VICS: Derrick Walker Confident in Brian Barnhart’s Ability as Race Director

When it was announced that Brian Barnhart would be Verizon IndyCar Series’ Race Director for the upcoming season, the response from the fans wasn’t all that positive. After all, Barnhart hasn’t made some of the best decisions in the past as evident during his previous reign.

However, INDYCAR’s President of Operations and Competition Derrick Walker says for him, it was a very simple decision to put Barnhart back in charge and feels he’s going to do just fine. Walker added that he feels this time will be different simply based on the system that they adopted at the end of the 2013 season.

“We have a race director who basically is your team manager, crew chief of your team of people in race control, and you have a group of three guys that are stewards,” he explained. “They’re looking at the incidents that happen on track. Their job is to know the rules and deliberate on whether they think that’s an incident or not.”

Walker feels that the criticism received so far from fans is based on “a complete misunderstanding of how the system was back then and what it is now”.

“When you look at what Brian does really well, race director is probably one of the best things he does,” Walker continued. “So it wasn’t a decision I had to think twice about.”