Finding the Limits Can Be a Tricky Proposition for IndyCar Drivers

NTT IndyCar racer Sting Ray Robb said pushing his Juncos Hollinger Racing Dallara Chevy is “an easy thing to do. Finding the limit is a whole other thing.”

And colleagues Santino Ferrucci and Felix Rosenqvist can relate.

“There’s a lot of ways that you can do it wrong, and there's very few ways you can do it right,” Robb said. “That's what separates the greats from the not-so-greats. The way that you approach the limit and how quickly you can get there, that’s what makes a great driver.

“Even in my karting days,” he said, “if I was really in sync with a go-kart, you knew where it was before you even sat in the kart. The same thing can happen in IndyCar. There’s almost an inherent nature of knowing where that limit is if you’re doing things right. But with an adaptable series like this where we have different tires weekend to weekend as far as compounds for different tracks, different surfaces, multiple surfaces on the same racetrack—you look at Detroit or Toronto, now Markham, all those surface changes just make the car a different animal turn to turn. Being comfortable in the seat that you’re in and finding a limit through what you’ve already experienced is super-important.”

A.J. Foyt Racing’s Ferrucci had another way of figuring it out: “I guess when you’re finding the limit, you kind of find it when you hit the wall.”

Ferrucci said, “This car, with the weight, with the hybrid, with so many different things, it wants to move in so many different directions. I think the better part of trying to find the car is with setup work and with engineering. I think we’re very front-limited everywhere we go, and trying to reverse that and get the rear to come around is—there’s limitations to everything. It’s always good to try and find that 101% and then dial it back to about 98.”

Rosenqvist, of Meyer Shank Racing, is like Ferrucci. He said, “I feel like you have to go over the limit a lot of times to actually reach the limit.

“These cars have become so incredibly tough to drive. We’ve all noticed that the trend from the previous years is that you have to drive the car in an area where it’s very uncomfortable. So in a way, you almost have to drive over the limit to be where you want to be. You just always try to push yourself as hard as possible—but what you’re comfortable with. That’s essentially your limit of how fast you can go. It’s not really complicated [more] than that. There’s a lot of other moving parts that need to work,” Rosenqvist said. “But you just need to be comfortable with uncomfortability.”