Geoff Turk
There has obviously been much discussion, and many things / comments written about what transpired at Indy, the wrong or right, or ‘grey’ of it.
There has also been dialogue about the real potential impact on performance these things that were done, may or may not have had across brands, competitors.
The screen shot of the table below compares performance of entrees from the race before (Brainerd) to Indy. It uses the best ET from each entree in each event for comparison (this eliminates, a one or two run difference comparing just qualifying, just a run).
Of course environmental conditions varied, run to run, across events but in general, considering all runs, the environment was comparable when looking at the events.
The notes column depicts known changes in rules and in the one case, where I have deeper knowledge, changes in the car beyond rule changes (Nash).
The Chevies are grouped by my knowledge (which might be wrong) of who there engjne builders are.
My conclusion, which not everyone sees the same, is it appears without the blower speed up methods employed, moving to legal, most Chevies lost two to three tenths.
As this conclusion has been challenged, and my view has been published, I wanted to publish the basis of that view.
It appears NHRA largely agrees with this analysis and granted the Chevies a blower overdrive increase in the rules of 27% more, a record increase in one change (in comparison the Dodges were granted a 7% increase prior to Indy).
These are all facts.
The same analysis in FX is difficult and I believe less telling as those entrants still have a lot of variation in them run to run, event to event, as they are all still making forward, backward strides, struggling with launching them (in our case at Indy, some of that but mostly a worn out engine we had no real time to freshen given the priority we gave to building a new, better engine with fresh blower rotors for Nash.
