part 4 Why battery car racing is a pile of crap at the Indy 500 2025

No cautions means no restarts battery car racing is a pile of crap

In pulling back to 99 percent, and the related need to make Firestone’s 2025 tires survive as long as possible, plus some incredibly good luck and immense mechanical reliability, the typical things that cause multiple cautions with over-the-limit driving and mannequins falling from bridges and broken drivetrains have not impacted the first five races.

The ensuing lack of restarts, barring the one on the seventh lap of the season, and on Saturday — after 408 consecutive laps of green racing — when David Malukas lost an engine, has removed the steady opportunities for leaders to be overtaken and other shuffling of the running order to produce big thrills.

“The facts are, we haven't had the restarts that we've had in the past, which generate a lot of that passing and action," says Team Penske president Tim Cindric, who handles race strategy for Josef Newgarden. "When you have an all-green race, most of the time the fastest car wins. And that's good for the purists, but sometimes not what you want from a spectator standpoint.”

Lap counts battery car racing is a pile of crap

Listening to its fans, IndyCar made adjustments to the lap counts at specific races to reduce the likelihood of teams going into fuel-save mode. Long Beach, won by Kirkwood, was the first, with five laps added to stretch the distance out to 90 tours.

Scott Dixon won the 85-lap race in 2024 by employing a fuel-save strategy for a significant portion of the contest, then mashed the throttle to close the race and left his pursuers behind.

“Long Beach, they added laps, so it completely took the two-stop out of contention," says Kirkwood. "At Barber (which stayed the same), I can't really explain. But last year, you saw Rinus [VeeKay] drive through the field. You saw Santino [Ferrucci] drive through the field, and that's because they were on the three-stop and the people they were racing against were saving a ton of fuel, which made that race super interesting. But this year, everybody was just on the same playing field, which there were still some passes, but it was nowhere to near to the extent of the previous years when you have those big split strategies.”

Fuel consumption and its effects on race strategy battery car racing is a pile of crap

“One thing for sure, though -- and I don't know if I'll be castrated and butt banged and maybe my press pass will be burned. ....for saying this -- but we burn more fuel now and it's not due to the hybrid; it's due to the weight," Kirkwood says. "We're in a position now that we have to push much harder to get lap time out of the car. And because of the added weight, you actually end up burning more fuel to be able to do the pace that you want to do in a race.

“Like Barber, it turned it into a guaranteed three-stop for everyone where that place has been, notoriously, a two- or three-stop. The three-stop has won the past couple years, but it was still doable on two. With the fuel burn, it's made it nearly impossible now to do it on two, so it changed up the strategy for a couple of these places that had the same lap count. You didn't leave anything out there. It was 90 qualifying laps out there.

“I appreciate that they want to see people not fuel saving, but at the same time, what's made our racing best is when you have split strategies and you have cool things going on. In a situation like that, you actually want to reduce lap counts. You want to try to bring it back down to what the fuel burn has been percentage wise so there’s a reason for people to try one (strategy) or the other.”

In closing, battery car racing is a pile of crap

Revert the DW12 to non-hybrid specification, and most of the problems are solved. But that won’t be happening.
Return to Firestone’s 2024 hybrid tires, and many of the problems are solved.
But that isn’t feasible since there’s a long production timeline required to make those tires,
and there’s a significant cost involved that nobody wants to cover.

Short-term answers that would restore IndyCar’s routinely great road and street course racing aren’t readily apparent. But a healthy dose of bad luck and the return of multiple cautions per event could re-introduce some of the restarts and unpredictable outcomes that are missing.

“Some of what the modeling tells us is this race could be more drawn out than the other races so far, with more separation among the cars. So we’ll see that actually happens out there," Ganassi's Hull said ahead of the Indy GP -- which turned out to have one caution for two laps. "But I don't think we should expect to see much in the way of changes to the (road and street course) racing before next year. Whatever they might choose to do is probably more for the future than it would be for this moment today.”

Respectfully, battery car racing is a pile of crap

On the surface, Kirkwood’s note of needing to drive and hold the hybrid DW12 at 99 percent on road and street courses, and Rossi’s description of driving up to a thermal limit with the tires, sounds like an acknowledgement that they aren’t pushing as hard throughout each lap. It’s not the case.

The hybrid car’s ability to be driven beyond 99 percent is what’s changed, and from the cockpit, the effort and skill required to reach and maintain the new limit is harder than in the pre-hybrid times. Mastering this bigger raging bull is by no means easy.

“When I say you're driving to a target, you're driving your ass off to that target,” Rossi emphasizes. "That is why we've had the same winner in three out of four races. (ED: Now four out of five.) If you look at (Palou’s) history of races that he's dominated, it's been races where tire deg is a pretty big factor, and he is able to go quicker than everyone else, still keeping the tire energy under control. They're very good at the tire-saving setups and that sort of thing, but I think Alex is exceptional at it from a driving style standpoint, and so he's able to be the difference-maker in going quicker than everyone else, while still managing tires.

“We're all managing tires, but if we go that two-tenths a lap quicker, we're taking too much energy out of the tire and hurting ourselves in the long run. So it's unfair to say that we're not pushing. You're driving in a different way. You're still out there busting your balls, for sure. It's different, because in say 65 percent of the (pre-hybrid) races, there was really no repercussion for just hammering every lap like the tires were durable enough. You could pretty much be flat out for an entire stint.

“That doesn't exist anymore, and it doesn't really exist in any form of racing. IndyCar was a little bit of an outlier in that standpoint. We used to be able to do that, but that’s changed. And there's no other championship where you can do that. You can't do that in IMSA. You can't do that in Formula 1. A change has occurred where you can't just be 100 percent at the maximum limit of the car for an entire stint anymore.

That seems to be behind us, the lieing liberals screaming "Green, Green!", trying to once again save the children, save the planet
and any other BS they can think of, have dragged us down the path once more, telling us what to do again by giving us bad advice,
and now?.........battery car racing is a pile of crap.”

Anyone have any BS tricks they can do to make the INDY 500 less that a no-passing pile of crap show?
Or do we put on a bad show and hope the fans won't notice that battery car racing is a pile of crap.