Sunday’s IndyCar race in Toronto marked the end of an exhausting three-week sprint for NTT IndyCar Series teams that included the changeover to hybrid powertrains and sweltering heat in Iowa spread across a doubleheader in the heartland. Throw in a busy May and June, and collectively, the paddock is tired and sore.
Thanks to the upcoming Olympic break during which IndyCar’s broadcast partner NBC will concentrate on the Paris games, no races will be held until the August 17 oval event at World Wide Technology Raceway, and with the unusually long pause, hundreds of team members will get a chance to breathe and recharge before sprinting to the championship finale on September 15 in Nashville.
There’s one or more tests scheduled to take place between Toronto and WWTR, so it won’t be possible for all of IndyCar’s 10 teams to completely shut down, but according to every squad that spoke with RACER, a rest period of some sort is in motion.
“Once we get back and get settled after Toronto, we’re going to take a week,” A.J. Foyt Racing team principal Larry Foyt told RACER. “The guys have really been putting the time in so they deserve it.”
“We’ve given everybody the week off,” Dale Coyne said of his two-car crew. “We’ve looked at the schedule and we’ve got a couple guys in here for projects we’re working on, but 90 percent of the teams are pulling back.”
Ed Carpenter Racing general manager Tim Broyles is thankful for the break, especially after teams like ECR exhausted themselves at Iowa while repairing cars overnight between the Saturday and Sunday races.
“We’re shutting down,” he said. “The race team will be off for the full week, and then our shop-based group will have a four-day weekend. It’ll be pretty quiet, and everybody’s earned it; deserves it. If you walked through the paddock on Sunday morning at Iowa and looked at everybody’s faces, they were hammered. You look at the schedule, the garage area was literally closed, I think, for seven and a half hours.
“We had guys there until 3am and back at six. You literally have time to drive to the hotel, take a shower, pack a bag, and go back to the track, and then you’re expecting those guys to come in, perform and do pit stops?
“I’m super proud of the effort our guys did, because even under those conditions, our pit stop times were strong. But we seriously have to look at how we’re doing this. We can’t keep putting people in this situation. It’s just beating everybody down. It’s getting harder and harder to get people that want to do this, and when you have a schedule like this, it makes life harder than it should be.”