Comments on: The Owners Won, After All

By: MotorPundit.com » INDYCAR balks, will postpone aero kits until 2013

MotorPundit.com » INDYCAR balks, will postpone aero kits until 2013 — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 16:16:12 +0000

[...] Oil Pressure Blog: The Owners Won, After All [...]

By: The Speedgeek

The Speedgeek — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 13:59:05 +0000

Very true, SimFan, but I think that one of the selling points of the kits wasn’t that it would make the maker a Brinks truck worth of money from the sale cash, but that they would be valuable from a branding and marketing standpoint. If, say, GM (although this could be Bombardier, Oreca, BAT, heck, even MIT or Cal Tech, if they were so inclined) wanted to make a kit, they’d likely only make back a fraction of the cost of development from the sales to teams, but they could theoretically make back the rest of that outlay in advertising (this is the whole “you could brand your entire car a “Chevy” instead of a “Dallara-Chevy” scenario). It’s very true that you’d have to sell nearly 60 kits at $70k a piece in order to recoup a $4 million development price (if the price to the kit maker was that high, I’m just making up numbers here), but if you could sell 30 kits and then get $2 million worth of mentions on ABC/ESPN/Versus, then maybe the numbers make sense. It’s just an idea.

Meanwhile, I think the teams are overselling the “we have to run our kits in our own CFD tubes/wind tunnels/shaker rigs/coast down tunnels” aspect. Most of that cost is baked into the development by the kit maker. The kit maker won’t just slap a few pieces of balsa together to make a set of sidepods and an engine cover and say, “OK, there you go, you have to do the rest yourselves”, they’re going to do most of that work up front, before the teams even get the first crate full of carbon bits. Of course, if Chip or Roger wants to go spent $5 million to go figure out if there’s a better way to counter-sink the Dzus fasteners, then there’s nothing stopping them, but really, that’s just like today. Or the same scenario as we’ll have next year with everybody having the same kit. Different kits just opened up the possibility of smaller teams getting the drop on Chip and Roger by having something special that they didn’t. It’s a disappointment to hear that the smaller teams didn’t see any value in that.

By: JohnMc

JohnMc — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 01:49:48 +0000

Initially, and IIRC, the kits weren’t going to be ready at the first of the year anyway, so everyone takes a breath and resells the manufacturers on the deal. Lets see what teams are going to get what engine and if Lotus comes in.

By: redcar

redcar — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 01:37:16 +0000

Trying to revive mainstream interest in open-wheel racing in the U.S. after the disaster of the split and the subsequent flight of sponsors to Nascar is not a job for the faint-of-heart . There are many hiccups along the way but I think it’s slowly getting interesting in terms of tracks, new drivers, sponsorships, equipment and leadership. But it’s not going to happen overnight so let’s not overreact–unless you’re one of the many who exist to overreact–and throw out the baby with the bath water.

By: Simona Fan

Simona Fan — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 20:13:35 +0000

I was about to say something similar, but you said it so well. People think that you just go to Wal-mart and buy an aero kit. These things have to be developed if they’re going to improve your lap times and that development costs hundreds of thousands if not millions of money. Heck, one of our steel and aluminum wind tunnel models (aerospace industry) costs $300,000 and that doesn’t count design time or wind tunnel time. Just the model.

The problem with the aerokits is the artificially low price. I can’t see any reputable outside company wanting to develop them for that price, and the race teams don’t have the money to do it themselves.

Sadly, I think we’re stuck with spec chassis and spec aerokits for the foreseeable future. And with the engines being performance matched, it’s hard to get excited about innovation being back in IndyCar.

If we were going to go spec, why couldn’t we have the Swift 23? That was so beautiful…

By: Josh

Josh — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 18:27:59 +0000

Unfortunately, there way too many negatives with this league right now. I am simply in awe that an organization that too pride in it’s product (REAL RACING) has fallen so far off the mark that it is unbelievable …….. Just to ponder, what happens when the new car fails to reach it’s potential? What (We still haven’t learned our lessons yet!) happens when ESPN treats you like an ugly step child? What happens when there are no Darios and TKs and Dixons and HCNs driving their cars? ………….. Can you say, we don’t need others to screw us, after all these years, we have become some of the best at screwing ourselves!

