Silly Season & Tunnels

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1:26I can't really, yeah, that's not a good look. It's, I think it takes away some of the panache of the pizza movement. Yeah, oh, yeah. I don't think you would have made it in like medieval England, you know, royalty, or a feeling aristocracy. I feel like the royalty for the most part has like traditionally speaking, have had a lot of genetic problems. Yeah, that's true. Actually, if we're going back a couple hundred years, a lot of, a little weird there for a while. Yeah, very weird there for a bit. I feel like I could have, could have, you know, been fine on that. Well, if it, if it looks like I just woke up from a terrible sleep, it's because that's the facts I just woke up from. So, I mean, just to sleep. You celebrated Becky coming out to sing a poor little too hard last night?

2:26No, not at all. I mean, I celebrated her being not too hard. It was a function of going from having, sleeping in a bed to myself to sleep in a bed with someone who I was terrified of waking in any capacity because she had had like a very lengthy travel experience. I feel like you just went a different direction there. I feel like you were going to say something about her moving too much and then you're like, oh, but she listens. And I don't know. I don't know. It's the opposite. Like her getting a good night's sleep was so critical for everyone in this house having a good week that I was terrified about moving too much. And so I was sitting there with this like level of self-consciousness about moving and waking her. And I just, I spent like several hours in the middle and I just staring up at the ceiling. And I feel like I've been moving too much. I have to move less. And thinking about not moving while you're trying to sleep, then worth because you're thinking

3:26it and you have to sleep. That's nice. You guys get to have a little downtime before the Bahrain Malaysia race. Yes. Which I'm not doing. By the way. So, yeah, I'm on vacation now this week, which is nice. This was something we had planned and we've been fortunate to be able to do a couple times now with me working this race is coming out here and are very good friends, Matt and Sid live out here and our goddaughter, Margot. And so getting to spend some time with them is cool. It is hot in this country. I don't know. It's hot in this country. So like imagine that same heat but hotter and then at, you know, that humidity that you get out there. Oh, you don't really get it in. We have lately. It's been a thing. It's been. It's not been Southeast Asia. That's probably think. That's probably true. Yeah. Yeah. We walked to get coffee yesterday after Becky landed and I mean, it's a, it's a short

4:27walk. It's a short little cafe and you're just like, I'm like, this was I, you can only wear white or black. You can only wear white or black or it's just everything. You're just, you just see it all. And I have to be on television for four days next week. I think I have to go shopping because I don't have enough exclusively white or black shirts to pull this one off. So I would have it. You know, I have one dozen dressers. They do not, they do not at present. We're working on that because it's, it's for reasons like this. You're like, Oh, I, I'm very miss packed for this week. All right. Well, I feel like there is actually a good amount of stuff to talk about because yeah, I would. That's why I said it. Oh, okay. We were just chatting a little bit before we started recording, you know, the silly season is heating up, but not with the drivers.

5:28The driver is everything's pretty set. The drivers. Yeah. Although I do what I do. Gennace being a bit of a prick about Dixon. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, do we talked about Lungard officially being announced? I don't think so. All right. No. So the worst kept secret in IndyCar for the year, Christian Lungard confirmed in the nine. I kind of thought the way that they teased it like the day before was sort of cute because it was a little like mini putt golfing thing because we know Christian's a big golfer. Like he was putting up orange P and C orange golf ball. That was kind of a cute little thing. So that's that's the one side of it, right? Christian confirmed the nine. Obviously, he's been freed from any contractual obligations to begin whatever it is he has to do over there. He's been in the shop. He's wearing the polo and all the rest of it on the flip side. You have Dixon who's leaving to go the Christians old home at McLaren and it's come out that

6:34he is being kind of held to his contract, which expires at the end of the year. So it's not seen before. Yeah, which we saw much better and will power and the consensus from everybody was, huh, dick move. Yeah. No, that was not a particularly popular move. This is where I'm, this is where I'm a little confused, maybe confused the wrong word, but like they're doing the same thing. They're doing a straight line. Yeah. So why didn't McLaren do it to one guard? The only, well, there's two options. One is Lungard's contract was written as such that he was only responsible to the team until like September 30th or something. I guess that's not even we're out of there yet. So maybe it was till the end of the season or whatever or maybe, you know, cooler heads and clear heads prevailed there and TK were just like, yeah, I mean, it's go do your thing, right?

