After what was considered a chaotic race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Road Course last Sunday, drivers and teams wondered if something needed to be changed when it comes to racing on road courses.
Restarts brought more aggression on to the track, with drivers fanning out as much as eight-wide heading into a flat and narrow turn one.
Though for Team Penske’s Joey Logano, he’s not concerned with the aggression level going forward on road courses.
“I think with Indy what you see is there are six lanes wide across the race track and then it funnels down to three or two by the time you go through one and two,” Logano said. “It gets very wide, where like Road America is a similar situation but the track is only paved three lanes wide from grass to grass. That’s all you can fit in the first place, so it kind of keeps everybody somewhat in line, but when you have a track that wide that funnel is big and the opportunity to gain a few spots in the braking zone is there and everyone just kind of goes where somebody isn’t and just gets wider and it turns into a mess when it gets to the funnel part of it.
“Watkins Glen, three lanes is all you’ve got there, so you have a similar situation as you did at Road America,” Logano continued. “The Roval, we’ve already seen where that can be a challenging piece there whether it’s on the front row or the 15th row. It’s kind of hard to say, but it gets three, four lanes wide and then funnels down that chute to turn two, so you may have a similar situation there, but I don’t see us doing anything different for those. I think it just is what it is.”
Logano believes a big reason behind the chaos is because the Next Gen car is built stronger than its predecessor that had bodies weren’t built to be as flexible.
“I think it’s more this year than last year because the cars are more durable,” Logano said. “Last year, you didn’t want to push a fender in. You had more fender rubs. Everyone is realized at this point that (it’s) a little bit harder to cut down a tire, bodies are pretty tough, and so contact isn’t that bad.
“That is the number one thing that we asked for when we built this Next Gen car was a more durable race car to where we could bump and bang more. We’ve got it and now we’re gonna complain? We asked for it. The fans asked for it. Everybody asked for it. Everyone in here thought about it, so it’s just the fact that everyone is just gonna complain, period. That’s it.
“It doesn’t matter what we do, someone is gonna complain,” Logano concluded. “That’s just life at this point. Everybody has something to complain about, instead of looking at the positives.”