By: raeindy

raeindy — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 17:50:38 +0000

I am with the “If you have the money to buy a different kit then do it, if not don’t” crowd. How many “free” Dallara kits do you get? When you get Viso’d the replacement/spare kit won’t be free so why does it matter where the owners pay the money? They will have to spend the money anyway.

Unless, if they all have the same kit, the replacements for next year won’t be $70k since Dallara will know that they will sell 100 of them instead of 35 and they don’t have to develop a competitive design. If this isn’t the case then the owner’s argument is invalid.

By: Grover1

Grover1 — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 17:32:58 +0000

I believe that every single one of the groups that presented the new designs for 2012 wanted a sole supplier agreement. The aero-kits were the only way to (potentially) get the different looking cars that fans wanted.
Who is going to make these kits? In the racing world, we can almost completely count out all the manufacturers/designers who weren’t chosen (Lola, Swift, Bowlby-Deltawing and BAT). There might be some interest from Oreca, Dome, Wirth Research (who would likely partner with HPD/Honda), Panoz/Elan Technologies, and maybe others from the world of sportscars and F1. Airplane manufacturers seem like an interesting idea, but one needs a good rolling road to get the most of the designs and not a six-story tall wind tunnel built for planes.
Marshall Pruett had a conversation with Bruce Ashmore (?sp) after the announcements last year who said that as Ashmore Designs, and not as BAT, it would take him at least 6 months of CAD before something goes from design to a model for testing. This is after he got the drawings from Dallara. The costs would be in the millions of dollars to design and produce the kits. If he got a sizeable chunk of the field using his kits, he might be able to make a profit at the end of the four-year period they would be homologated for.
This might be more a case of Indycar lacking partners interested in designing these kits rather than the owners not wanting to spend money. Who’s heard anything concrete about aero-kit manufacturers outside of passing interest and an expectation of Honda, Chevy/GM, Lotus named kits? If it costs in the millions of dollars to design an aero-kit, which are then sold at a maximum of $70k and limited to two different kits per team/car, the economics of this doesn’t really make sense to the manufacturers.

By: Ron Ford

Ron Ford — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 17:08:53 +0000

It just seems to me that most of the above advice on how the owners should run their business comes a little too easy when it is not your money being spent. I am of the opposite opinion that many fans take the owners for granted.

Go to any midget, sprint, or silver crown race and there is not a nickel’s worth of difference in the appearance of the cars. So what? People still enjoy the racing. Why? Because the cars sound good, go fast, and are exciting to watch. Anything else is just cosmetics.

What will sell these new cars to the fans in my opinion will be the racing experience. Will they be faster, will there be more side by side racing? If one of those gorgeous looking Swift designs turns out to be a backmarker, fans will lose interest swiftly.

I had the good fortune to be able to visit the IMS museum in June when they still had all the cars on display in order beginning with the first winner right up to the present day. It was fascinating to see the design changes through the years. But those design changes were made in an attempt to make the cars go faster (along with safety modifications), not appearance for appearance sake. The addition of wings resulted in an immediate average qualifying speed increase of almost 20 MPH. But I don’t think anyone involved said: “Hey, maybe some wings will make them look cool!”

If we have to wait a year for additional aero kits, so be it. Hopefully there will be many interesting and exciting looking variations in 2013. But from an owner’s standpoint, if those kits don’t make the car go faster, then it’s just all hat and no cattle.

By: JP

JP — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 16:42:09 +0000

It is also a possibility, not sure how high the probability is…that 40,000 people show up at St Pete next year, 2,000,000 people tune in to see 5 cars on track because the rest of the owners chose to take their sponsorship $ to a more cost effective series like Nationwide.
At the end of the day, this is a Franchise based business model, and no matter how many fans there are, there will be no participant teams if the teams can’t MAKE MONEY.
If Quizno’s can’t support their franchisee with a product and marketing support combination that allows him to make $ then that franchisee will buy a Subway kit and sell a different product. Same thing here.