Formula 1 U.S. Grand Prix, Indianapolis Motor Speedway
It took a while for me to decide to commit to going to the first Formula One race in the U.S. since 1991 after the date was formally announced, so by the time I sent in my ticket request the good reserved seats were taken, and there were no hotel rooms available within 100 miles of Indianapolis. I got a seat in the North Vista overlooking the first several turns, but that's pretty far from the track. I decided to use the ticket as a backup and hope to find a better one in the meantime. I also found out that Behram was going and had found a hotel about 45 minutes from the speedway, so that was a backup plan in case I couldn't find a last-minute cancellation.
Fortunately I found both an available room and a better ticket through the Boxster Board. And I was able to arrange a flight on one of the few flights out after the race on Sunday night, so I could make it to the CFRA day at Thunderhill on Monday.
Friday
Behram was going to Indy a day earlier and he offered to pick me up at the Indianapolis airport in a rental car. My plane landed and as I sat waiting for the crowd to disembark, my cell phone rang. It was Behram, saying that he was stuck at the raceway and that it would take a good 45 minutes to get to the airport. I said no problem, I'd meet him out at the arrivals curb. Finally I walked out the jetway into the gate area, and headed down the long corridor through the terminal. Suddenly, I noticed some guy standing in my path wearing a McLaren team cap and a Mercedes logo jacket, standing there looking through the passers-by, holding up a piece of paper with my name scribbled on it. I walked up to him and said, "Hi, that's my name." He said, in what seemed to be a German accent, that someone named Behram had arranged for him to pick me up at the airport. Now I was confused. I'd just talked to Behram not five minutes earlier and was planning to hang out for 45 minutes and meet at the curb. Well, this guy looked official in the McLaren-Mercedes gear, and I thought maybe Behram had gotten a great connection with some McLaren-Mercedes team guy. I explained that I'd just talked to Behram, and I'd better call him back to confirm everything.
Sucker.
As I reached for my cell phone I saw Behram and Dan Jones sitting in the airport bar, laughing.
Saturday
Practice
We arrived at the track early and walked around the facility. The sky was gray, the ground was wet from rain, but it wasn't too cold. There was almost nobody around at all. The first thing near the entrance we took is the Indy museum. Nearby were the vendor exhibit and booth areas, but immediately next to the museum was the Mercedes area where they had a new show car under a car cover, and David Coulthard's 1999 McLaren Formula One car.
Nice car. That must be my Dumb Guy look.
We wandered over to the paddock area entrance where Behram had to go -- using his press pass -- and I waited outside the gate while Behram went in to get some stuff out of his press locker. A small crowd was milling around the gate waiting for any celebrity arrivals; this is where all the drivers and teams and big shots had to enter the paddock.
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Then a pair of Mercedes sedans pulled up and the guards opened the gates to let them drive through (everyone else had to walk through). The first car pulled up to a parking space just inside the gate, and I noticed a name plate on the fence in front of the car: "Mika". Apparently the World Champion gets a reserved parking space inside the paddock. The parking space next to Mika's is labeled "Bernie". Ah, I see, the champion and the owner of F1 get reserved parking. The other Mercedes pulled up next to the first one, and out climbed several McLaren crew, plus Mika, Mrs. Hakkinen, and DC. A few waves and autographs to the growing mob later and they were gone.
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After lots of wandering around the track, Dan and Paul and I headed for the grandstands near turn 1 to see the morning practice session. When the first cars came out, the crowd stood up and roared. The jumbotron screen across from us showed the action on various parts of the track, plus a rolling scoreboard of drivers' times. The sound of the cars slowing for turn 1 was great, although not amazing. Most of the cars exhibited a "pop-pop-pop" sound of the engine backfiring as they downshifted and braked to slow from a top speed of over 210 MPH down to 80 MPH or so through the turn. The location was good, but because of the fencing, the pictures weren't too good.
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The session was fairly uneventful, although a couple of drivers had a little trouble at turn 1 and chose to go straight past it down the oval, and return between turns 2 and 3 on a little access road at the direction of the track workers. It sure seemed like turn 1 was going to be a great place to see the most overtaking maneuvers in the race.
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The top six in practice were Schumacher, Barrichello, Coulthard, Button, Hakkinen, and Frentzen.