7:35As a driver, I could see TK taking that approach. If that was his call, if it was Zach's call, I don't know, different conversation because obviously there's some history between Zach and Chip. And that's going to be not a non-contributing factor, I think, to Gennace's decision to not let Scott free. Part of it too could just be like, look, man, we had Gennace on the chip on the warm up show in... Wasn't... Was it Mark? I don't know where it was. Some time after all of this kind of came to be. And he made a couple comments about how like, yeah, I mean, he wasn't super thrilled with Scott's decision to leave. So I can't tell if this move is more like a little bit of a, you know, a little bit of

8:44a shot at Zach and... Which is there, or at Scott. If it is a shot at Scott, I understand, you know, being a little hurt that Scott left after all that time. But in the grand scheme of things, it's not going to make a huge difference to hold Scott to the contract for three months, right? It's not going to be that big of a deal. So just the optics to do that to the guy who brought you so many wins and then brought like, defined an era of IndyCar for you is just so petty. It's such a small move to do. And it's, but it's also, you know, just, I don't disagree. But like the devil's advocate argument is, yeah, well, like the guy that gave you the opportunity to win all these races and championships and you left, you know, yeah. I mean, yeah, I guess, I guess.

9:47But I don't know. I think it's a bad look. The, I don't think they care what I think. I don't think, I don't think they care what most people say. Especially like, they're winning every thing right now. So like they're, they're sort of, they can, they feel like they can kind of do whatever they want. And they think in the suns like that. The other side of it, which has come out recently is the silly season on the engineering side, as you sort of alluded to, where the, what was his, what was his official title at, at Canassi, because there was, there is a gentleman by the name of Chris Simmons, who has been a, a, Gennace, like, mainstay for a long, long, long, long time. He had the title of Racing Performance Director. And Chris was, Chris was like a very, actually successful driver in his own right, made it up, I think, to the Atlantic series before pivoted to race engineering and engineered Dario

10:56when he was there for a lot of his success as engineer Dixon. And then it had been sort of promoted to a more overseeing all engineering facets, you know, across all three cars, position in recent years. And the rumor is that I think it's been confirmed that he's leaving, Chip Gennacee racing. And the rumor is that he's going to be following Dixie to, to McLaren, which is a huge, huge hit. That kind of institutional knowledge, that kind of understanding of the, you know, the inner sanctum of the, of the Gennacee engineering department and, and having that hands-on experience with the car as well, is, is pretty impressive. So yeah. And, and I think it was Buckson's tweet that brought this up. It's twofold. And we have one more year of the current car. And he's coming with an insane amount of institutional knowledge, right?

11:58I keep, because obviously Gennacee knows how to work this car. I mean, there's also the improvement, but yeah, I guess it's been okay. But then he's going to be, he's going to be there to develop the, the 28 car for McLaren now. I mean, yeah. Yeah. You, you understand how things work behind the scenes more than I do. Like, is this as monumental as it looks? It's, it's pretty big, guys. It's pretty big because yeah, you're going to get the instant, the, you know, instant boost of understanding this car, maybe a little bit better. Now, let me, let me be like, let me be clear about one thing, though, because we've seen engineers switch teams before and it's not like overnight. The team that they're going to becomes as competitive as a team they've been at, right? There's a lot of elements that go into this. The biggest thing with IndyCar is that the, the damper builds are completely open, right? So every team can develop their own dampers. And so the, the dampers are such a key part of the setup that you can take all the other

13:04spec components of the car and put them in the same settings as, you know, one from one car to the next. If the dampers are different, fundamentally, the cars will not be the same. And so like you can take a Gnassie setup sheet and just, you know, control C, control V, put it onto a McLaren, that's not going to necessarily produce a Gnassie level of performance. Now, Chris will also have all the knowledge of what the damper program is like a Gnassie and what makes it special and what they're doing. And that's again, that's a component that takes a lead time to pull off. So it's not like you can even with all that knowledge can just build those dampers overnight, right? These are these are, could be spoke components that take time to build and develop. So is it going to be as good as a Gnassie car overnight? No. Granted on certain tracks, they don't need like, you know, the McLaren's were incredible on road courses this year. So and that's like, polo strength as well.

14:04So they were incredibly competitive. And the question was, I think the most competitive guy on road courses street courses for sure, they can, they can use some massive improvement and, you know, ovals, it kind of depends how you look at it because paddles been running well. Other drivers, a little bit more, you know, they fluctuate a little bit more in their competitiveness on the ovals. And a lot's been said about what paddles cars like to drive, et cetera, et cetera. So it's going to be a net positive, I think, across the board. Over one year, as this car then gets phased out for the IR28 and the two big things about the IR28, the two big points I want to make about that transition. One Chris has done this before, right? Like he was there when we went to the AK 18 kit. He was there when we went to the arrow kit for the manufacturer kit era. He was there when the DW 12 came out, like he's been through car, you know, swaps before. And I don't know if you look back historically over the last 15, 20 years, chip can ass

