The long evolution of Dallara's Indy 500 winner

IndyCar looked stale at the start of 2010, barely staggering through the economic recession and dwarfed by NASCAR. The excitement surrounding the 2008 unification of the Indy Racing League and the Champ Car World Series, to form the new IndyCar Series, had dissipated. The schedule comprised nine road/street courses, eight ovals, and spectator numbers at most venues were falling.

The cars reflected this stasis. The Indy Racing League’s spec Dallara IR-05 was never accused of elegance even when it emerged in 2003, but it had been developed for a largely oval series, whereas the Panoz DP01 used by Champ Car in 2007 had never seen an oval. Thus when the series merged, the attractive turbocharged Panoz-Cosworth was rendered obsolete after just a year of competition, and the obsolete-looking Dallara complete with raucous 3.5-litre normally aspirated V8 Honda became ‘the IndyCar’.

The arrival of Randy Bernard as IndyCar CEO in February of 2010 was seen as exciting by those who had moaned about the series’ lethargy and lack of ideas in recent years. Over the course of the previous 15 years he had turned Professional Bull Riders Inc from making barely half a million into a $26m brand, and if he knew nothing about motorsport, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

He wouldn’t have his hands tied by tradition and his head fogged by others’ agendas. And in a rare display of unity, the majority of the series’ competition department members, team owners and drivers informed him that one of his priorities should be new cars and as soon as possible. But from whom?

“I’m going to create an advisory board that will combine some of the greatest minds in the sport,” Bernard told this writer, one month into the job. “A chassis engineer, an engine expert, a team owner, a track and event promoter, a safety expert, etc.”

It sounded like a boring version of the Village People, but Bernard went on: “Whatever their decision, someone will be upset but the important things are for fans to love our car, be happy that the competition is better, and recognise that we went through the right process to decide which car got the verdict.”

‘Car’ in the singular?

Bernard's arrival was the trigger point for IndyCar adopting a single-make chassis, as he formed the ICONIC committee

Photo by: Michael L. Levitt / Motorsport Images

“Open source or sole source is a sticking point with me,” Bernard explained. “I’ve seen what built the Indianapolis 500, and so if there’s a way to keep prices down, then it will be open-source.”

Five companies submitted serious proposals – Dallara, Lola, Swift, BAT, and Chip Ganassi-backed DeltaWing. The latter’s car, penned by Ben Bowlby, was innovative but truly extreme; the Lola looked like a gussied-up B2K with aftermarket addenda; the Dallara proposals were sane but slightly staid; the BAT concepts from Bruce Ashmore, Alan Mertens and Tim Wardrop looked clever but ugly. A couple of Swift’s proposals seemed to hit the right blend of innovative, lithe and distinctive.

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However, this was a time for heads, not hearts, and Bernard assembled a diverse team under retired US Air Force General William Looney: former F1 and Indycar engineer Tony Purnell, ex-Ford motorsport head honcho Neil Ressler, former Indycar engine-builder Rick Long, DP01 deviser Tony Cotman, president of Texas Motor Speedway Eddie Gossage, IndyCar’s then-president of competition Brian Barnhart, and two-time CART champion and 2003 Indy 500 winner Gil de Ferran.

"The floor in front of the sidepods had been extended to the outer edges of the tyres, so this could act like a ramp, leaving the driver exposed" Bill Pappas

The cheesy acronym for the project was ICONIC – Innovative, Competitive, Open-wheel, New, Industry-relevant, Cost-effective – but its purpose was worthy. So too was the idea of multiple manufacturers, but each advised that without a monopoly, cost per unit would soar from $385,000 to almost $700,000. So Purnell came up with the idea of getting one manufacturer to build the chassis, wings, sidepods and engine covers, and leave the remaining aero surfaces open to other manufacturers, who could charge no more than $70,000 per kit. This carrot, he hoped, would entice race car manufacturers, automotive giants and even aerospace companies.

Dallara got the chassis construction gig – the ICONIC committee was impressed by the Italian manufacturer’s pledge to build a factory in Indianapolis – and by April 2011, teams had also voted unanimously to keep costs in check by running all-Dallara bodywork for at least the first year of the new car.

The following month, Dallara’s two bodywork variants – one for road/street courses, one for ovals – were unveiled to mixed reactions. Many thought the car looked bulky or overly contrived and some complained that the rear ‘bumper’ pods made it no longer an open-wheel car. Yet they acknowledged that the wide floor, large sidepods and bumpers would increase driver protection.

Bill Pappas, IndyCar’s current VP of competition and engineering, was back then still a race engineer, and one of great repute. He recalls: “Dallara and Tony Cotman had come up with a race car that didn’t look like what we had been campaigning over the last several years, which was good, but I saw some serious flaws. The radiators sat behind the driver’s hips, but the floor in front of the sidepods had been extended to the outer edges of the tyres, so this could act like a ramp, leaving the driver exposed. That’s why shark fins were introduced ahead of the sidepods.”

