The RACER Mailbag, December 4

Welcome to the RACER Mailbag. Questions for any of RACER’s writers can be sent to mailbag@racer.com. We love hearing your comments and opinions, but letters that include a question are more likely to be published. Questions received after 3pm ET each Monday will be saved for the following week. Q: Being non-American, I just don’t get how can NASCAR be more popular than IndyCar. Obviously the Split wrecked it, however the reunification happened almost two decades ago. Also, in the first years of the Split, CART was still great with international races, lots of manufacturers and well-known drivers. And another less rhetorical question – any news on the Honda front? Nicholas, Greece MARSHALL PRUETT: Regarding Honda, nobody will talk on the record (I’ve asked), but I’m hearing positive conversations on staying have been happening. The Split was a crucial event that helped propel NASCAR ahead of IndyCar, but that leap was already in progress as Cup began reaching a wider base of fans — escaping its mostly southern roots — while CART and the IRL stepped on their respective appendages. I’ve told this story many times: Sonoma Raceway, 1990, and the second NASCAR Cup race there. I don’t know if it was organized by the track or the series, but on the opening day, Friday afternoon, there was an autograph signing arranged with The King, Richard Petty, and the newest Daytona 500 winner Derricke Cope. It was positioned in front of Huffaker Racing’s shop near the entry to the paddock, with Petty and Cope sitting at a little square card table. There was nobody in sight as I walked down the road from our shop — positioned about 200 feet away — and nobody in line to get their autographs. I walked past them and they were chatting among themselves in this awkward event. But the NASCAR weekend quickly took off and became the biggest event of the year, beating former monster weekends put on with IMSA and Trans Am by a mile. If you weren’t a NASCAR fan, avoiding Sonoma Raceway and all of the arteries to reach the track for a good 5-10 miles in any direction became the norm when Cup was in town. That was happening in Northern California road racing territory while CART was a raging success, and doing similar backed-up-traffic-forever at Laguna Seca. Seeing NASCAR go from an oddity with minimal interest to the biggest race in NorCal by the early 1990s was the sign of change that registered with me the most. The cars are super-relatable to what the average person drives or understands, which is always the hurdle for IndyCar to overcome. Q: One of the interesting things I’ve noticed lately is the evolution of the language around racing, so I have been collecting a glossary of sometimes overused new motorsports terms for my own amusement: Deg = tire wear Box box = pit pit Livery = paint job Papaya = orange Coms = radios Vasser = a reference to a car owner made at least two dozen times by T. Bell every race (multiply if it’s an endurance race) Driver “opened up his hands” in the corner = ??????? Sub-optimal = not great (please stop using this it makes one sound sub-intelligent) Playoffs = Don’t know, don’t care. The Dynamo = Pipo. (Isn’t Pipo interesting enough for a name?) Maggotts, Becketts and Copse = Corners at a race track that every Brit is required by law to use every time Silverstone is mentioned. This all leads me to my question. Why do F1 teams have people sit on the wall outside of the ‘box box’? Certainly, the mountain of coms equipment make it sub-optimal for the people to actually see the papaya livery of the cars as they pass by on the straight and observe if the driver opens up his or her hands as they enter Copse and Maggotts. DA, Chicago MP: Opening up your hands is another way of saying the driver is unwinding the steering wheel, which I realize is another odd expression. The ‘pratt perch’ (stand of idiots) positioned on the other side of pit lane, separated from the crew and garage, is very much an international thing. I’d guess it remains today out of tradition since, as we see, there are teams who prefer to have their engineers and strategists situated in the garage. Since sitting out on an island does nothing to help those on the island — they all stare at TV/timing/data monitors, just like those in the garage — I can’t work out why the practice continues. Q: You have Mario Andretti who is a class act, then you have Michael who the exact opposite of his father. Why such a difference? Is he the primary reason his son Marco really didn’t do much in his racing career? David Tucker MP: Not sure how we’ve arrived at Michael having no class. In all of my interactions with him, ‘having no class’ never entered my mind. But maybe you’ve had encounters that left a different impression. I’m struggling to think of many third-generation IndyCar racers who’ve had careers that were anything close to their father or grandfather’s accomplishments. Unsers, Foyt, and Andrettis come to mind. Q: I read an interview with Valtteri Bottas on one of the other racing websites where he said he turned down a full time ride with an IndyCar team for 2025. I’m trying to think of what team made this offer? Maybe PREMA, or possibly Ed Carpenter? Certainly not Dale Coyne. Do you have any insight as to which IndyCar team made this offer? Steve, Chicago MP: Without asking Dale, this sounds like Dale. He’s had an interest in good on-the-way-out-of-F1 drivers for many years.