EuroSpeedway Return Official!

[JoeBob]

http://www.cart.com/News/Article.asp?ID=5371

Up until the crash, that was a great race. Glad to see it back on the schedule.

What is interesting, is that they're running a road course and an oval on the Europe trip. That seems like it will be quite a bit of work for the teams, unless they decide to use the road course wings at Lautsitz.

[WickerBill]

And they're doing it the week AFTER, not the week before, Brands. Good for Chris.

If the decision was out of Chris' hands, then good anyway; I'm glad they'll all be busy during the fifth month.

WB

[nrc]

This great news. It adds another oval, or at least replaces one. They had a great turnout the first year, I just hope those fans weren't put off too much by the bankruptcy and all the other bad luck.

[Lizzerd]

So, they have to convert from road circuit to super speedway configuration and do it at Lausitz after setting up in the paddock with no transports to haul their stuff.

What changes are reqired to the car to do this? Wings, shocks and springs, obviously. What else? Can it be done? The questions are moot if they are using the road course configuration, but I can't see them doing that on a two mile oval.

[pchall]

Originally posted by Lizzerd
So, they have to convert from road circuit to super speedway configuration and do it at Lausitz after setting up in the paddock with no transports to haul their stuff.

What changes are reqired to the car to do this? Wings, shocks and springs, obviously. What else? Can it be done? The questions are moot if they are using the road course configuration, but I can't see them doing that on a two mile oval.

It's all a fair amount of work and I bet the teams would prefer to do it in the shop. But I can see doing all the work --including changing out the undertray -- in the paddock. They just have to remember that the SCCA guys do all their work in primitive conditions on nationals weekends and still race like hell on Sunday.

[Hardpoint]

Thats good news. I have a friend of a friend who worked on Bruno's target car. His favorite venue from a "work" point of view was EoroSpeedway. Said the paddock and garages are HUGE and state of the art.

[pchall]

I just read the cart.com article and caught this:

"... to help draw fans back to the return of the 230-mph Champ Cars, the EuroSpeedway organizers announced that they will honor all tickets sold to last year's race for the 2003 event."

Nice move.

[cart7]

originally posted by pchall

"... to help draw fans back to the return of the 230-mph Champ Cars, the EuroSpeedway organizers announced that they will honor all tickets sold to last year's race for the 2003 event."

Great move indeed.

There's a lot of emotion tied up in that track for Cart fans. It was one of the first sporting event held after 9-11 if not the first.

And of course, there's the story of Alex. How great that would be to see him drive the pace car around that track again and drop the green! :D

[Railbird]

A quote from Pook in the Autosport interview that might answer questions about changing from a roadcourse to a speedway setup:


"We will have one downforce package common to our short ovals, street courses and road courses. We might even look at running the same downforce package at one of our superspeedways."

[RTKar]

I like the idea of show casing the diversity of CART by running an oval and a road course back to back in Europe. The UK/Euro press may develop a better appreciation of CART too. I also think show casing the series in front of some of the top young drivers in the world can only enhance CART's ability to draw drivers from that talent pool as well.

[DaveL]

Switching from one track configuration to another is not that big of a deal. The cars are designed to be easily converted. A couple of years ago they ran Chicago right after Mid Ohio, and Michigan after Toronto.

The cars are stripped down after every race and put back together. Running a road course one week and a superspeedway the next means bolting on different wings (which takes about 60 seconds if that long), different gears, different suspension pieces (all bolt on parts), different brakes (they do that anyway after each race) new springs (which take about 5 minutes to change) a different undertray (another bolt on part), and a different fuel map for the engine.

None of this is particularly complicated work. Stripping a car down almost to the tub and putting it back together is labor intensive, but that's what CART teams do all season. Going to a different type of track means bolting different parts on. Either way the car is stripped and rebuilt. It would be the same amount of work if they were going from one road course to another.

Running the road course one week and the superspeedway the next and preparing the cars differently is not an issue at all. At worst, they will have to ship more hardware for the different configurations but the actual act of changing the car over is the least of anyone's concerns.

[Lizzerd]

Thanks, Dave.