Wheldon was responsible for ironing out the initial niggles with the new Dallara chassis, which was renamed the DW12 in his honour following his death in the 2011 finale at Las Vegas

Photo by: Walt Kuhn / Motorsport Images

The original plan had been for the IR12 to run 2.4-litre turbocharged engines, but this maximum capacity was reduced to 2.2, some speculated to reduce weight. Dan Wheldon – without a full-time ride since the end of 2010, but having just earned a second Indy 500 victory with Bryan Herta’s little team – first tested the new car with Honda’s 2.2 at Mid-Ohio in August, before moving on to Barber Motorsports Park, Indy road course, Iowa Speedway and then Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

That’s where the test team encountered a significant aero flaw. The oval kit produced a lot of drag, and Wheldon admitted to this author he was also unimpressed with the car’s stability under lateral load. Even taking into account that the test car was running a very early iteration of the 2.2-litre V6 turbo, its lap speeds of 210mph were over 13mph off the fastest race laps by its predecessor in May’s Indy 500. By the time the new cars returned to IMS the following May, there had been a huge reduction in vertical surfaces on the superspeedway rear wing.

The new engine regulations (and Roger Penske) had lured Chevrolet back to IndyCar, while Lotus had also declared its intention to hit the US trail. The new Chevy- and Honda-powered cars, which had now also been tested by Will Power and Scott Dixon respectively, were demonstrated in public at Las Vegas Motor Speedway by Ryan Hunter-Reay and Graham Rahal the day before the 2011 season finale, the final race for the old Dallara IR-05. Tragically it would also prove to be the final start for Wheldon, who was killed in a horrific multi-car crash, and in that context, criticism of supposedly clunky-looking safety measures on the new car – renamed DW12 in Wheldon’s honour – unsurprisingly dissipated.

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Focus returned to performance testing, although that was a loose term in the case of Lotus. Hitting the track in mid-January it became clear that the Judd-built units were way off the performance of the single-turbo Honda and twin-turbo Chevy. By the Indy 500, the British brand’s only full-time representative was Simona De Silvestro of HVM Racing, and the legendary marque founded by Colin Chapman was gone at the end of the year.

Hunter-Reay, Dixon and Power won championships with the original DW12s from 2012 to 2014, and through this period there were subtle but significant improvements made, including new anti-intrusion panels to reinforce the cockpit sides. But to the untrained eye, a 2014 car was indistinguishable from a 2012. This wasn’t the case for the 2015 cars.

Despite Bernard’s departure at the end of 2012, the series had remained open to the idea of enticing outside aero specialists to apply their expertise with a supply of kits, but there were still no takers. Then-president of operations and competition Derrick Walker, however, did respond to the strong movement within the series to improve brand identity by allowing Chevrolet and Honda to produce their own aerokits.

The manufacturer aerokits introduced for 2015 were ungainly to say the least

Photo by: Phillip Abbott / Motorsport Images

There were two downsides: 1) the cost of building a 2.2-litre V6 engine and an aerokit reduced the likelihood of a third OEM joining the fray, and 2) relatively unfettered aero efficiency ain’t always pretty. Chevy’s effort, devised by Pratt & Miller appeared heavy, while Honda’s kit from Wirth Research looked wonderfully mad, particularly the comically flexible multi-plane front wings. Watching a Honda IndyCar pull away from standstill in 2015 reminded one of the ‘unusual’ crafts that emerged during humanity’s early attempts to fly.

“The series left the boxes too open,” says Pappas, “and suddenly the cars had huge downforce on road and street courses and short ovals, and were very efficient at the Speedway.”

“It was the opposite of what the series needed,” concurs IndyCar legend Rick Mears. “Too much downforce for the power. On the road courses, braking distances were reduced, and on short ovals, drivers were flat all the way around. Then suddenly the string would snap, the car was in the fence and, because minimum speeds were so high, impacts were harder. On speedways, it was like a bomb exploded, and because of the aerokits, there was more debris.”

"The [2018 refresh] cars did what we needed – reduced downforce, reduced dirty air so the car behind could follow closely, provided more feel and looked good. It met our targets" Bill Pappas

This took its ultimate toll when Sage Karam crashed out of the lead at Pocono in 2015, his car randomly scattering parts including the nose section, which struck Justin Wilson with fatal consequences. By this time, too, there had been three blowover shunts at Indy while cars were in qualifying trim, with 200mph-plus airflow catching the underside of the cars when in a high state of yaw.

Without a proven fix, Walker had insisted Indy qualifying was run with cars at race levels of downforce. By the following year, the domed underwing had been introduced, which greatly reduced threat of flips.

