The major takeaways from IndyCar's return

It was a very different atmosphere than normal at Texas Motor Speedway on Saturday as the IndyCar Series finally got its season underway.

Three months after the season was supposed to start at St. Petersburg in March, the first major open-wheel race to be held since the COVID-19 pandemic took hold was held in front of empty grandstands after practice and qualifying had been staged earlier the same day.

Scott Dixon eased to a comfortable win for Chip Ganassi Racing after team-mate Felix Rosenqvist's late crash, and despite fears that reduced stint lengths could result a return of pack racing, there were few incidents of note. There were, however, plenty of talking points to discuss.

Why Ganassi excelled

Towards the end of the 2018 season, the first with the current aerokit, Chip Ganassi Racing had a thorough rethink of its roadcourse setups, feeling Andretti Autosport and Team Penske had edged ahead in their packages. None of the team is likely to go into specifics until Scott Dixon retires or at least until the current spec chassis is ditched, but his long-time race engineer Chris Simmons and technical director Julian Robertson got their heads down and started thinking outside the box.

They came up with a slight shift in philosophy that would require a slight shift in Dixon's driving style. It produced the goods and the end result was enough to ensure Dixon sealed the 2018 title, his fifth.

By the end of last season, in which Dixon finished 'only' fourth in the title race, the team's new bugbear had become inconsistency on oval tracks. It wasn't that Ganassi cars were poor, but they weren't guaranteed to be exceptional across the five ovals on the schedule - Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Texas, Iowa, Pocono (as was), and Gateway. One team that had looked fine on ovals in 2018 and '19 was Dale Coyne Racing, and DCR driver Santino Ferrucci's race engineer Michael Cannon - a serious fan of Dixon - was available...

Lo and behold, it came to pass: in the autumn, Simmons moved up to the competition manager role, Cannon was drafted in as his replacement on Dixon's #9 car, and between them and Robertson, they have spent this artificially elongated off-season focused on ovals. Last Saturday's performance by Dixon would suggest it paid off - handsomely.

"I know we'd been working extremely hard on just trying to fix some of the issues we had last year," said a delighted Dixon post-race. "We have some new people, plus a ton coming back over from the [Ford] GT program [to run third driver Marcus Ericsson].

"The engineering depth and everything got a lot stronger, so development was good through the winter..."

While Dixon was nipped to pole position by a great effort from Penske's reigning champion Josef Newgarden come the race, no one looked to be in Dixon's class. He looked comfortable tracking Newgarden for most of the first stint and, as the Tennessee native started complaining of tyre chattering, Dixon took command. A slightly tardy pitstop dropped him back behind Newgarden at one stage, but a brave pass into Turn 1 on Lap 91 resolved the issue and he pulled away with ease.

"It was just nice to drive in traffic, I never really had to push too hard. It's not often you get a car like that" Scott Dixon

In fact, Dixon's toughest opposition in the final quarter of the 200-lap race was team-mate and series sophomore Felix Rosenqvist, and the Swede shouldn't take it ill when I say that his performance provided the biggest indicator that Ganassi was in a league of its own at TMS.

Dixon, now with 47 wins to his name - the first coming on the Nazareth oval back in 2001 - is someone we long ago realised could excel in pretty much any circumstance. Rosenqvist, probably the most versatile 20-something in motorsports, struggled on ovals last year, and while we expect development and self-improvement from this exceptional young man in every off-season, seeing him rocket past the likes of Newgarden and Simon Pagenaud then leave them for dead was still unexpected.

That he then threw it away with a heat-of-the-moment attempt to lap James Hinchcliffe will not have gone down well at CGR, but Rosenqvist is a racer who felt a potential win was up for grabs. As an onlooker, I give him credit for not just settling for an easy runner-up finish - but equally, I would understand bill-payer Mr. Ganassi not sharing that view...

Regarding how Ganassi had reached its position of supremacy at TMS, the most intriguing insight came from Dixon after the race.

"The DIL, the simulator with Honda that we've been using for the last three weeks in preparation for Texas, has been really good," he said. "Lots of things we didn't think we would try or have the time to try on track, we were able to do that [which] gave us some ideas. We were able to sort of verify them once we got here.

"We worked pretty hard on trying to calm the entry and exits, especially of Turns 1 and 2, from last year. That's what got really tricky. I think [Colton] Herta last year was really good. He was able to sit a little bit high, arc that corner a lot more than we were able to.

"[So] we worked on that a lot in the simulator. We found some things that seemed to work. You never know if that's going to work in real life [but] as we rolled off, it did straightaway. The car felt really secure.

"The car just had some really good speed. It was just nice to drive in traffic, I never really had to push too hard. It's not often you get a car like that."

