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Brian Barnhart attempts to murder IndyCar drivers...
14 years ago
General
IndyCar Series race director Brian Barnhart, henceforth referred to as Brian Brainfart, has committed the most unacceptable, unforgivable, unfathomable error in the entire history of motorsports.
Brainfart has a history of making poor decisions in his tenure as IndyCar race director. He has frequently been criticized for lack of consistency, unnecessary penalties, and letting blatant rules violations go untouched. But now he has crossed a line never before crossed by any race controller in motorsports history.
And I'm only SLIGHTLY exaggerating when I refer to it as attempted murder.
Today's IndyCar race at New Hampshire Motor Speedway was unfortunately affected by weather. Unlike on road courses, rain tires can not be safely deployed on oval tracks, so when rain came the caution had to come out. It never got heavy enough to red flag the race, and the race was able to go back to green after an initial brief and very light shower was dried up quite quickly by the cars rolling around under yellow.
It was the second weather-induced yellow flag that caused the problem.
After several caution laps, Brainfart decided to go back to green over the constant protests of virtually every driver and team owner on the track. The result was a massive crash taking out several cars, and a red flag. The race was eventually called official(ten laps shy of scheduled distance), and the running order on the run up to the green flag was declared the official finishing order.
At the time the green was thrown, the track had more water on it than when the yellow flag was thrown. Only the simplest of visual analysis was required to see that condition were unsafe to proceed. Brainfart defends his choice by saying they heard nothing from any drivers, nor teams.
This is not a valid excuse. Brainfart should have been able to tell that the track was unsafe with no outside input. And it is most likely a complete lie - the teams were damn near yelling at the officials in pit lane, and Brainfart expects us to believe not one notified him? Epic fail.
Racing is dangerous, this is true. But it is expected that a degree of safety should be followed to minimize the likelihood of injury. To that end, going to green when it is physically impossible is considered crossing the line of acceptable risk.
The drivers and teams are all calling for Brainfart's head. He put the drivers in an unacceptably risky situation, and it is time for him to be removed. This "error" was so egregious that I hoenstly believe that Brainfart should be charged with felonious assault AT MINIMUM.
Brian Barnhart is a greater insult to racing than Nelson Piquet, Jr. And people who know me are well away of how much I despite Piquet.
Brainfart has a history of making poor decisions in his tenure as IndyCar race director. He has frequently been criticized for lack of consistency, unnecessary penalties, and letting blatant rules violations go untouched. But now he has crossed a line never before crossed by any race controller in motorsports history.
And I'm only SLIGHTLY exaggerating when I refer to it as attempted murder.
Today's IndyCar race at New Hampshire Motor Speedway was unfortunately affected by weather. Unlike on road courses, rain tires can not be safely deployed on oval tracks, so when rain came the caution had to come out. It never got heavy enough to red flag the race, and the race was able to go back to green after an initial brief and very light shower was dried up quite quickly by the cars rolling around under yellow.
It was the second weather-induced yellow flag that caused the problem.
After several caution laps, Brainfart decided to go back to green over the constant protests of virtually every driver and team owner on the track. The result was a massive crash taking out several cars, and a red flag. The race was eventually called official(ten laps shy of scheduled distance), and the running order on the run up to the green flag was declared the official finishing order.
At the time the green was thrown, the track had more water on it than when the yellow flag was thrown. Only the simplest of visual analysis was required to see that condition were unsafe to proceed. Brainfart defends his choice by saying they heard nothing from any drivers, nor teams.
This is not a valid excuse. Brainfart should have been able to tell that the track was unsafe with no outside input. And it is most likely a complete lie - the teams were damn near yelling at the officials in pit lane, and Brainfart expects us to believe not one notified him? Epic fail.
Racing is dangerous, this is true. But it is expected that a degree of safety should be followed to minimize the likelihood of injury. To that end, going to green when it is physically impossible is considered crossing the line of acceptable risk.
The drivers and teams are all calling for Brainfart's head. He put the drivers in an unacceptably risky situation, and it is time for him to be removed. This "error" was so egregious that I hoenstly believe that Brainfart should be charged with felonious assault AT MINIMUM.
Brian Barnhart is a greater insult to racing than Nelson Piquet, Jr. And people who know me are well away of how much I despite Piquet.
(BTW, I work for said state agency)
In 2005 during the F1 race weekend at Indianapolis, Michelin failed to provide tires that could be safely used on the track's extremely abrasive surface(the surface's diamond-grinded nature combined with the extreme G-load in the final turn was causing catastrophic tire failures with the Michelins, but not the Bridgestones). The governing body of the series, the FIA, refused to allow Michelin to bring in new tires, or install a chicane to lower speeds to a safe level, and the Michelin-equipped entries chose not to race. Only six cars contested the race(it became the only race win that year for defending champion Michael Schumacher).
The FIA was going to penalize the Michelin teams quite severely, but settled for a letter of apology signed by all the teams after the aforementioned law came to light. The Michelin teams would have committed a crime if they'd allowed the teams to race without better tires or the chicane installed.
In a world where we are struggling with gas prices day in and day out, why in God's name is it necessary to waste millions of gallons of fuel a year on such antics?
