Originally Posted By: Indydriver
I saw Luyendyk do a 237+ in practice from a turn 2 suite balcony in 1996. I was holding my breath even if he wasn’t. To do that lap, he had to do the corners as fast as the straights. The driver has to be perfect, the car has to be perfect, the tires have to be perfect, the weather has to be perfect, well, you get the idea.
But in ‘96, a pole contender only had to do it once for four laps. With the goofy new system, each contender may have to go balls-out 3-4 times which of course dramatically increases to odds of something going wrong with all the perfect parameters cited above. No amount of safety parameters will save a driver from a 100G+ deceleration that gets suffered when it goes wrong at that speed. I fear for the boys this year. Throw our favorite gal in there in a one-off ride trying to prove a point and it could be a disasterous outcome.
They have been planning for years to get IndyCars up to lap speeds of 240 at Indy. Put enough downforce on the car to nail it to the track, and it will be safe to drive. Then all you need is Horsepower. At Indy there are long straights between the turns, so the drivers have a few seconds to recover from the high lateral G's. It's not like at Texas where the drivers were graying out due to high vertical G's on almost a continuous basis.