Dixon then returned to one of his pre-event narratives - that he felt the series had overreacted to the 'unknown' of the 2019 Firestone tyres on cars with a new aeroscreen-affected center of gravity, when it imposed a 35-lap limit per set. He was probably exaggerating when he commented, "I think we could have gone 65 laps!" but on a night when two of the Penske drivers struggled to keep their tyres under them, Dixon could be forgiven for throwing salt in his rivals' wounds.

He clearly believed before they arrived at Texas that Ganassi had the edge on tyre management - and even when abiding by the series-imposed stint length limit, he was proven right. Dixon, Simmons, Cannon and Robertson have again proven that the best can stay the best if they continue to investigate, learn and apply their findings.

Tyre woes hamper Penske trio

If Ganassi shone, Penske flattered to deceive - which may, on the face of it, sound a curious statement given that its three cars qualified 1-3-6 and two of them finished on the podium. However, the fact that first Newgarden and then Pagenaud suffered tyre issues despite the reduced stint lengths suggest the team has much work to do.

"We were not very good," said Newgarden. "Early on I was doing everything I could to keep Scott behind, he was way quicker.

"I think we had good speed in the car, we just did not have a perfect handle on what we needed over a full stint. We'll be working hard to come back and make sure we understand why that was.

"If there was more practice, we would have had some clues to point out maybe we weren't as strong as we thought we were going into the race" Josef Newgarden

"Honestly, tonight for me was a night of hanging on. I was doing everything I could just to try to stay up front... It's one of those nights you just got to kind of swallow your pride. Third place for us feels almost like a win tonight."

Later on, asked about the challenges of having the event compressed into one day, Newgarden commented: "The hardest part for me was thinking that we made the right decisions going into the race, and about 15 laps in realising that we were horribly off the mark!

"I think if there was more practice, more of a lead-up to this event, we would have had some clues to point out maybe we weren't as strong as we thought we were going into the race."

Later he added that the calculations based around the effect of aeroscreen weight on tyre degradation meant that he and race engineer Gavin Ward "took a little bit of a guess on our car. It didn't come out as a winning guess. It at least gives us a direction. We're going to work with it and figure out what's best for it."

Interestingly, Pagenaud said he and race engineer Ben Bretzman entered the race with a quite different philosophy.

"We decided to restart with what we had last year because there were too many unknowns," said the 2016 IndyCar champion. "The car has changed a lot technically. The tyres obviously seeing a very different effort, I would say. Obviously, the degradation factor was different than what we expected.

"When you only have an hour and a half of testing, you only have time for three changes, quick fixes, but it's not like you can reinvent the wheel and go into qualifying and race with something you haven't even tested on track.

"It was pretty much a day today where you had to unload good to win the race. I think we were OK - we were actually getting pretty good at the end, we just ran a bit out of time. But overall I think we maximised what we had."

It would have been interesting to see if their teammate Will Power might have ended up second (no one's kidding anyone that we had the right winner) because he didn't suffer the same tyre issues as Newgarden and Pagenaud and felt his car was good - albeit while running a tick off their pace at the start of stints, in order not to drive in the dirty air of other cars.

That sort of tyre management tactic might have paid dividends, but Power's efforts were nullified by a pitstop in which the right-rear tyre changer fumbled and the 2014 champion was sent on his way before said crewman had finished his task.

Electronic glitch neutralises Hunter-Reay, Rossi and Rahal

Luck is something difficult to define with top-rank racecar drivers. The big picture view is that they have wonderful and devoted families, they get to do something that they love and they are well remunerated. But in racing terms there are two current IndyCar drivers who are about as fortunate as stowaways on the Titanic. One is Power, whose latest disappointment we've already covered, and the other is 2012 champion Ryan Hunter-Reay.

RHR shunted his Andretti Autosport in practice on Saturday, but displaying an admirable confidence turnaround since his dispiriting 2019, bounced back to qualify fourth. Then he, teammate Alexander Rossi (who was to start eighth) and Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing's Graham Rahal (qualified seventh) found their Honda engines wouldn't start on the dummy grid.

"While not a frequent problem, it is something that has occurred previously. Our engineers are aware of the issue, and had they been in their normal position at the car for the engine start, could have quickly resolved it" Allen Miller, HPD

Due to social distancing rules, neither Honda nor Chevrolet engineers were allowed to attend to their engines and plug in their laptops for the startup procedures, so there was no way to swiftly resolve the issue.

Allen Miller, HPD race team leader, explained: "The problem is the result of a software communication issue between the Honda electronics and Cosworth's ECU that sometimes arises during the startup procedure. While not a frequent problem, it is something that has occurred previously. Our engineers are aware of the issue, and had they been in their normal position at the car for the engine start, could have quickly resolved it."

