2023 R7: Detroit

[John]

[Cheeveer]

Hype!

Hype.

Hype?

[MonteCristo]

All hail space laser gun!

Pew pew!

[Michkov]

All hail space laser gun!

Pew pew!

Indycar is going to Spa?

[Everso Biggyballies]

Interesting to see how this dual pitlane entry thing works out. They are referring to it as "The Zipper".

This explains.....

The Detroit Grand Prix has been relocated from the Belle Isle circuit, which was its home since 1992, to a street course in the city. It includes some of the same roads used for Formula 1’s races in the circuit between 1982 and 1988 before the race was taken over by the CART IndyCar series.

The pits will be built in a car park for the nearby Renaissance Center. However the organisers found space was too limited to construct a conventional, single-sided pit lane. That led to the decision to allow drivers to refuel on both sides.

“The problem was there wasn’t 1,000 feet of pit lane,” Detroit Grand Prix chairman Bud Decker explained in a video produced by the event promoters. “We have 500 feet.

“So what do we do? For the first time ever, the fans are going to see a dual pit lane where cars will come in and some will pit to the right and some will pit to the left.

“At the end of pit lane they’ll all come together in a single file and find their way back to the race track. How? I’m sure they’ll figure that out.”

Edit: Found this video that shows it in principle. The plan..





This is the pit allocation.







This is how the layout for this year compares to previous.

[MonteCristo]

@Antonov - your time has come!

[erwin greven]

@Antonov - your time has come!

Exactly! This is a classic layout.

[John]

I'm sure T1 won't cause any problems.

[Michael Ferner]

Hey, what happenedd to the Belle Isle? Back in downtown?

[erwin greven]

They sadly ditched it, in their immeasurable wisdom. "Bringing the sport to the people". You know. What Liberty Media also wants to do. That "the people" never asked for that...

[MonteCristo]

They sadly ditched it, in their immeasurable wisdom. "Bringing the sport to the people". You know. What Liberty Media also wants to do. That "the people" never asked for that...

"I'm a doctor, take your medicine."

"But I'm not even sick..."

"TAKE YOUR DAMN MEDICINE!"

[MonteCristo]

O’Ward leads Dixon in incident-packed first practice in Detroit

The new, fast, narrow and bumpy course on the streets of downtown Detroit caused red flags aplenty, but by the end of the session, Pato O’Ward led the way for Arrow McLaren ahead of Ganassi legend Scott Dixon.

Benjamin Pedersen of A.J. Foyt Racing-Chevrolet was the first drive to complete full laps, running the extra set of primaries that all IndyCar rookies receive for road and street courses. But it was Chip Ganassi Racing-Honda’s rookie in the No.11 car who first ducked under the 70s barrier, setting a 1m09.9s followed by a 1m08.1s, then a 1m06.5s, then 1m05.8520s an average of 89.929mph around the 1.645-mile course. Eventually Armstrong whittled that time down to 1m05.2832, 90.712mph.

Agustin Canapino of Juncos Hollinger Racing caused the first red flag of the session. He was 1.1s off Armstrong’s early benchmark when the No.78 went long at Turn 1 and needed a restart. After 14 of the 19 Indy NXT cars ended up in the Turn 1 runoff in that series’ first session, it was little surprise that it was a scene of incidents among the 27 IndyCars taking part.

Full report and results: https://racer.com/2023/06/02/oward-lead ... n-detroit/

(I'd post the results, but oftentimes the copy-paste from the PDF stuffs up the formatting and would take forever to fix)

Interesting that all the rookies are in the lower half, given it's a new track and we're part of the way into the season now. Armstrong the ... strongest.

[MonteCristo]

Mickey Mouse.

[erwin greven]

Concrete surface concrete walls, concrete trackside objects... concrete atmosphere.... state of the art...

[John]

I miss Belle Isle.