15:06erasing has been pretty competitive no matter what car has been running. So good guy to have in your stable as that happens because a lot of the McLaren engineering staff, I'm just trying to make up it. I'm doing like a rough, like audit in my head, but I don't know if I can say majority, not insignificant number joined the sport in this at this level of the engineering world after the DW 12 came out. So they haven't actually necessarily been through a complete new car situation before, right? Like Will Anderson, who's the race engineer on Pattoscar, who was my guy. I don't know if he was engineering, he definitely was not lead engineer on a NID car with the DW 12 came out. I'm not sure he was on an Indy car team with the DW 12 came out. He's a young guy. So there's having having somebody that's been through this so many times is it is a huge,

16:10huge deal. What's interesting though is with the IR28. And so this is almost a point the other way with the IR28, we no longer have damper development. It's going to be a, we're not supposed to use the word spec damper. So it's not a spec damper, but it is a, it is a damper with a set number, which is a high number of adjustable components and, and architecture and things like that. So you still have to develop them with the pieces you're given. It's just everybody's giving the same pieces, but there are a lot of pieces. So the knowledge that people are just going to know the best setup. Unfortunately, very quick, this is my big hold up with this move, right? It was done for cost savings and weight savings, actually, because the, the custom made damperers can be quite bulky, where these ones could be quite a bit lighter when we're trying to shed weight off the car.

17:10But this, so the argument for Indy car is there are so many different pieces that you can add or remove, you know, to these dampers that the, I think the iterations are like in the billions, right? And so you're like, not everyone's going to have the same stuff. Well, of those, I forget with the number, there's 300 different components you can add or remove. We're going to be able to eliminate 130 of them free quick. And then it's going to be how do you balance the remaining 70 and unlike right now, where a Chris Simmons coming from Gnassie with setups in his brain can't just overnight rebuild the damper is at McClaren to be just like the Gnassie dampers. In the future, you will 100% be able to do that because everybody has the same pieces. When you invest with fidelity, go. It does all the work for you. So while fidelity, go monitors the markets, rebalance is your portfolio and tracks your progress

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19:14Oh, and it is completely ad free. Yes, I said it ad free. Try YouTube premium for two months free at youtube.com slash premium trial eligibility varies, terms apply, cancel anytime. Three o'clock kids are home. Your to-do list isn't done. New craft mac and cheese power Mac was made for days like this. Craft mac and cheese power Mac packs the same irresistible creamy cheesy flavor you love. Now with 17 grams of protein and six grams of fiber. Fuel's you up, keeps you going because your day doesn't stop. Craft mac and cheese power Mac find it at your favorite retailer. The best thing ever keeps getting better. That damper advantage will be, you know, whoever figures it out in year one will have an advantage. If there's, you know, no talent loss at the end of year one, you'll maintain that advantage. But as soon as one engineer from that team goes to a different team,

20:18that team has it. And then, and then the, then the spread starts. Is it, is there not an ability to kind of keep it even contained within your own department? Like so that like one guy knows what everybody's supposed to do. But yeah, that's a great point. I, I imagine that there's going to have to be some kind of system that's maybe a little bit more, yeah, a little bit more restricted in place in terms of like one person's building, one person touches them and physically adjusts them and whatever. You know, you get to a three car team. It starts getting a bit challenging. You probably have to have multiple people, but I don't know if contracts are, I agree to start getting a little bit more strict in terms of things like gardening leave. Would you hear about an F1 all the time, but you don't hear a lot of an Indy car? Oh, I'm kind of surprised Chris to have a garden leaf or maybe his contract just expired. And rather than renew, he went somewhere else, but yeah. And that's, that's, that's usually how it goes.

21:19It is funny how how it can F1 engineers sometimes have like six month gardening leaves. And so if you leave a company, even if it's, even if it's your choice, like you're leaving, it's like, yeah, you can't work for six months at another team, which is crazy. We don't have that, thankfully. But so yeah, it's going to be interesting. It's going to be very interesting to see because it also Ross Benel, who was Felix's engineer at MSR, it's been confirmed that he is leaving MSR with the overwhelming consensus being that he is also going to McLaren. What's interesting there is he ended up on Felix's car off the back of being on Dickson's car for, I forget how many years, it was just wonderful. But now if he ends up at McLaren, and because from what I heard, he wasn't necessarily voluntarily, he was voluntarily told to leave Dickson's program.

