I mean, you spend all that time, effort, and money to get a car and driver into the Indy 500. Probably over a million dollars just to earn a starting position….
And at the start of the race your car won’t start because it has a dead battery. A simple dead battery. You’d think that that would be one of the things your team would verify at the beginning of the day of racing. Chargers are cheap, or simply put in a freshly charged new one a few hours before the race. Do they not have a Before Race car preparation plan? (You know, check tire pressures, oil, fuel,, make sure the windscreen tear-offs are in place, lug nut on each tire is correctly tightened, etc.) A checklist? Or are they just winging the whole thing? What kind of management is there if this can happen?
That simple oversight cost the Rahal Racing team 2 laps….at the start of the race.
There are so many things that can go wrong, things that break, things that just happen. But if you don’t eliminate the things you can, you start out at a disadvantage.
Nothing like shooting yourself in the foot.
There is ALWAYS something that gets missed… sigh
I won’t disagree; given the cluster-up on the start, I was waiting for a wheel to fall off or the engine to seize two laps in due to lack of oil.
And the only reason Rahal might have had anything even slightly better than the proverbial snowball’s chance was Indy has devolved into the open wheel version of NASCAR restrictor plate racing; the qualifying spots for the first 3 rows (9 cars) on the grid were separated by just over 1 MPH (1.147).
Front row pole (Palou) to last row center (Harvey, Rahal was last row outside because of the driver change) were separated by just over 5 MPH (5.049) That’s not racing, that’s “parity club.” And everyone involved seems to think “that’s the way it’s supposed to be done.” I realize that everyone is constrained by the same rules and it’s now “who’s got the best engineers” so you wind up with a 480 mile parade and 20 miles of bumper cars.
It would still have to be an alky burner because the batteries wouldn’t last 500 miles but give it a few more years and Musk could enter a car with the AI Autopilot feature and save the weight of the driver.
Anon 2