Scott Dixon zips through turn 7 at St. Petersburg. [Joe Jennings Photo]
It was the first IndyCar practice of the year and it kind of looked like it.
Not that any driver looked thoroughly uneasy out on the Grand Prix of St. Petersburg street course—all 14 turns and 1.8 miles of it—but there seemed more of a sense of urgency to go fast that wasn’t quite backed up by demonstrated performance.
Will Power of Team Penske got things off to an unsteady start in the morning by smacking the right front of his brilliant silver No. 12 Dallara/Chevrolet into the barrier at Turn 9 only minutes into the session. Power later confessed he was monkeying with the brake balance of the car at the time of the incident, putting to rest concerns that perhaps something had broken on his car as it traveled over this slightly uneven and bumpy temporary course.
“It’s one of those tracks that sometimes things don’t fall in the right way,” said Power of his misfortune.
Speaking of bumps and jumps, the event organizers have a repaving ahead of them prior to the 2017 meet, a well-deserved rework that was underscored when a red flag for loose asphalt brought proceedings to a halt in the evening practice session.
This is the time of year when fitness becomes a major issue in the cockpit, what with dehydration and heat occupying a premium place on the list of obstacles that the drivers have to overcome to score well. Today was no exception. Ambient temperature stood at 70 degrees Fahrenheit with humidity at 77 percent, and Firestone recorded a track temperature near 100 degrees in the morning. Things only got warmer from there with a high of 81 ambient at 5PM.
There are always lots of cool and welcome new sights with the beginning of a racing season, chief among them the livery on the cars. This year’s eye-popping sweetheart award goes to Scott Dixon’s red Ganassi Racing No. 9 Dallara/Chevrolet with the yellow lightning bolt accents that trace their history back to Juan Pablo Montoya’s Indianapolis 500 victory of 2000.
As Dixon said in the post-practice press conference, “We have all made wholesale changes over the off-season, and it’s clear the car has great potential we have yet to realize.” He went on to note that the aerodynamic configuration of his car was markedly different from Power’s, a sign that there will be multiple routes to engineering success in the coming season. In theory that should result in greater diversity of results over the long haul of sixteen races.
On track, the usual suspects were hard at their labor: Power recovered nicely to post the fastest lap by day’s end, followed by Dixon, then Simon Pagenaud in the second Penske Racing machine of the trio of top-runners.
On the power side (horsepower, not driver name), the top ten were split fifty/fifty between Honda engine and Chevy. The top three practice times of the evening session were powered by the American maker, but positions four through eight were solidly Japanese. This no doubt comes as welcome reassurance for Honda after recently re-upping for three more years of competition in the series after a winter spent twisting and turning every bolt and airfoil in pursuit of sufficient speed to subdue the feisty bowtie boys. Dixon summed up the feeling around trackside from observers in both camps: “It seems the cars have evened up a bit. It will be interesting to see what happens in qualifying.”
The biggest surprise of the day was Tony Kanaan in the No. 10 Ganassi Racing DW-12. TK finished a tepid fifteenth among twenty-two competitors on the time sheet.
Finally, if you attend IndyCar Series events (and you should, because they are spectacularly accessible and fan-friendly) be prepared for airport-like delays at the turnstiles. Each event manages its own security needs, and some will be more particular about items entering their domain than others, but it’s safe to say the metal-detector route as evidenced here in St. Pete is going to leave some late-comers still en route to their seats at the green flag this year.
Come early, stay late, is the mantra for the year.
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