Indy 500 preview: Will experience or youth be victorious at the Brickyard?

Much has been made of the fact that there are nine former winners in the 33 cars qualified for this weekend’s 105th running of the Indianapolis 500. They are Juan Pablo Montoya, Helio Castroneves, Scott Dixon, Tony Kanaan, Ryan Hunter-Reay, Alexander Rossi, Takuma Sato, Will Power and Simon Pagenaud, who between them have 13 victories at the iconic 2.5-mile superspeedway.

That’s the most winners to start the race since 10 took the green in the 1992 edition, so yes, it’s a big deal. And it looked like an even bigger deal after the first day of practice last week, when seven of those nine managed to occupy the top 11 slots. After the excitement of three new winners in the first five races of the 2021 IndyCar season, was the world’s oldest venue now playing into the hands of the veterans?

“I’ve had so much time around here, I know the cars, and having worked with Juan and Helio before, these guys were very, very good because of experience,” says Team Penske’s 2018 winner Power. “They know how to get the car right and know where to put it and not get themselves in trouble. I feel like I’m at that stage now.”

Montoya, the 2000 and 2015 winner who this year is the ‘extra’ in the Arrow McLaren SP team alongside Pato O’Ward and Felix Rosenqvist, concurs: “As you get more experience, you really know what you’re looking at on the car, as Will said.

“But sometimes when you don’t know enough, it’s good as well, especially because of the way these cars drive at the moment. If you look at Pato, for example, he’s comfortable with a car that is like really, really neutral. I mean, we can handle it, but for me is the question: can you do it for 200 laps?

“You look at how many young guys have won the 500 the last few years. I think that answers the question. I mean, do they have a shot? For sure, no question. I think Pato and [Colton] Herta and all those kids, they’ve got a lot of talent… Felix, as well. But at the end of the day you’ve got to run the 200 laps and see what happens at the end of it.”

Hunter-Reay, the 2014 winner for Andretti Autosport, makes the point that veterans tend to deal with pressure and be more methodical in their build-up to the event. “Your head doesn’t get spun out of control anymore, at least when you’ve won here and you’ve had experience going through the different steps of the week – the race running, the practice, the qualifying, the qualifying sims and things like that,” he says.

James Hinchcliffe, Andretti Steinbrenner Autosport Honda and Ryan Hunter-Reay, Andretti Autosport Honda

Photo by: Barry Cantrell / Motorsport Images

This year, practice comprised three days at race turbo boost (1.3 bar), Fast Friday at 1.5 bar, followed by two days of qualifying. Saturday set positions 10 to 30 on the grid, decided which cars would take part in the Fast Nine shootout on Sunday, and which five cars would take part in the nerve-wracking battle to land one of the last three places on the three-by-three grid.

Some teams began their qualifying simulations on Wednesday, just the second day of practice, because where you start has become so very important at the Speedway. The days of Montoya or Dario Franchitti coming from last to first, as in 2015 and 2012 respectively, are gone for now, for it has become very difficult to pass from further back than fourth in a line of cars. This was particularly apparent in last year’s 500 and it’s something that IndyCar has tackled, after painstaking research along with Dallara, by partially filling in the holes in front of the sidepods that are there to prevent blowovers during accidents. This move forces the underwing to provide more front downforce.

“I think you’re going to have one of the old-style races where the front three are just swapping positions constantly because you can follow so close now” Will Power

“That’s crucial because when we went to the UAK18 [the universal aerokit introduced in 2018], the weight of the car moved forward a lot because of the side-impact structures and the removal of the wheelguards,” explains IndyCar head of aerodynamics Tino Belli. “That meant teams had to add downforce to the front of the car to make it turn, because the weight of the car was trying to make it understeer. Firestone helped with their more compliant right-front tyre, but there’s only so far they can go.

“Then, of course, we exacerbated the understeer problem in 2020 with the additional weight of the aeroscreen – in this case, high up – and that put quite a lot more force on the right-front tyre once more. Therefore even more front wing angle was needed.

“So for this year on the superspeedways we filled in the front half of the hole, and this fill-in piece has a one-inch wicker [Gurney flap] on the trailing edge. That change is enough to allow teams to back off the front wing angle and make it less likely for the airflow to separate, and the cars can therefore run closer together.”

In addition, there is a turning vane/bargeboard, and underbody strakes, to give the teams options according to driver preference.

