Tuesday 5th May 2015

Motorsport on ... Tuesday 05/05/2015

Indycar hits Indianapolis, Meeke's WRC success, more WEC thrills

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IndyCar has begun its 'Month of May' residency of Indianapolis, with testing beginning last weekend for the 99th running of the legendary Indianapolis 500. Despite the internal strife of IndyCar, CART, Champ Car and whatever else it's been called over the years, this race has remained one of the greats, up there with Le Mans and Monaco for recognition. Winning it is a big deal.

Montoya back in Indycar and doing rather well

And a man who's taken an early headstart is one Juan Pablo Montoya, the former Champ Car star who stunned F1 on his debut and went on to wow before becoming disillusioned and heading back to the US to quite probably earn a shedload in NASCAR. But now, he's back in his spiritual home and those of us who remember tuning into Eurosport late at night to watch him in Champ Car are delighted. Particularly as after the early races he has a points lead in the series.

In a Penske, he was chased hard by team-mate and fellow IndyCar 'name' Helio Castroneves, a man as famous for climbing fences as he is for winning the Indy 500. Other runners include Marco Andretti, the 28 year-old son of Michael Andretti who's team boss of Andretti Autosport and, of course, himself the son of Mario Andretti (how about that for a family dynasty?), Takuma Sato and 31-year-old Brit Pippa Mann, who's becoming a bit of an Indy 500 regular.

Another Brit, Justin Wilson, also returns for Indy 500. The lanky racer has, rather impressively, raced in America's top flight series for 11 years now, but a gamble to move further up the order has so far left him without a seat for 2015. He returns to an Andretti Autosport cockpit for Indy, with the target of a full-time drive with the front-running team for 2016.

Justin Wilson out for a full-time drive

Before qualifying for the big race gets underway though, there's the small matter of the Indianapolis road course race, which runs this weekend: Wilson's also got a seat for that and the other runners will be riding too. In an age where Formula 1 turns up for just a few days at a venue before chasing the calendar to reach the next event, IndyCar's prolonged stay in Indianapolis is rather neat.

The cars look better too: Indy 500 marks the rollout of the new speedway aero packages for 2015, to facilitate 230+ mph speeds on fast ovals while retaining the safety-focused wheel pods and other innovations rolled out by IndyCar over the past few years. To these eyes, they are a big improvement on earlier designs, particularly the skinny Monza-spec rear wing; as F1 knows - (2014's nosegate, anyone?), how the cars look is a vital part of motor racing, and this year's cars look like proper racers.

He'll be back!

Kubica commits
Robert Kubica was absent from Rally Argentina, following what appears to be a bit of a tiff between his RK World Rally Team and the A-Style engineers that ran the cars. Relationships are strained, it seems, but despite this, the Pole insists he is committed to WRC despite apparently receiving offers to go circuit racing.

He will be back running in Rally Portugal later in May - but it's not clear who'll actually run the RK World Rally Team's all-new 2015 Fiesta RS WRC. Apparently, it's even been suggested he could return to Malcolm Wilson's M-Sport squad in the medium term, and try to pick up the flashes of brilliance he showed in 2014.

Kris Meeke's breakthrough win must surely encourage him. Kubica's quick, we know that, but just needs to pull it together so he can translate this speed into a win without crashing. M-Sport is, surely, the best chance of achieving this? All those who loved his style in F1, and his determined comeback, will be hoping so.

Bring on Le Mans!

WEC continues to thrill
Sportscar races are long drawn out events where calculators and lap charts are needed and only experts truly understand what's going on as the race unfolds. Right? Well, not if it's 2015-spec World Endurance Championship: last weekend in Spa, there was another thrilling battle between Audi and Porsche that left the winning R18 e-tron of Andre Lotterer, Benoit, Treluyer and Marcel Fassler just 13 seconds ahead of the Porsche 919 Hybrid of Marc Lieb, Romain Dumas and Neel Jani. And that's after six hours!

It could have been even closer between the top runners, but for niggly driver errors and frustrating mechanical maladies - Mark Webber, Brendon Hartley and Timo Bernhard's Porsche won pole but only finished third, a lap down, after being hit by both.

It's the mechanical problems that teams will now be focusing on in the build-up to Le Mans: when reigning WEC champion Anthony Davidson and Sebastien Buemi can only finish 8th in their Toyota after accelerator and electrical problems, you know plenty of midnight oil is going to be burned...

[Images: LAT]

[roland82]

I watched 5 hours of WEC it was great. Toyota were disappointing though.

[STiG911]

If Porsche can get their niggles and downforce sorted it'll be a terrific LeMans - their straight line speed was incredible.

[iwantcheese5]

Such a shame for Toyota, they just seemed to be off the pace for the whole race, hopefully they can sort themselves out for Le Mans so we can have an epic fight between the four manufacturers. The biggest dissapointment of the weekend was an even worse performance from the ByKolles LMP1 car, it was the first car to retire after only 48 laps and had barely any more pace than the LMP2 cars. Hopefully they'll get the car sorted and have decent race against Rebellion at Le Mans.