Let’s get this thing started.
With Content Days taking place in Indianapolis today and tomorrow, the 2024 NTT IndyCar season is underway – at least unofficially.
While the series opener in St. Pete is still a few weeks away, getting the gang together and talking about racing is a pretty good thing. I’m looking forward to getting reacquainted with the drivers and other people in the series over the next two days, and Abby and I will have plenty of content coming out of this event.
Before we head to the J.W. Marriott in Indy – which, by the way, you can see IMS from the higher floors that face west – let’s dive into a few recent bits of news.
Godspeed Gil de Ferran
The New Year started out with a bit of sad news with the untimely passing of two-time CART champion and 2003 Indianapolis 500 winner, who suffered a heart attack while karting with his son in Miami. De Ferran was just 56 years old, which, given this writer turns 55 the day before this year’s Indy 500, is way too freaking young.
I wish I could write a flowing eulogy for de Ferran, but unfortunately most of his career occurred during the time I was a lapsed IndyCar fan. Two kids, two jobs, and a general apathy over life in general and the stupid infighting that was going on in American open wheel racing will do that a guy.
Still, looking back at his career, you can’t not have a ton of respect for a determned driver that was highly respected by his peers.
Overall, de Ferran was credited with 12 total IndyCar wins. After finishing second in the points in 1997 and eighth in 1999 with Walker Racing, de Ferran moved on to Team Penske and put together a dominant five-year run that saw him win eight times while notching 30 podium finishes.
Along with his two championship seasons, he also had a third-place finish in points in 2002 when the team moved to the Indy Racing League, and closed out his career with a runner-up finish in the standings in 2003.
Of course, 2003 was also when de Ferran etched his name into immortality when he passed teammate Helio Castroneves with 31 laps to go to win the Indianapolis 500 and put his face on the Borg-Warner Trophy.
And of course, de Ferran will always be connected to what is still the fastest qualifying lap in IndyCar history when he posted a massive speed of 241.428 miles per hour at Fontana in 2000. If you have never watched his qualifying run that day, go check it out on YouTube, it’s spellbinding, the car looked and sounded like a fighter jet on wheels. Just stunning.
(Editor’s note: Can we get an IndyCar to sound like that again? Please? Yeah, I know, they will never put 900-1,000 horsepower in a car and let it turn 18,000 rpm, but we can dream, right?)
Later, de Ferran formed his own team in the American Le Mans series, with Simon Pagenaud as a teammate, and was part of the ICONIC committee that was part of the development process of the current DW-12 chassis.
Just last May, de Ferran had taken a consulting role at McLaren.
Sadly, for as much time as I’ve spent around IndyCar the last few years, I never had the chance to meet him. By all accounts, he was a gentleman, and I wish I would have had the pleasure.
iracing is back
As I talked about in a recent post, the IndyCar video game that had been in (and out) of development for the last couple of years went belly-up a few weeks ago, but the series righted a huge wrong when it announced that they were back in business on the iRacing platform.
Thank God.
In what has been described as a multi-year partnership, the platform is restoring popular features such as the iRacing Indianapolis 500, IndyCar Series leagues, and the biggie, licensing of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Admittedly, I am a terrible sim racer, although between this news and watching Grand Turismo last week, I’m ready to give it another whirl. But, it’s a big deal in the sim racing world, and many people like me will be pulling their steering wheels out of storage and downloading what might be several gigabytes of iRacing updates.
Of course, for me, it might even be terabytes. It’s been that long.
(Another editor’s note: I give Gran Turismo three stars. It’s not great and the ending wasn’t very good, but it’s worth a watch and gave me the opportunity to learn about Jann Mardenborough, who is a great story.)
Sure, it would’ve been great to have an exclusive video game. It would have been cool to run a series or be a certain driver and all of that, but iRacing brings together some of the best sim racers in the world, which is cool. Does it bring more eyes to the series? Who knows. But really, who cares?
Plus, whatever money has been cleared from that venture should be moved into a new one: creating a sim racing series on par with what has been done in Formula 1, where sim racers are affiliated with teams and compete on a massive scale.
The most recent eSports race held last month had more than 660,000 views and is featured on the F1 YouTube page that has 9.84 million subscribers.
I’m going to beat the eSports drum forever, hopefully it becomes reality someday.
santino back with foyt
The announcement took a while, and probably was just a formality, but A.J. Foyt Racing announced that Santino Ferrucci is officially back behind the wheel of the iconic No. 14 for the 2024 season.
The 25-year-old from Connecticut finished 19th in the final standings last year and finished in the top 20 just eight times, but that result stems from the overall result of the team as much as it does Ferrucci. Still, he finished 11th at Long Beach and 13th at Gateway, and of course, he’ll always have the Month of May.
Quick from the first day of practice, Ferrucci made the Fast 6 shootout and eventually started fourth. On race day, he led 11 laps and moved up one spot to finish third to finish in the top 10 for the fifth time in five starts.
He will be teaming up with Sting Ray Robb, who was announced earlier as the driver of the No. 41 machine.
As far as the status of Benjamin Pedersen, it looks like he hits free agency as Larry Foyt said that his contract had “lapsed”. Whatever that means.
While they will only run two cars during the season, it would be no surprise to see the team roll out a third car for the 500. While of course Pedersen could jump in that seat if he got the funding together, if I were a betting man I’d think that a bigger possibility would be J.R. Hildebrand, who announced recently that he was trying to put something together and drove for Foyt in 2021-22.
That’s it for now. If you have anything you’d like me to get at Content Days, hit me up on Twitter @15daysinmay and let me know!
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