Will Power, Team Penske Chevrolet

Photo by: Phillip Abbott / Motorsport Images

Have the changes worked? “Adding that downforce is certainly going to help the racing,” reckons Power, who will certainly hope they have worked, because he only just scraped onto the back row of the grid with his wall-brushing final run. “I think you’re going to have one of the old-style races where the front three are just swapping positions constantly because you can follow so close now.”

But Power also sounds a note of caution: “Once you get back in that train… it’s just so hard in all that dirty air. It’s hard in practice to understand, too, because you’ve got people checking up, you’ve got guys coming out on different fuel loads and new tyres and old tyres. You don’t know where people are set-up-wise or tyre-wise, so you don’t get a very good idea until race day how the cars will race.”

That being the case, again you’d imagine circumstances will put a premium on the kind of versatility that only a veteran will possess.

One exception seems to be O’Ward, whose composure and judgement have been two of his most impressive facets in the 27 IndyCar races in which he’s taken part so far. Of course, the then-21-year-old produced many eye-catching drives to podium finishes last year, and this year, at Texas Motor Speedway, he became an IndyCar winner. But his drive to sixth in last year’s 500 was no less impressive, overcoming Chevrolet’s slight but noticeable disadvantage to Honda and resisting the urge to try too hard to capture fifth place – the kind of effort that often results in a crash as track conditions change.

With that kind of maturity, Craig Hampson as team R&D engineer, Will Anderson as his race engineer, and McLaren’s aero input increasing for 2021, it would be foolish to doubt that O’Ward could pull off a magic performance. But still, if you’re looking for new faces destined to be cast in sterling silver and set on the Borg-Warner Trophy, you’d still be smart to focus on the veterans.

Three-time Indy polesitter and owner/driver Ed Carpenter has started the 500 17 times, the highlight being a runner-up finish in 2018, but he’s not the obvious candidate for victory that he once was. As the number of ovals on IndyCar’s schedule has dwindled, so there have been fewer chances for oval specialist Carpenter to get time in his car, and it sometimes shows, be it with mistakes, or difficulty in climbing out of a hole when his cars aren’t quick right off the truck. Fortunately, he lines up on the second row, with young team-mate VeeKay on the front rank.

Ed Carpenter, Ed Carpenter Racing Chevrolet

Photo by: Barry Cantrell / Motorsport Images

Graham Rahal is another driver who is traditionally strong at the Brickyard, having far more impressive races than poor ones, but his speciality used to be climbing through the field – only three times in 13 years has he started the race from the first three rows, and only once in the previous 10. On the upside, that occasion was last year. But Rahal’s team-mate, two-time and 2020 race winner Takuma Sato, started from the front row, and that’s what put him in the mix throughout the race, whereas Rahal had to fight through from eighth, and that’s tough enough to take several stints. This year it’s worse, with Sato starting 15th and Rahal 18th.

Looking at the grid, the most obvious candidates for becoming a first-time winner are Herta and VeeKay, who start on the front row alongside polesitting veteran Scott Dixon. But, allowing for the technical changes to make it easier to race, Penske’s two-time IndyCar Series champion Josef Newgarden can’t be ruled out from the seventh row. Last year was a poor one for Roger Penske’s famous squad at the Speedway where it has earned 18 wins since 1972, two of which were delivered by current drivers Power and Simon Pagenaud.

Three of the Penske cars qualified outside the top 20, and that same trio finished the race outside the top 10. Newgarden, by contrast, started 13th and dug and hustled his way up to claim fifth at the chequered flag, and was the leading Chevrolet-powered driver.

- If you’re looking for new faces destined to be cast in sterling silver and set on the Borg-Warner Trophy, you’d still be smart to focus on the veterans.

Suitably chastened, throughout the off-season and into this campaign, Penske engineers doubled down on their efforts to regain The Captain’s team its traditional position in the top echelon of victory contenders at IMS.

“A lot’s changed since Indy last year,” says Newgarden’s race engineer Gavin Ward. “In terms of the Speedway package, I’d say this is the biggest change since we switched to the UAK18 at the end of 2017. New underwing infill parts, the front of the floor, the addition of the bargeboard and strakes… that’s definitely given us a lot to look at to try and optimise.

