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Dixon wants IndyCar aero change to improve racing

Scott Dixon says he thinks a change to the front wing of Dallara’s spec aerokit would help improve IndyCar racing on road courses.

Scott Dixon, Chip Ganassi Racing Honda

Scott Dixon, Chip Ganassi Racing Honda

Art Fleischmann

Scott Dixon, Chip Ganassi Racing Honda
Scott Dixon, Chip Ganassi Racing Honda, podium
Scott Dixon, Chip Ganassi Racing Honda
Josef Newgarden, Team Penske Chevrolet
Scott Dixon, Chip Ganassi Racing Honda
Scott Dixon, Chip Ganassi Racing Honda

 

After finishing third at Road America, Chip Ganassi Racing-Honda’s four-time champion and current points leader said that there are alterations that should be made to allow the cars to run closer together without losing front-end downforce.

Despite IndyCar switching from downforce-heavy manufacturer aerokits to Dallara spec kits in 2018, Dixon pointed out that this year’s cars had a similar drag/downforce ratio to last year at Road America because the long straights had obliged teams to trim their cars to make them as fast as possible in a straight line.

He said: “I think as far as configurations, here and the Indy road course are close to the packages we had last year, because we were trimmed so much in last year's configuration. I think it’s a difference only of a few hundred pounds [of downforce].

“Some guys were quite trim. The hard part with this aerokit is that the trim levels are pretty coarse. It's not really fine-tuning. I think that's good, because sometimes people just get it really wrong.

“[But] I'm still not totally sold on the low-downforce situation. I think the front wing needs to go through a bit of change to make the racing a little bit better. It seems like it's quite inefficient in traffic.

“I know everybody's working on that and looking at that for the future.”

The reduced number of passes being made by evenly matched cars in Sunday’s race was also a by-product of there being no full-course caution periods.

With all the fast drivers trying to make the race on three pitstops due to the major loss of time caused by pitting, and no caution flags in which to save fuel, it meant fuel-saving was required at some point in each stint. As a result, therefore, drivers could afford to use their push-to-pass boost only sparingly.

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