Q&A: CART's John Lopes and Lee Dykstra - Pt.2.

With several far-reaching changes planned for next year's CART FedEx Championship Series, the organising body's vice-president of racing operations, John Lopes, and director of technology and competition, Lee Dykstra, made themselves available to discuss the competition-enhancing rule revisions that will debut in 2003.

Q:
I know that Cosworth, one of their goals is to have additional life out of their engines and they have got some pretty optimistic targets of 800 or 1200 miles between rebuilds. Is there going to be any type of a oneengine rule implemented like they have in NASCAR and that they are going to move to in Formula One?

LD:
We don't have to have it essentially because our typical mileage for weekend is about 500 miles. So, essentially, we have a two and a half race weekend life out of the engine., So, at one point in time, we had this [situation] where you had to run the engine essentially for a race weekend and we have rescinded that because of the 800 to 1200 miles on the Cosworth now.

Q:
I have read reports that you are hoping to use some of the CART Toyota Atlantic drivers to do the durability testing. Is that still true and when would you hope to begin that programme?

LD:
That programme should begin sometime after the last race. We're looking to run 1200 miles in each chassis - either a Reynard and/or a Lola - and run 400 miles on an oval, 400 miles on a road course, and 400 miles on a street course in each chassis.

Because we don't want to give a team an advantage, certainly we would run this as a tyre test and certainly it would be a good place to run an Atlantic driver to get him some miles in a Champcar.

Q:
This season we have seen at, I think, at least two races, and certainly the Mexico race, [the situation] where, in the closing laps of the race, there was a caution flag and a lapped car definitely figured in the final results of the race. I am wondering if next year any consideration to, let's say, with less than ten laps to go, that lapped cars are forced to go back into their position so that they don't end up getting in the middle of a race or a finish?

JL:
Absolutely. We have talked about implementing that and I think you will see this where the Chief Steward has the ability to move a car over for a restart.

I don't think it's a great secret that what you have seen happen in a couple of the races this year is manufacturer cars getting in the way of another manufacturer's position toward the end of a race. We all know that happens, and I think we have to take it into account although, of course, next year we won't have a problem with that situation. But, this year, some of the teams are under a tremendous amount of pressure to follow the orders of their manufacturer. And, longterm, CART has to have, or should have, the ability to just move cars over into a separate line somewhat in the way that NASCAR does or at least have the discretion to do it if it is safe to do.

So it's something we're looking at, yes.

Q:
Is there any thought at all to once again trying to come up with the minimum weight including the driver for next season? I know you were planning to do that this year. It didn't happen. Is this something that's still on the agenda?

LD:
That will be implemented next year, at the start of season. What we'll do sometime during this [time] is weigh all the drivers, get an average driver weight, then adjust the minimum weight of the cars relative to the variance from that average.

Q:
Have you guys given any further thought to standing starts or is that a dead issue at this time?

JL:
There is a significant discussion right now going on for the potential of standing starts being reintroduced on a limited basis in the Atlantic Series. That's not to say it's going to happen, but we are looking at it both from the entertainment standpoint of its value, and from the safety standpoint.

One thing that we're concerned with is safety, and we're doing some extensive R&D going into next year from the safety standpoint. In fact, we had a meeting yesterday with Lee, [CART chief orthopaedic consultant] Dr Terry Trammell and myself about launching - cars actually getting airborne. We've learned some new things about launching over time.

Lee, I don't know if you want to discuss that right now, but we're currently conducting a study and it's something, particularly with standing starts, that poses a problem. So we're weighing the safety issues against the entertainment value, and it is something that I think it's safe to say that there's a lot of support on the Atlantic side. On the Champcar side, I would not look for standing starts in 2003.

Q:
Do you know if Cosworth is going to lower rpm, or higher boosts next year, or are they going to keep the same boost levels that they have today?

LD:
The boost levels will be about 41 and a half inches for the road course and 39 for the oval.

Q:
Any indication of horsepower range?

LD:
We're looking at 750 for the road course and 700 for an oval.

Q:
This year, for Fontana, are you still looking at 18 cars, or might we see more than 18 cars at Fontana given it is a 500 miler with high attrition historically?

