IRL FEature - The Black Art Of Qualifying
20/05/2007
Qualifying for the Indy 500 is an art and a challenge all rolled into one for the teams and the drivers – and the Firestone Firehawk tires.
Some say qualifying at Indy isn’t so important, given that there are 500 miles to race to the front regardless of starting grid position. However clinching pole position ofor “The Greatest Spectacle remains a coveted prize. One of the reasons? Pole Position is clinched two weekends before the race, allowing two weeks of press and promotion for the fastest driver and team in the 14-day build-up to the race.
But in addition to the cudos of starting the 500 miles on the inside of row one, success in qualifying is a major accomplishment in itself. The Indy 500 features one of the most grueling forms of determining the order of its 33 starters, ranking car-driver combinations not by a single flying lap but by the average speed of four fliers.
It’s a huge test for the drivers – who must keep a state of near-transcendental focus for almost four minutes, the time it takes to complete four laps at Indy’s 2.5-mile, four-corner oval – and machine alike, as the Dallara and Panoz chassis and Honda engines demand the most from its Firestone tires, running absolutely flat out for 10 miles and 16 corners at average speeds of 225 plus miles per hour.
“Qualifying at Indy is the hardest in all of racing, no doubt,” says the 2005 pole winner Tony Kanaan of the Andretti Green Racing team. “It’s four laps and 10 miles at the ultimate limit on a track that’s already challenging enough in normal‚ circumstances –without the extra pressures and expectations of Pole Day.
“The task begins with finding the right setup, which is completely different from what we use for the race – there‚s no need to worry about the car’s handling in traffic, for instance. We run such extreme high-speed setups in qualifying that everything is pushed right to the limit.
The tires will change every lap, and it’s important to time getting them up to temperature the right way, so that they are at their optimum just for those four timed laps. They won’t need to do any more than that. They won’t perform uniformly for all four laps, such is the speed of it all, and you can feel that at the end of the last one,
“Because of that, I always approach Pole Day as an event itself - a mini-race, if you will. It is a real challenge for the whole package, including myself.”
This year the winner of that mini-race was two-time 500 champion Helio Castroneves of the Penske team. Whether he can hold on to that P1 status on the "maxi-race" on Memorial Day Weekend will be discovered on May 27.
Castroneves set his pole time in 2mins39.4214secs. Kanaan took 2mins39.4634secs, an amazing difference of just 0.042 of a second. But, he is alongside Castroneves on the front row, in a car with a set up and fresh Firestones ready for the new challenge of 500 miles, all set and eager to win his first Indy 500.