Automobiles aren't the concern right now. Saving fuel is. Doesn't anyone care about that?
The fact of the matter is, we have PLENTY of fuel on this planet if you look beyond just fossil fuels. With series like the American Le Mans Series(where isobutanol is quickly becoming the fuel of choice, and nearly everyone who doesn't use it has switched to E85) and IndyCar(100% Ethanol) proving that such fuels can be used, the research is advancing to make the racecars able to use them as efficiently as possible, which makes the road cars more efficient as the technology trickles down.
You're committing the same error everybody who complains about racing does: Complaining about something without doing the proper research. Racing isn't wasting fuel, they're providing us the technology that will get us the renewable fuels we need.
There is no actual need to conserve right now. As long as we make sure to not go balls-out insane we'll be fine - and the world is conscious enough of the fact that oil is a finite resource that it won't be happening.
Oh, and for the record, the combined fuel consumption of all the racing series on Earth still doesn't add up to "millions" of gallons of fuel consumed per year.
I can't really say too much about the series that don't have other fuel sources but to say this fuel situation we are under is still fairly new and businesses really don't like to change their ways that severely. Looking at them as businesses who are keeping people working behind the drivers might help a little for you.
The series that are doing what they can to test and promote other fuel sources will hopefully put you at ease, that even though it's not a perfect system there are those that care and are making the attempt at testing and promoting ways to save for regular street cars.
Seriously, around here it seems like the smaller a car someone drives, the bigger an asshole they become.
The Chevy Tahoe I was refilling came out to 23.1 MPG. His Prius? 13.5
I didn't hold him to the bet, but he sputtered out accusations that I did the math wrong(calculators don't lie when you put the information in properly). As I left the guy a pump over was lecturing him on how his driving habits were doing more damage to the environment than that SUV ever would.
What it comes down to is that around here people buy big trucks and SUVs solely because they need to use them, or because they want the added safety. While I don't agree SUVs are safer(they have a higher likelihood of rolling over in a crash, yet are exempt from rollover testing - as a result, most are not tested for rollover safety by the factories and most SUVs fail independently-performed rollover tests), the end result is that they're driven carefully around here either to prolong their life(in the case of work trucks), or to avoid crashes. This is an area with some nasty winters(though not the worst in the US), so I think being conscious of this results in some different attitudes up here.
Up here, we contest the "correct" choice of putting worn tires on the back of a car if you can only afford two new ones.
That's why I get further between fuel stops in my Windom despite my mothers Camry having a larger fuel tank.
The first problem is the nature of the tracks. Specifically, how they're driven and how that stressed the car. Road courses are all about hitting your marks without error and setting up drivers for perfect passes. Even when you're on the limit of a tire's adhesion, you're not putting the same kind of stress on them as when you're on an oval.
On an oval, even a short track like New Hampshire, everything's about speed. This pushes the tires -and the suspension- to extremes not seen on road courses. But the more significant factor is that the outside tires are stressed FAR harder than the inside, unlike on a road course where it gets balanced out over the course of the lap. To give an idea of how big it is, earlier this year at the Milwaukee Mile, Helio Castroneves ran ten laps with NP AIR PRESSURE in his left-rear tire. He never knew it was down because the right side takes all the cornering force, so the flat tire never delaminated. It stayed intact until a caution came out for unrelated reasons and the team was able to change the tire.
But back to the point, the result is that the outside tires on an oval need to be a very hard compound to be able to maintain grip - the extra forces applied to them make up for the lack of grip a harder tire has compared to a softer tire. However, in order to get ANY grip at all, a wet weather tire has to be an EXTREMELY soft compound. Like full slicks, the wet tires need heat to grip, and wet tracks are the enemy of keeping heat in tires. Additionally, they don't have the same level of adhesion under ANY circumstances as dry tires, so put them on the knife edge that is an oval track and even if you're tip-toeing around you'll find yourself in the wall very quickly.
The SECOND problem is in the soft compound itself. Put them in a situation where soft tires are a bad idea, and they lose their grip very easily - when tracks start drying, it can be more dangerous to be on a worn wet tire than on a slick. In racing school they teach you that a wet tire works better on a dry track than a dry tire works on a wet track, but this doesn't hold true for very long. Which brings us to the biggest issue of why wets don't work on ovals...
The banking. As you know, most paved ovals are banked. The result is that the water naturally drains off the track, and the hot tires evaporate the traces very quickly. If it's raining on an oval, it takes about two laps before it's too dry for rain tires on the banking. But at the same time it's not always ready for slicks, yet.
The closest you'll ever see to racing on an oval in the wet is at the 24 Hours of Daytona, where the road course uses parts of the oval. A couple years ago it was wet at the start, and almost the instant the rain stopped virtually every team put dry tires on. Even though the flatter infield was still quite wet, the banking was wearing down the tires too much at full speed. And they could make up on the banking what they lost in the wet infield just by trimming out some rear wing.
The one team that stayed on wets blew a tire two laps later going into turn one - coming off the banking. The tire blew at pretty much the best time, as he was entering the corner so the direction of travel took him away from the wall.
But that's pretty much the situation. The stresses of the oval and knife-edge driving requirements are simply too much for wets to safely handle.