Too tight. Too short. Race day will be about survival. Expect carnage.
The whispers got a little louder following qualifying and the pole won by Alex Palou on Saturday for Sunday’s Chevrolet Detroit Grand Prix presented by Lear.
“It’s too tight for IndyCar, it’s too short for IndyCar,” Palou said. “There’s too much traffic, it’s too bumpy”
Palou, who won the pole last time out at Indianapolis, turned a best lap of 1 minute, 1.8592 seconds and came with just over a minute left in the Firestone Fast Six qualifying session. Scott McLaughlin and Romain Grosjean rounded out the top three qualifiers.
The race will be contested on a tight, nine-turn, 1.7-mile street course that replaces the 2.35-mile course on Belle Isle. Drivers left practice and qualifying sessions wondering how racing will be after struggling for the past two days to open spaces on track to get in fast laps.
“Yeah, first-year problems,” Palou said a few minutes after his initial rant. “It’s always going to happen. It’s just going to get better from here. The racetrack for the drivers is a blast. We don’t even know how it races yet. Everyone is making conclusions already. They probably just need to relax and wait for tomorrow.”
Some drivers have seen all they need to see to predict a tough day at the office come race day.
“I really don’t see a lot of opportunity without it creating carnage,” Kyle Kirkwood said. “Like you can pass into (turn) one, you can pass into eight, you might be able to pass into five, but you’re not going to be able to go double file through there. I think the outside guy is going to go into the wall in a few of places that people will try and pass, to be honest.”
All of which made Saturday qualifying all the more important to being in a position for a good finish on race day that will feature few gaps between cars during the race.
“It’s 330 feet is what we calculated,” Kirkwood said. “Under 2.2 seconds is the gap if all the cars were on track at once.”
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Palou said that 27 cars at Detroit is pushing the limit on a course as short as the Detroit layout for Indy cars.
“I don’t know what the perfect distance is, but I would say adding 30 seconds to a track or 20 seconds would help a lot,” Palou said. “We have a lot of cars. It’s crazy. It’s good, it’s really good for the series, for the racing. But when it comes to practice, we have 10 red flags, 25 yellows, traffic all the time.”
And your suggestions to IndyCar would be?
“If they were asking me, I would say, please, can we have 20 more seconds so it’s a little bit of a longer lap, a bit wider turns. Turn one is really tight. Yeah, they are not going to ask me, so… I’m happy wherever they take me.
“Obviously I can complain a little. I don’t think that would be a great idea. I’m not saying I would do a better job.
“Yeah, that wouldn’t be a good idea.”
Mike Pryson covered auto racing for the Jackson (Mich.) Citizen Patriot and MLive Media Group from 1991 until joining Autoweek in 2011. He won several Michigan Associated Press and national Associated Press Sports Editors awards for auto racing coverage and was named the 2000 Michigan Auto Racing Fan Club’s Michigan Motorsports Writer of the Year. A Michigan native, Mike spent three years after college working in southwest Florida before realizing that the land of Disney and endless summer was no match for the challenge of freezing rain, potholes and long, cold winters in the Motor City.
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