Monkeys Screwing Footballs

The title of this post says it all right now regarding IndyCar and the situation at IMS. You could also go with goat rodeo or cluster*bleep.* The point is this has been a disaster, and unfortunately there is no assurance at all that anything has been rectified.

Basically, once Ed Carpenter got upside down this morning, IndyCar went into full Drudge siren panic mode. Meeting after meeting took place with little to no communication from up high. That was frustrating, but the press conference with Mark Miles and Derrick Walker was infuriating.

In response to today, IndyCar mandated that teams must run the same aero setup in the race that they run in qualifying. They've also reverted back to the boost levels that will be used in the race. This leads to two questions right off the bat: Does that mean teams can't change anything in the set up for next week, and more importantly, how does dropping the boost back help things? Helio and Newgarden's crashes both occurred in race trim.

The overall problem is that the powers that be clearly have no idea what is causing the cars to get airborne, and thus have no idea how to fix it. Thus, the perception is that they are scrambling and essentially throwing darts to try and solve the problem. Maybe they have solved it, although that seems unlikely. Either way, unless they can figure it out before Sunday, there's going to be a layer of apprehension surrounding race day. What if one of the cars gets airborne in traffic, or goes into the crowd?

If there is a root cause to all this, it's the fact that the superspeedway aero kits had little, if any testing, before May 3rd. In hindsight, that's completely ridiculous, but again, those with decision making power should have known that ahead of time. The crazy thing is, I sort of believed Derrick Walker when he said this won't happen next year, because they will have had the time to get it straightened out. They didn't give the cars that time this month, and this is the result. Testing before hand might have discovered this and given them time to fix it, instead of the haphazard desperation we see now.

Meanwhile, practice has just started. Qualifying has been shifted to ESPN News. Of course, this being IndyCar, rain remains in the forecast potentially starting shortly after qualifying is to begin. In all this, someone is going to win the pole, and someone is going home, which feels doubly cruel. At this point though, I think everyone just wants to get through today in one piece. Hope might be all we have to go on with that, since we're clearly lacking a concrete plan.