What went wrong for Walker at IndyCar?

During an email exchange with the AUTOSPORT.com editor a few weeks ago, I mentioned a growing swell of chatter within the IndyCar paddock about the likelihood that Derrick Walker would be exiting the series in the near future.

It was one of those weird 'grey area' stories: solid enough that I felt confident flagging it up with my colleagues; not enough substance to actually run with it in print.

The reaction from the UK at the time was one of surprise, and there was a similar response from a lot of the series' fans when Walker's plans to depart were announced last week.

Inside the paddock, it was a different story. The reality of Walker's tenure as IndyCar's president of operations and competition never quite matched up to expectation, although in some regards this was not his fault.

For starters, the level of expectation that accompanied his arrival was probably unrealistic in the first place.

Walker's team achieved success with the likes of Gil de Ferran and Robby Gordon © LAT

Walker was widely considered the missing puzzle piece that might have made Randy Bernard's tenure as IndyCar CEO a success: a grounded clear-thinker with deep racing experience, and a strong understanding of the needs of the teams and other stakeholders.

He was supposed to be the reality filter through which all of Bernard's grand plans passed before being unloaded onto the world. And indeed, Bernard did make an unsuccessful attempt to prise him away from his previous role of team manager at Ed Carpenter Racing.

So when it was finally announced that Walker had moved across to what he described at the time as "the dark side" and taken a senior operations role within the series, expectations were high.

The reasoning essentially boiled down to: Bernard's replacement Mark Miles is the business-minded suit who doesn't know his Unser from his elbow, and Walker would be the guy to give the whole regime some racing cred.

Of course, the real world never works so seamlessly. It's unfair to expect one guy to act as the 'solution', especially when the question was never really defined in the first place. But there was a sense in some quarters that the basics were never addressed.

Race control was an obvious example. Those who anticipated that former race director Beaux Barfield's departure would herald a new era of fairness and consistency were quickly disappointed, despite Walker's introduction of a three-steward system to remove the burden of decision making from the shoulders of a single person.

Recent history has shown us that three stewards - or at least, IndyCar's three stewards - were not necessarily any better than one when it came to something like consistent application of the blocking rules.

Rahal won at Fontana but he should've been penalised by officials © LAT

The low point came at Fontana, where all three of the officials in race control managed to miss the fact that Graham Rahal had exited the pits with the nozzle from his fuel hose dangling from his car, despite the problem having been picked up by TV and spotted by every single fan watching at home.

When the nozzle fell out a couple of corners later they threw a yellow for debris, but still failed to address the issue of Rahal being penalised. Rahal went on to win the race, and at time of writing he stands a very real chance of going on to win the championship.

It's possible he might have been able to recover from the penalty that he should have been issued and won the race anyway. The Rahal Letterman Lanigan team had prepared a superb car that weekend. But the fact he didn't have to certainly made his day a lot easier.

And IndyCar's current practice of delaying post-race investigations and announcing the findings the Wednesday after the race is infuriating. If you're going to do that, there's almost no point bothering to drag three officials into race control every weekend in the first place.

As damning as that was, the judicial system was not the catalyst for Walker's departure. Rumours of his impending exit had already been circulating for weeks before Rahal's fuel-hose incident. They started roughly around the time of the roll-out of the aero kits.

For all of the complaining about the competitive imbalance between Chevrolet and Honda, that isn't the issue. The nature of competition is that someone wins and someone loses, and so far, Chevrolet has done a better job (which makes Honda-powered Rahal's late championship push all the more extraordinary).

But the lack of track testing resulted in a lot of problems that should have been avoidable. When the kits made their debut in St Petersburg, the occasion was overshadowed by the fragility of the new parts.

Castroneves was among those who went flying at Indianapolis this year© LAT

And when the teams switched to superspeedway-spec for the first time, we had that string of flips at Indianapolis that threatened to overshadow the Indy 500.

The series itself did nothing to help the situation by waiting several days to give an official response, and it's still unclear who made the call to remain quiet.

Whoever it was got it wrong, because IndyCar completely lost control of the story as a consequence, and put itself into an entirely avoidable situation of damage limitation.

Whether Walker was pushing the buttons during all of this, or was simply the guy to take the fall, we don't know.

It's certainly true that he's preparing to leave one of the most thankless jobs in racing. And it's true that elements of his management style appeared counter-productive.

Did I expect more from him as a senior official within the series? Frankly, yes.

Was that fair of me? I genuinely don't know.

But for all that, he was always generous with his time, and with his knowledge. Any chat with Walker inevitably leaves you with a perspective on some angle of the sport that you might not otherwise have been privy to.

And for those reasons, I deeply hope to see him back in the paddock in some capacity in the future.