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Join the Paddock trio as they rehash the events from Iowa. A great weekend of racing from the IZOD IndyCar Series as well as the Mazda Road to Indy. We look at the low downforce setting and debate whether it is car or driver that is making the exciting on track product. We also look at the heat races as well. Should we have them again or drop them? This weeks motorsport minute also covers the European Grand Prix and the WRC from NZ. Enjoy the show and thank you for the download!
Doug – In regards to the Toyota Yaris entering in the WRC. Sure that little thing seems like a bit of a heap in comparison to a lot of cars available today, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t pop in a better engine and a different transmission to make it a viable rally car. So long as the chassis is strong enough to handle the abuse and added power, it just might do fine. Have you seen what the normal off the shelf Skoda Fabia looks like? It totally dominates the IRC yet it is not the prettiest car in the showroom that’s for sure.
My thought is that Toyota wants back in the WRC to get a team trained for a future introduction of the Toyota GT86 rally car. AKA Scion FRS, AKA Subaru BRZ, AKA ToyoBaru. So even if the Yaris doesn’t do squat at first, they will at least get a nicely trained team ready for future cars. Just my $0.02.
Also of note…the reason why Solberg didn’t have a chance to compete for the win in NZ was because of a bad tire choice for the longest loop which was Friday. Solberg was so very angry about the performance of his hard compound tires that he wouldn’t talk at stage end, which is unusual for him. It turns out the tire choice came from Malcom Wilson and was not Petter’s decision. They had a limited number of soft compound tires for the wet conditions, and Malcom wanted to split his drivers (Jari-Matti on softs and Petter on hards) to hedge his bets. Turns out that even though the first days loop was long, the soft tires stayed in great condition due to ample amounts of loose gravel. Jari-Matti on the second pass of the Friday stages ended cutting a corner that sucked him into a barbed-wire fence. It took 4 minutes for fans to cut him free. Sebastian Loeb did not dominate the entire time. In one stage Mikko gained 15 seconds head of Loeb on day 2 and Loeb was actually concerned…he didn’t know where Mikko’s speed came from and had to catch up to him. Of course on other stages Loeb did catch him, but the reaction from Loeb was rather blunt that he couldn’t have gone as fast as Mikko on that stage. At the end of day 2 team orders to hold position went into effect.