22:21And because of the Gnassi MSR engineering relationship ended up on Felix's car. Obviously that went okay. They had a good year. So, you know, not all for nothing. But I wonder if he does end up there actually which way he goes. But that's another point, right? You're bringing in a guy that's worked with two-year drivers in Ross. You're bringing in a guy that's worked with two-year drivers in Simmons, because obviously he was there when Felix drove for Gnassi. Got to come in this like Gnassi BT and it's like Gnassi's satellite program almost with some of the people that bring him in. So it is going to be very interesting. That ought to calm things down between Zach and Chip. I'm here for it. I'm here for it. It's good to hear. You got a lot of it when you're in a race fight. I had a conversation yesterday with a few friends and we were talking about the longevity of Gnassi's dominance in this sport.

23:21And then things like the wind tunnel came up how that went from being a complete secret to a conspiracy theory to just confirm. I can't just have it like just. So what I love about that story is that there's proof that sometimes conspiracy theories are right. Yeah. Yeah. But it also kind of plays to my larger point about conspiracy theories that they're all going to come out. Correct. Correct. You cannot keep humans quiet for that long. So do we think there's what do we think the next wind tunnel is going to be where we find out oh my god, they've been doing that. Yeah, that's a great question. That's a great question. I mean, the wind tunnel one was so unique. And for those that don't know the story, Chip in a genius stroke, like an absolute genius stroke back in the I think is back in the IRL days, the state of Pennsylvania was closing down a bit of highway, but of road that

24:25the horn tunnel or the rural tunnel. I think Holland tunnel is still a thing, isn't it? I think that one's still around. I don't know what it was called, but it was it was a tunnel through a mountain in rural Pennsylvania. And he moral hill tunnel. There you go, lural hill tunnel. And they essentially built a a real life wind tunnel. Like a moose. So if you put a car in a wind tunnel, right? If you put the current Indie car in like a normal static wind tunnel, we're all the developments done these days. It's a rolling road. So originally they were kind of static. Like there was a period where the car didn't move. The wheels weren't turning and you blow air at it and you'd measure it, right? But the wheel spinning actually understandably creates a huge disturbance in the air. And so to be more accurate, they came up with rolling road wind tunnels.

25:26But even a rolling road wind tunnel doesn't have things like exhaust gas, you know, affecting your wing sort of thing. But Gennace bought this bit of road that was a tunnel. And so it's great about a tunnel. So we go straight line testing all the time, right? You go to like, you can't be Kennedy now. We go to yeah, other facilities in Texas or wherever and just you take it into car and you load it up with sensors and you drive 200 miles an hour in a straight line, then you stop, you turn around and drive 200 miles on a straight line, change a little arrow component and you go to the same thing back and forth all day long. It's the dullest, most boring thing that racing drivers can do in their job while driving a race car. And teams like doing that because it's real. The car is running, the engine is running, the heat's involved, like everything is real. The problem is when you're doing sensitive arrow testing for things like the speedway, a gust of wind or a change in temperature or change in humidity or whatever can have an

26:28effect on the data on the outcome. So what Gennace did was he built a wind tunnel, a real life moving car wind tunnel in completely perfect controlled conditions because he sealed off both ends. So it was temperature control, it was pressure control, it was very much like everything. It's almost a mile long. Right. And so at one end, there's an engineering office and then at another end, there's a turntable and the car would go run in a straight line, get on the turntable, turn around and then run back and you had the most accurate way to measure arrow ever. And so yeah, this was something that they did in secret and developed and then yeah, rumors started coming out. Eventually was it was exposed as being true. And then I think IndyCar eventually banned being able to do that. But some wild stories from the tunnel, from the Gennace drivers over the years. So to your point, Tim, I mean, if I knew the answer to that, I would be a highly sought after consultant in IndyCar world. Because it is,

27:36in all honesty, for me, you've got to think it's going to be something like AI slash simulation related. There's going to be a team that has some tech partner that develops some kind of software that just allows engineers to mind data at a much quicker and more accurate sort of just more thorough level. Because right now, you come in from a practice session on Saturday morning, heading into qualifying. And you have as an engineer, an hour, hour and a half maybe, depending on what changes you're going to make, to look through all the data and make decisions on setup changes. And then you've got to get that setup sheet to the mechanics for them to actually put it on the car. There's just no way you catch everything. There's so much data coming off these cars. And even with three, four engineers sometimes looking through it, you're not going to catch everything. And so I think the team that like is able to utilize AI to help mind that data

