexander Rossi offered a different take that speaks to understeer, the opposite handling phenomenon.
"Certainly, the hybrid has made the car really numb and unenjoyable to drive, and it's also added a lot of understeer," Rossi says. "So, that's a safer way to drive a car too, right? It's not that we're choosing to have this massive level of understeer, but you can't really get the car to the same oversteering that it once was. It’s just induced so much push that you can't really even spin if you wanted to. Like, you can, obviously, but the car is not free (to easily oversteer) anymore.

“When we added the aeroscreen, it overloaded the front axle, and so now it has nothing to do with where the weight is – high, low, forward, back; the physical capacity of the car and tire right now can't tolerate the higher weight. So the weakest link is the front, and that's what's obviously going to give up first.

“You’d think rearward weight would make it super-loose, and that's not the case because most of the time the front tire is what's struggling in the pure balance of the car to combat the added 100 lbs.”

Tire thresholds as a limitation battery car racing is a pile of crap

With the changes to the road racing tire compounds, and the excessive weight of the car placing extreme demands on those tires, the DW12 hasn’t been able to withstand the same level of abuse.

The riskier passing attempts under braking and into the corners seen in the pre-hybrid era, placing high loading on the tires, have been mostly abandoned in the name of managing tire life. In turn, green-flag racing has ruled the season.

“Even though it's not technically a fuel race for distance, it's a fuel race for tire life," says Rossi. "You're driving under the performance threshold, and so you're not as prone to mistakes. And then at Thermal, even though it's not a different tire, but because the (tire degradation) is so high there, it's a similar situation. Not from a fuel standpoint, but you're driving to a tire temp target to make it survive, so again, it’s the same sort of situation.”

Braking battery car racing is a pile of crap

Turn 5 at Barber Motorsports Park was a prime example of how the DW12 has changed with the hybrid weight onboard. Prior to the hybrid, the long run to the downhill braking zone and hairpin corner is where most of the passing happened, as driver after driver would shoot down the inside and take the position from a rival, often banging wheels and forcing those on the outside onto the dirt and grass. It was messy and made for great theater.

But those kinds of passes -- the daring lunges – were somewhat muted in 2025. Christian "Lunge-gaard" as FOX’s Townsend Bell has called the Arrow McLaren racer, certainly used Turn 5 to his benefit, and passes continued to happen into the corner, but it wasn’t the same aggressive use of the inside lane.

It was cleaner, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But Barber’s most dynamic turn for passing was transformed into any other anonymous corner because the new tires and weight won’t accept the same kind of spirited stopping and turning.

“My old friend Mr. Rossi and I were chatting about this after the race," relates Rob Edwards, Andretti Global COO and Colton Herta’s race strategist. "I don't think you can follow as close. It’s changed braking distances. That ability to get close enough to throw the car down inside or alongside it, I think that is not there as it was before.”