While Hunter-Reay's and Rossi's crew swapped out their cars' ECUs on the dummy grid on pitlane, RLLR pulled Rahal's car back to the pitbox to have a Honda engineer reset the electronics and fire up the engine. Unfortunately, all three cases breached IndyCar's parc ferme rule preventing work on cars between qualifying and the start of the race in this one-day event.

All three were therefore handed drive-through penalties, and Rossi's delay was exacerbated by then speeding on pitlane and having to serve another drive-through. Although Hunter-Reay eventually recovered to clinch eighth place, Rossi could only salvage 16th, while 2016 Texas winner Rahal was a further place behind, having also served a stop-and-go penalty for exceeding the 35-lap tyre stint limit.

Hunter-Reay, whose race thereafter appeared faultless, still probably couldn't have tackled Dixon - but nor can one dismiss the idea, either. On his best days, RHR is as good as anyone and, given cleaner air near the front of the pack and his traditionally brave approach to oval racing, he might have been a victory contender.

At the very least, he could have landed a podium given the Penske drivers' issues, and while Zach Veach upheld the Andretti team's honour with fourth place, one suspects that his team-mate could have gone at least one and maybe two places better.

Problems with passing

Traction goo - okay, officially it's called PJ1 TrackBite - has been applied to the turns on various ovals in recent years, primarily to enable NASCAR cars to run more than one groove. Any racing purist will feel their temperature rising at such impure ways to tease passing opportunities from elite racers, but that's where we are as a sport.

TMS applied PJ1 last November on the eve of the NASCAR Cup race, and while it apparently proved beneficial that day, more than seven months later it was deemed the culprit for effectively halving the racing surface on this 1.5-mile oval.

I've witnessed terrifyingly close pack racing at TMS, I've seen drone-a-thons and I've also been there for races where each driver was rewarded according to their abilities, car's speed, crew's slickness and team's tactics on the night - which is how it should be. But I don't recall any Texas IndyCar race resulting in legitimate accusations that the track was to blame for a fast driver being unable to pass a slow driver.

Given PJ1's purpose, it's beyond irony if it was indeed the cause of IndyCars being unable to run side-by-side through the turns, yet track president Eddie Gossage suggested this was the case.

"From what they tell me, heat activates PJ1, whether that be the sun or hot tyres," he told Autosport. "None has been applied to the track since November and we used a tractor with a brush on it extensively last week, which is always the case with the entire track. It's routine for us to clean and prep the track.

"But [PJ1] stains the track. James Hinchcliffe suggested to me that it was the colour and not a substance on the asphalt that was the difference. He said the untreated area is much lighter, so it remains cooler than the dark, treated surface."

It seems unduly harsh to slam the venue on this occasion, as it will likely be a one-off problem

It must be said that some drivers did feel that the track was still exuding ooze in these patches, however, and that opinion was lent credence by Ed Carpenter's utterly bizarre - and thankfully harmless - spin while driving almost in a straight line during practice. Consequently, drivers tended to steer clear of the dark patches, or only ran half a tyre width up there, and only when their tyres were fresh.

It seems unduly harsh to slam the venue on this occasion, as it will likely be a one-off problem. One of Gossage's top priorities has always been the quality of the racing at his track, and if he thinks that one series' solution to an issue is harming another event - especially one that is already a harder sell - he'll find a remedy.

The passing problem should prove to be just a passing problem.

Format a blueprint for the future?

Over the last dozen years, there have been several calls for IndyCar to compress its oval events into one day, should there be few support races or none at all.

The benefits are obvious in that the venue only has to hire spectator-control staff for one day, and those spectators get to see their heroes on track for several hours - practice, qualifying and the race itself. For the teams it means a cut in accommodation costs, assuming the drivers and crews arrive the day before the event and leave the day after.

But the nature of last Saturday's event with several team members flying in and out in one 24-hour period, thereby avoiding the need for overnight accommodation, will not be the way forward in the post-pandemic world.

Even aside from personnel of all kinds being overworked in high heat, the scheduling for Texas was just too compressed with only two hours between the end of one session and the start of the next. Of course, there was no way around that in this very unusual instance, given that the charter from Indianapolis only took off at 6am.

But Takuma Sato's shunt in qualifying and inability to join the grid as a consequence, reminded everyone why IndyCar oval events have traditionally been left as two-day affairs, with no action on the day of the race. Oval shunts tend to be high-speed and therefore more damaging, therefore requiring more repair work from their crews.

Three hours between IndyCar sessions would probably be just enough to make a difference for the teams should they need to repair a car or build up their spare and send it through scrutineering - and would be ample for running Road To Indy support races.

So yes, with those provisos, there's no doubt that a one-day show is feasible at certain venues and could be a huge boon for the fan who gets five hours of IndyCar action and three hours of support race action. It's definitely worth considering.