JL:
We're reasonably confident that you will see some additional cars at the end of the season. How many? There's no way I can really predict. We're reasonably confident in, for example, the way Dale Coyne was car #19 in Rockingham. Just today, I've received phone calls from perspective entrants for both Fontana and Mexico.

Q:
I guess you won't be announcing the teams for next year. Are teams going to announce it next year, or is CART going to come out with a list of approved teams for next year at some point?

JL:
There's really no such thing as 'approved teams', other than those teams which will participate in the ESP programme. At some point we will announce the ESP participants in whole, but that's something which we're not going to do at this time, because the picture is not complete.

As many of you know, historically, car count is something that's not completely determined until, typically, January, when everyone's deals are put together. There's an awful lot of activity going on right now. There will be a minimum of 18 cars on the grid next year but, in terms of announcements, I think you will just see a combination of teams making their own announcements when their sponsor and driver deals are put together and CART making an overall announcement as to who is participating in the ESP programme when that's appropriate.

Q:
Back on the five engine maps, are they going to be a standard map for road courses and ovals or will those maps vary weektoweek depending on the course?

LD:
I think that they will be fixed so, once we hard code these things into the ECU, essentially they will stay. Cosworth will be doing transient dyno work, plus some of this as far as the 1200 mile test, to determine exactly the composition of the map and such. But once it's in, it's fixed.

Q:
If I understand correctly, the driver will have a switch where he can change the map during the course of the race?

JL:
Yes.

LD:
Yes.

Q:
The intention, I gather, is with the elimination of the fuel control switch to give the same type of performance enhancement for short periods of time or without disturbing the fuel mileage - is that the idea?

LD:
It's a relative aggressiveness of the engine. So, essentially, you have something very aggressive that conceivably, on a low speed turn, you might have wheel spin out of the turn in position five, but might not have it in position one.

Q:
Will you allow this to be switched from the steering wheel?

LD:
Yes.

Q:
I sense you will have a gear shift in one hand and a mapping switch in the other?

LD:
Essentially, they've had this all along. All the manufacturers have had a torque control in. The thing is that what we're doing by hardcoding this thing is that we're eliminating the ability of a Cosworth engineer to make this work specifically for a driver in a turn in other words, a form of traction control in a certain gear.

MC:
John, I'd just like to ask you a final question. Cost containment's obviously been a big issue in CART. You touched on the ESP programme a little bit. Can you talk about some of the measures that CART has done to ensure that cost containment is there for the series next year, and the relationship with Cosworth, the ability to provide onsite service for the engine support and ESP programme, and about how the teams have responded to that....

JL:
I think to give you a broad brush of some of the things we have done, of course, grandfathering the chassis was significant, so that the [teams] don't have to buy new cars. The aero-freeze which has been discussed at some length is basically restricted development. We've also limited testing for next year, which I think is going to cut an awful lot of the team's budgets in the final analysis. Also, packaging of the engine programme is something that's going to drive their engine costs down from what they were previously anticipating.

Another thing we're doing is basically taking a day off the road for all of them with the implementation of the new 'buckeye system' in [CART senior manager of technology] Steve Dixon's programme, where we will now begin teching the cars at approximately 1pm on Thursdays. The team members can actually come in Thursday morning, get off the plane, get to the track, unload their cars, and get through tech. So we take away a Wednesday night travel date. If you just take a look at that, if there's 20 races, 20 Wednesday nights, and you look at 20 room nights times how many crew members times 25, it starts to add up in terms of the money the teams can save.

On aggregate, we have driven the costs down to a significant degree for our existing teams. But also, for new teams, we have removed the barriers to entry. And we're working very hard at bringing new teams in, but we're also working very hard at ensuring that our current teams are running multiple cars next year to create, in essence, an economy of scale where they can take their savings, apply it to a second car, take two payments from the ESP programme, apply it to a second car, add on some sponsorship and sometimes there's drivers with cash looking for rides. That's part of the business, no matter what level of racing you are in. So, when you add it all together, we're trying to create a situation where these savings will add up to additional cars on track.

We think, ultimately, it's going to payoff. At least the type of activity that's going on right now, we think it will help us to get to that 18 car count plus number.

MC:
If there are no further questions, we'd like to thank both John Lopes and Lee Dykstra.