Qualifying
We decided to wander down the main straight, across from the pit garages, to watch qualifying from the grandstands there. Directly across from the pit garages, we could clearly make out the mechanics, the occasional driver, and hear the pneumatic tools at work prepping the cars for qualifying. Just a couple of minutes before 1PM, Heinz-Harald Frentzen's Jordan was the first car to pull out of the pits and line up to go out. The grandstands erupted as the crowd roard their appreciation to the first driver to qualify on this new Indy circuit. A quick flurry of a few other cars including Jacques Villeneuve's BAR followed immediately, as the weather looked threatening and no one dared lose what might be their only chance to get in a dry qualifying lap. The way Formula 1 qualifying works is that during the qualifying hour, each driver gets 12 laps from which to get their best time. Since to take a flying lap you waste one lap as you exit the pits past the start/finish line, do the flying lap, and waste lap returning to the pit lane before the start/finish line, it means that each driver usually does just 4 flying laps. Of course, it's possible to do 10 flying laps all in a row, but there's a lot of strategy involved as each driver tries to wait for the perfect moment to get in their best lap, tweaking the car set-up differently for each run, based on how the car feels and accounting for track conditions, temperature, fuel loads, traffic, etc. It's often an intense poker game as the top teams save a run or two for the end in case they need to make another attempt to best the others' times. But on this day, many were certainly worried that if it started to rain, no one would be able to get better lap times than those who posted a time early in the session.
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So the lights turned green and the first handful of cars headed out. As they disappeared down the straight, a slow, steady stream of other cars came out of their garages and went down pit lane and onto the main straight.
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Then, a little more than a minute after the first car took the green light, I experienced the most awesome sound I have ever heard. The cars completing their out lap rounded the banked section of the oval and screamed down the long straight, past the start/finish line, passing 200 MPH and approaching 18,000 RPM as they passed us. The sound of these engines at those speeds, amplified by echoing off the grandstands and pit walls, is simply mind blowing. It is a horrible, beautiful, shrieking metal sound. My jaw dropped and I grinned in stunned amazement. You just cannot believe the sound. (I now know that anyone who says their engine sounds like an F1 engine, or that their new exhaust system makes it sound like one, has obviously never heard an F1 car in person and can be ridiculed.)
The Ferraris and McLarens were notably absent from the line of cars taking the track at the start of the qualifying session. A couple of minutes went by and they continued to sit in their garages. I was surprised, because I figured that with the ominous weather, they'd want to post times in the dry. If it were to start raining before they posted a time, they could easily be stuck at the back of the grid with only wet track qualifying times to show. But they sat in their garages like gunslingers waiting for the other to make the first move.
The first move came from the McLarens, three minutes into the session. Both cars came out and each ran two flying laps. Hakkinen took provisional pole first at 1:16.170, but Coulthard went faster at 1:14.900. Barrichello's Ferrari came out a minute later and took provisional pole at 1:14.796, but Hakkinen's second flying lap took it back at 1:14.689. The McLarens were gambling on the weather worsening, using up precious laps early in the session -- leaving them only two runs each left -- and taking positions 1 and 3, split by Barrichello, with Schumacher still in the garage, surely hoping the track would get drier, not wetter!
Finally, with nearly ten minutes in the session gone, like a knight on his steed, Michael Schumacher finally rolled out of his garage at the end of pit row, with just the slightest of rain drops falling. As he screamed past the start/finish line, the jumbotron read 1:14.492 for provisional pole position.
Now it was Ferrari 1-3 with three runs each remaining, and McLaren 2-4 with only two runs each remaining. But then Barrichello took another shot and went ahead of Hakkinen, making it an all-Ferrari front row.
Then the Ferraris went out together, and a strange sight appeared when around the banked oval section appeared the pair of red cars in close formation. It turned out to be Barrichello giving Schumacher an aerodynamic tow down the main straight, improving Schumacher's pole time down to 1:14.266. Meanwhile, Hakkinen took another flying lap to take back second place, but it left him with only two laps remaining, which is not enough for another run. Coulthard went out for a similar last run, but when his flying lap went poorly in the infield, he aborted it and pitted immediately, leaving him a full three laps remaining for a final run.
Ferraris in tow
After a few more minutes the Ferarris took to the track for a final time, again running nose-to-tail down the front straight, but this time it was Schumacher towing Barrichello, hoping to take second from Hakkinen. But Schumacher got a little too far ahead of Barrichello in the infield section, and Barrichello was unable to improve without Schumacher's car towing him closely down the straight.
View from the upper deck
But McLaren had one more trick up their sleeve, and instead of Coulthard making a flying run alone, he went out behind Hakkinen, and the crowd realized that Hakkinen could use his two remaining laps to give Coulthard a slipstream tow onto the front straight. It worked better than planned: Coulthard lept ahead of not only Barrichello for third position, but ahead of Hakkinen, too, into second place. Not quite what Hakkinen wanted in his quest to hold on his slim two-point lead over Schumacher in the championship.
McLarens in tow
Starting grid top six: Schumacher, Coulthard, Hakkinen, Barrichello, Trulli, Button.
