Can you imagine hurdling down one of Indy’s two straightaway’s at over 230 miles an hour, turning left and feeling the car get loose? Or the front end push and point you into the wall? Like, out of control while covering the length of a football field every second? With too little or too much down force, that’s liable to happen. The slightest split second driver inputs in steering and throttle are what will gather the car up and get it going once again in the right direction. The more down force the car has dialed in the less likely is such a disruption, but too much is no good either. The trade off is always going to be speed and handling. A fast car is going to be more loose than a slow one. This is the area where a fine line is drawn by the race teams that determine their set ups for either qualifying or for racing.

When a car is qualifying it is out on the race track by itself for four laps. Since there is no traffic to encounter, no turbulence from other cars, and the tires don’t have to last very long, a car can be set up for qualifying with less down force, and softer stickier tires. This will compromise handling to some degree, but give the car more speed. Consequently, a race set up takes into consideration tire compounds that are a little harder, suspension tweaks to compensate for the tires, and more down force dialed into the wings so that the car doesn’t get loose.

Some drivers, however, such as Team Redline Xtreme’s Tomas Scheckter, are notoriously aggressive and don’t mind giving up some adhesion for some speed. While most cars will be running wing degree angles that are positive one or two degrees, Scheckter feels that his Team Redline Xtreme car is so well sorted and so well balanced that he could be running the race with a certain (top secret) number of negative degrees of wing! To some this may seem insane. To Scheckter, and to his team, it’s just merely Xtreme!

Practice will have to continue to see how this pans out, so stay tuned for further updates as the practice week continues.