Originally Posted by D.O.:
I just don't understand why this series seems intent on shooting itself in the foot repeatedly when reasonable alternatives are available.
What series is reasonable that will get you laps on 1.5 ovals and road courses?
The IRL pro series isn't cheap to run and breaks on light impacts.
NASCAR has no cheap series.
IRL is too expensive for it's own self, except for a few large teams.
Star Mazda??? drink the wine and eat the cheese series.
All of the purse, schedule and officals has to wait until the teams get cars refitted.
Look inside the left sidepod and you can see the side bumper.
Safety issues compared to present Silver Crown cars are considerable.
The complete front end bolts to the 4 major frame tube with a driver steering rack type crushable structure, allows teams to unbolt the front end and bolt on a replacement.
Inside the side pods is a large curved bumper system to keep the side pods from crushing give a lot of strength in that area.Protecting the bits located inside. Large pads mounted to the frame is where this bolts to spread out impact energy. So it has good safety features with crushable structures.
Don't drink the wine or eat the crackers but watch in time what happens. A turd is a turd but they run turds every weekend in Nascar.
I hope it works for Bruce and the Teams, but not until 2011 as a series.
I will have newer pictures sometime this week after it comes back from the paint shop.
D.O.
I edited the show so the Ashmore interview starts off the top. It's at www.Racinwithdo.com
Enjoy
D.O.
Since you included nascar in your list, I assume stock cars are fair game here. ARCA will get you on 1.5s, along with 2s and 2.5s and 2.66 along with road courses. Now you can spend a million on an ARCA season, but it's twice as long as what is proposed here, so the cost per race would be about the same. And that's for a top line team. You know the back half of the ARCA fields haven't seen a million dollars in their career. And for real reasonable there is the Frank Kimmel Series that doesn't have any road courses that I know of, but it'll get you onto 1.5s for under $10K.
But from my point of view, we're talking open wheel, so they don't count. And I would tend to agree with your assessment of all of those open wheel series as unsuitable and therefore unreasonable. That doesn't make this series reasonable though. If and when this series is able to put 30+ cars those 1.5s, then it will have been proven in my opinion to be reasonable. The fact that no series that is running now or seriously proposed that fits that description doesn't mean that someone cannot or will not come up with something.
I've found out that I time out before I finish my post, so I'm going to submit this and add to it later.
---------- Post added at 08:57 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:53 PM ----------
Timed out again.
Of those series you listed, the IPS or Indy Lights now is probably the most similar to this series in a lot of ways. Remember, it was proposed to be a combonation ladder/destination/retirement series like the nascar grand national series. And it was highly touted as an affordable way for short trackers to get that all important rear engined road racing experience. But it wasn't that affordable. Hardly any short trackers ran in it at all. And since the IRL itself was and still is in such a mess, there were almost zero seats available for even the champions of the IPS, especially if you weren't family. The cars were comparably slow and expensive compared to almost anything else. Well here we are now and we don't have a rear engined carbon fiber car for $115K, but instead a front engined tube framed car that cost $85K. When you consider that the transaxle is a very significant part of the cost of the IPS, that brings the cost of this car much closer to what is already known to be too expensive.
Again, why road courses? We already know that the lack of road course experience was actually just an excuse. Neither the lack of road course experience or the lack of rear engine experience were the real barriers to short trackers racing at Indy. Money or the lack of it was and still is the barrier. If your check is big enough and will clear, you have all the experience needed to get an Indycar ride. If Mario Andretti and AJ Foyt were starting out, they would never make it to Indycars today. They only had talent, not money. So unless this series is really just going to be like the IPS, another place to park young road racers until they can get funding for an Indycar ride, why even have road courses? It doesn't take much reading on other boards to realize that the fans of the IRL or CART 1,2 or 3 hate the sound of normally aspirated large bore American V8s. They hate front engine cars and they hate tube framed cars. One thing they do seem to approve of is small fields of cars. Maybe that's what they are shooting for here?