“We did all right as top Chevy car last year, but we certainly weren’t satisfied with our competitiveness, so there’s been a huge emphasis on improving ourselves. And we’ve seen that bear fruit a bit. And we’ve worked hard with Chevy to improve our collaboration there.”

Chevy itself also appears to have stepped up its game, although it only got two cars – ECR pair VeeKay and Carpenter – into the nine-way pole shootout, while Penske’s best qualifier is rookie Scott McLaughlin in 17th.

Scott McLaughlin, Team Penske Chevrolet

Photo by: Phillip Abbott / Motorsport Images

Both Montoya and Power feel that Hondas are better on pick-up, for example, when a driver is forced to breathe the throttle because they’ve been slowed by a car ahead, and that could be helpful on race day if the track becomes truly slick and all drivers are forced to soft pedal through the turns. But Chevy seems to be very strong at the top end, its drivers dominating through the speed traps at Turns 1 and 3 on race day boost levels.

But in anything other than dense atmospheric conditions, handling can be every bit as important as outright horsepower, and it’s well known that changing track conditions at Indy can turn a good car to bad. So it remains a regular dilemma for race engineers as to whether they should assume the 500 is going to be hot and slick, and work hard to optimise the car for those conditions, or have a potentially slightly slower car but one that is more readily evolvable with in-cockpit tools and on-pitlane adjustments.

“You’re always keeping an eye on the forecast,” says Ward, “but you’re also thinking, ‘What are we going to need if the day’s more difficult than the day we’re running on?’ You don’t want to kid yourself and go down a path with a configuration that you can’t balance if you suddenly need to run more downforce, for example.

“Ideally, you’re running the car in a window where it’s benign regardless of conditions and you can go either way.”

This will be Newgarden’s 10th Indy 500, and his fifth with Penske, yet his best year at the Brickyard came when he raced for Ed Carpenter – qualified second, finished third in 2016.

“Josef’s a perfectionist and he’s trying to make everything better – he’s never fully satisfied, but he’s in a pretty good place,” replies Ward. “I do feel he gets stronger every year, and last year Josef’s contribution relative to our team was very competitive. It was just a case of us collectively not really being in the mix for a win.”

Newgarden himself says “I feel really good about us still” and “I’ll be happier next weekend in race trim”. Can this be his time?

Simona De Silvestro, Paretta Autosport Chevrolet

Photo by: Barry Cantrell / Motorsport Images

De Silvestro’s return with a new team

Six years ago, Beth Paretta tried to start Grace Autosport, a woman-dominated team, with the aim to enter the 2016 Indianapolis 500 with Katherine Legge as driver. The idea was stillborn but, when Penske Entertainment launched its Race for Equality and Change last summer, Paretta returned to her theme.

Paretta Autosport is described as a “female forward” team – it includes 19 women among its 30 personnel – and she had no trouble convincing Roger Penske it would be an asset to the grid. And so Team Penske prepped the ex-Juncos chassis and Paretta did a deal with Chevrolet.

Those ingredients persuaded Simona de Silvestro, currently a works Porsche driver competing in the ADAC GT Masters championship, to revive her IndyCar career, which included 68 races between 2010 and 2015, with a best result of second at Houston in 2013.

“I think our association with Team Penske is incredible,” says de Silvestro, who didn’t put a wheel wrong in the April test at Indy, and looked similarly competent in official practice.

“I’m just kind of getting confidence out there, and the car feels really good, so from that point of view I’m really excited to be here because I think we have the tools to do something great.

“I haven’t been in an IndyCar for six years, so it’s great to have great team-mates around me and everyone from Team Penske really kind of helping us out on that side.”

Despite the 500’s appeal, there was a risk of disappointment for a start-up team in a year when 35 cars are competing for the 33 spots on the grid, and de Silvestro only just squeaked into the field at the last gasp.

“Absolutely, and we actually considered doing a bundle of races,” says Paretta when asked about the risk of failing to qualify.

“Part of it has to do with Simona’s day job as a Porsche factory driver, so there were some conflicts with some of the dates. But we decided collectively with Roger and [Penske Entertainment] upper management that we would start here.”

Quizzed if this means there are more races coming up, Paretta nods, and de Silvestro suggests she is keen for more outings. Most likely would be the final two races of the season, at Laguna Seca and Long Beach.

Simona De Silvestro, Paretta Autosport Chevrolet

Photo by: Phillip Abbott / Motorsport Images