Dixon of Ganassi, Penske’s Simon Pagenaud and his newest team-mate Josef Newgarden clinched the titles in this high-downforce era of 2015 to 2017, all using the Chevy engines and kit. That was karma, given that Honda had been allowed to rehomologate far more of its aero pieces for 2016 when the Wirth design failed to match Pratt & Miller’s.

Jay Frye replaced Walker at the end of 2015 and was quickly made aware that manufacturer aerokits were an expensive dead end and the series needed new spec bodywork for 2018.

Says Pappas: “I told Jay [now IndyCar president] how unlikely it was that any OEM would want to design a new engine and an aerokit at the same time, so we and Tino [Belli, IndyCar’s director of aero development] went off to Dallara to brainstorm with the designers some basic concepts. I told them what I thought a basic IndyCar should look like and what we were trying to achieve performance-wise. Chris Beatty then got the rough concepts and ideas, refined some things and came up with curves and shapes that worked aero-wise and aesthetically. He did a nice job on both the oval and roadcourse kit, I felt.

Wickens starred on his IndyCar debut at St Pete in 2018 when new IR18 aerokit was introduced

Photo by: Phillip Abbott / Motorsport Images

“And the cars [tested by Juan Pablo Montoya and Oriol Servia] did what we needed – reduced downforce, reduced dirty air so the car behind could follow closely, provided more feel and looked good. It met our targets.”

Two years later, after testing with alternative frontal impact solutions, the Red Bull Advanced Technologies aeroscreen was introduced for the start of the 2020 season. There was bitching about how it hurt the car’s centre of gravity – an extra 60lb, high up – and altered the handling, and greatly increased in-cockpit heat. But its safety benefits were undeniable, its introduction unstoppable. And of course, the usual teams and drivers remained at the top.

The evolution of the DW12 – or IR12 or IR18, whichever is preferred – isn’t over yet: from next season it will house a hybrid unit hooked to the 2.2-litre engines (the proposed and tested 2.4s have sadly been delayed indefinitely), and will gain a magnesium gearbox to offset the extra weight of the MGU. For now, it has no expiration date.

“The team owners seem 50/50 about replacing this car,” says Pappas. “You ask, ‘What do you think about a new car?’ and their response is, ‘Why? We have all this inventory built up. Do we have safety issues with this car that we need to address?’ And I see their point; that there’s no reason to change until the next step in safety makes a compelling case to update.

“You look at the 2012 car and the 2023 car and you’ll see a resemblance but there’s very little that’s the same. Front wings are completely different, the aero package in both road/street course and in oval format are completely different, the airbox has gone, there’s different sidepods, radiators, underwing, gearbox, bellhousing…

“And if you started with a clean sheet now, you wouldn’t get something where the spine looks radically different from the current car because of safety constraints. It has to pass certain FIA standards – x amount of crush in the nosecone, sidepods, etc – and it has to deal with a wider variety of tracks than any other series.”

If it’s hard to predict when the next-gen Dallara IndyCar will emerge, it’s harder yet to imagine the day will ever come when Dallara has a rival and IndyCar becomes a multi-chassis series. Whereas the IR05 was introduced as competition for the Panoz/G-Force chassis of the time, and rules were loose enough for teams to customise them with flicks, flaps and flourishes, one of the DW12’s prime purposes was to reduce costs, and IndyCar ensured the boxes in which teams could work became much more confined.

IndyCar's VP of competition and engineering Pappas says there is no need to change the current formula as it meets the key criteria for teams

Photo by: Michael L. Levitt

But Pappas bristles at the idea that engineers no longer have enough room to flex their intellect. He states: “People say we have a spec car, but at any given race you won’t find two cars among the 27 that are running the same combination of geometries, rocker ratios, spring rates, wheel rates, ride rates… There are multiple tuning options.

“When I was hired [February 2016], I was told to look at things from an economical standpoint and an entertainment standpoint. When I worked at Ganassi, we’d get a ‘tweak of the week’ from Lola – a widget here, a turning vane there – and that was cool.

"This car has been a success, and just what the series needed" Bill Pappas

“From this side of the fence, though, that did nothing for the racing, for the series as a whole. If we allowed a team to spend big money on a new underwing but it was beyond the budget of several other teams, suddenly the field is more spread out.

“So, for example, the aero options that we’ve introduced for Texas and Indy this year are a way of allowing teams to experiment and apply engineering expertise within parameters that don’t financially ruin the smaller teams, while also improving the racing. From that point of view, I think this car has been a success, and just what the series needed. We’ve been able to govern its evolution for the good of the teams and drivers, while still maintaining a demanding and competitive environment for the engineers.”

Expect to see the current Dallara-built machines previously known as the DW12 to continue turning laps around the Speedway for years to come

Photo by: Jake Galstad / Motorsport Images