Ferrari Challenge street car race
Sunday
Warm-Up
The weather looked much more grim on Sunday. It had rained overnight and it was continuing off-and-on through the morning. I sat in the grandstands near turn 1 with several layers to stay warm and a windbreaker to stay dry. The food at the track was quickly growing unappealing after relying on it for a day and half. The concession stands at Indy are all the same and have a choice of Track Burger, Track Dog, and Track Nachos.
Behram took my camera with him into the press-only areas and got the rest of these photos from the pits before practice and from the turn 2/3 area during the race. Awesome!
Photos from pit lane:
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Cart Champion 1999 moving to Williams BMW F1 in 2001 |
Jackie Stewart Jaguar |
Benetton ex-Ferrari |
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Sauber-Petronas |
Prost-Peugot |
McLaren-Mercedes |
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Jordan-Honda |
Ferrari |
Williams-BMW |
The rain seemed to dissipate during the Porsche Supercup race, and by the time the F1 warm-up session started, the track was wet but the rain was basically gone.
Warm-up took place on a wet track, with lap times a good 9 to 10 seconds off qualifying pace. The top six in warm-up were Coulthard, Hakkinen, Schumacher, Villeneuve, Trulli, and Verstappen. After that the track began to dry out somewhat in the banked oval section, probably due to gravity. The question would be what kind of tires the teams would start the race on, as the clouds continued to look pretty bad. As it turned out, only Johnny Herbert's Jaguar opted to start the race on slick tires.
Race
When the red lights went out, we couldn't see them directly from the turn 1 grandstands, so the first few seconds had to be monitored on the jumbotron. Somehow, Coulthard got a jump on Schumacher and beat him to turn 1. Schumacher seemed faster and after a close call trying to pass Coulthard in turn 1, got by in the same place the next lap in another exciting maneuver. Immediately thereafer, Coulthard took to the pits to serve a 10-second stop-and-go penalty for jumping the start, which explained why he'd gotten past Schumacher so handily into the first corner. That was essentially it as Schumacher led to the end. As the track quickly became dry, everyone pitted for slick tires early in the race, but exactly how they timed the change from wet gear to dry had quite an effect of shuffling the running order. Hakkinen started to gain ground by around the one-third mark, but his engine caught on fire, putting him out of the race, coasting down the pit lane entrance until he had to get out of the car only a few meters from his pit garage. The other big excitement was Jacques Villeneuve's valiant attempt to get another spot on the Indianapolis podium after having won the Indy 500 before coming to Formula 1. First he battled Barrichello for fourth place, but spun exiting turn 3, losing several places. Then after Hakkinen dropped out and Barrichello moved up to second place, Villeneuve passed several cars and got behind Frentzen to try to grab third place. He was faster than Frentzen in the infield, catching him up, but just couldn't seem to get enough aerodynamic pull on the oval section to make a pass. But finally he made a late braking move on Frentzen into turn 1. Unfortunately it was too big a move and Villeneuve took a detour onto the grass in turn 1 right in front of us. Meanwhile, Schumacher grew a comfortable lead and in a moment of lapsed concentration, touched the grass near an apex curb and spun. Fortunately he didn't stall the car or hit anything, and got back on the track without losing position. With time running out, Villeneuve caught up to Frentzen again, and I was really hoping he'd take another shot in turn 1, but there were not enough laps left. It was exciting!
Here are some of the photos from my camera during the race. (Wish I was standing there!) The thumbnails are reduced to 160x pixels across; click the thumbnail for the cropped 640x image; click the "xl" for the uncropped 1024x768 original.
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Jaguar - Johnny Herbert (xl) |
David Coulthard (xl) |
Michael Schumacher (xl) |
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Heinz-Harald Frentzen (xl) |
Jaguar and McLaren follow (xl) |
Michael Schumacher (xl) |
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Ralph Schumacher (xl) |
Rubens Barrichello (xl) |
Michael Schumacher (xl) |
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Rubens Barrichello Ferrari |
Michael Schumacher Ferrari |
Heinz-Harald Frentzen Jordan |
After watching the closing cermonies and doing a little last-minute souvenir hunting, we hopped in the car to fight the traffic and rush to the airport for flights out. Behram hopped out at the curb and ran to the gate to make his flight with moments to spare. Then I realized I didn't know where the car rental drop-off was. I found it and scrambled to get on the rental shuttle before it took off. Then I ran to the gate where my flight was boarding. I made it just in time.
My flight got in to Sacramento at around 10:30 PM, so I caught a shuttle van to my friend's house where my car was stashed, and drove up to Willows, arriving at around 1 AM for the Monday track day at Thunderhill.
