Longtime readers should know by now that I have a love affair with the Indy 500. I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: the Indianapolis 500 is the race that got me interested in cars and motorsports. Going is always a special event for me, whether it’s as press or as a fan. Going as press has been an amazing experience and I end up taking a few thousand photos during the race weekend. It’s rather a shame that we only publish a few dozen on MotoIQ, so instead of doing a normal race recap I thought it would be more interesting to pick out some of the coolest pictures I captured during the weekend and share them with some thoughts, observations, and notes. By the time this has gone live you’ll either know what happened, or you won’t care, so hopefully this approach brings a different perspective to the race.
Dawn breaks over the Speedway, the calm before the storm.
It was very weird not seeing James Hinchcliffe’s #5 Arrow car in the garage and not on the grid. When it was announced that bumping was back, I was rather bummed: In today’s economic climate, upsetting sponsors is not wise. However, the story of Hinch getting bumped was HUGE and even made non-racing news. That is the kind of exposure you can’t pay for. So I guess it turned out to be a good thing for IndyCar and Hinchcliffe’s stock rose immensely with fans because of how he handled the situation. Yeah he missed Indy, but Hinch and IndyCar won themselves some new fans for sure.
So much of the new aerokit is based on the underbody that the rear wing on speedways is basically just a tuning element. At its greatest angle, it makes only 232 lbs of downforce. The mounts give a lot of adjustability to the engineers to get the car perfectly dialed.
This angle really shows how deep the tunnels are. Not the deepest in the world, but that’s by design. You can also see some of the funky suspension setup required for going fast on an oval.
All cars go through a final tech inspection before hitting the track.
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