28:40and come up with, you know, the right, the right setup based on the information from the morning, could that could be like a pretty big advantage? That would be hard to replicate. You know, but as we as we go into the IR 28 and there's and there's more kind of spec components, it does kind of put, you know, it's all the stuff is going to be important, but it still puts more in the driver's hands at the end of the day. It does make the cars more even and it is going to make this even more of a driver's championship than it already is, which in a lot of ways is good. I might make it tougher to attract certain engineers when you have the aerospace industry doing what it's doing and you know, F1 and NASCAR are doing what they're doing, but it's, it is going to definitely make it even a step further to work the driver's championship. I don't know. I mean, you can always just tell them there's a good chance Zach Brown will roll up with the brink's truck if you do well at Gnassi. So, you know, that could get some people. I feel like they're not all going

29:45to McLaren for the love of papaya. Yes, no, I imagine there's some, there was a article that came out a couple days ago that said that McLaren racing across all their racing enterprises, which just means that the car and F1 combined were going to potentially produce a billion dollars in revenue in I don't know if it's 2026 maybe, which with call space paid obviously that is 90% the F1 team, but I it's got to be more than I mean, the IndyCar team's not generating 100 million dollars in revenue. Yeah, I was going to say there's a good chance. Just F1 is actually higher. I said revenue, not, no, it's not, is not, right? This is, yeah, this is gross. So,

30:46yes, no 100% of the profit is coming from the phone. But, um, but just think about that. I mean, think about the money that they do have to spend, we don't have a cost cap in any car. So, you can, you can spend whatever you make and then some and, uh, and yeah, it looks like they're doing a little bit of that. So go to them, go to that group if that's a real number across the whole series. Dude, Yoikes. Um, so yeah, we're interesting to see if there's any other big engineering shifts this year in the off season. Because again, a team's are thinking forward, right? It's not really about 27 at this point. It's, it's about preparing your team and building your team to develop the IR28 when it comes. So, um, yeah, watch this space and we'll see if there's any other, you know, big names moving. Tim, at your dinner, did you guys come up with a theory for the next? What's the next wind tunnel? Uh, no, but that's because we didn't quite a bit of wine. Got it. Got it. So I'll tell you, um, the secret is not two bottles of wine because I

31:49have had a rough day. Two bottles of wine personally or I don't mean who are you? What is this interrogation? James. I don't need to come back with a war. I will say I will say on Saturday morning, um, I'm going to be in a similar state to what you're in currently because Friday night, we have a reservation at my personal favorite as well as I'm pretty sure ranked the world's number one cocktail bar. Okay. All right. And it's called the Atlas bar. And I've been before it is, it is the best, it's the best cocktail bar in the world. I've been saying that and then apparently some study actually proved it to be true. So, um, don't expect a lot of communication on Saturday. Um, well, it's for cord off track right after you say, and we have special guys. Yeah. It's going to be we've had a few lost episodes. Let's do one more.

32:55We have had a few lost. Those were funny. Darcy's still mad about that. We're just we're just still upset that we haven't had him back on. I think we've we've we've recorded with him twice. Yeah. Yeah. They was in the vault somewhere. Do we still have those episodes? Like, do you still have a hard drive? There's going to be a hard drive somewhere with yeah, there's a few few of those doosies from the trip. Yeah. Yeah. Good times guys. Well, look, we come a long way. What episode are we up to? Like five, 30 or something. Yeah. I thought it was like readily available. Yeah. I think that's close. Let me just pull it up and check. That's one of those things I should probably know, but I'm not good at my job. This is episode 530. Wow. That was all. Wow. That was impressive too. All right. Even if it was a complete flu, that was very

33:57maybe maybe why is the answer? Because I'm feeling pretty sharp. I'm second. I'm pretty sharp. Yeah. And Garth Salch, another round. All right. Well, yeah. Next week we do actually already hit the guys. We already have a guest lined up for next week, which I'm pretty excited about. Yeah. I'm not I'm not like 100% holding out on that happening, but he he confirmed, you know, I've got a verbal by that. I mean, written, you know, agreement that he's going to come on and talk about, you know what? Maybe some of the very topics we discussed today. He'll have an opinion on. We'll see. This has been OffTrack with Hinch and Rossi. OffTrack is part of the Sirius XM Sports Podcast network. If you enjoyed this episode and want to hear more, please give a five-star rating and leave a review. Subscribe today wherever you stream your podcasts. We are at Ask OffTrack on Twitter and Instagram. And if you want to follow us on Twitter, we're at Hinch Town and at Alexander Rossi. If you want to follow Thim, though we have no idea why you would, he's at the Tim Durham

35:01on Twitter. Find us on YouTube and subscribe to our channel for exclusive video content. OffTrack is produced by Tim Durham and by that, we mean Thim. This is a new era of wealth. A UBS financial advisor can help you with personalized advice and long-term planning to move forward with confidence. Find out what's possible at UBS.com slash new era UBS financial services zinc member finra s IPC.