Photo Credit: Chris Owens/IndyCar
During a celebration of the 100th running of the Indy 500 on March 23, 2016 in New York City held at the Hearst Tower in Manhattan hosted by IndyCar and Driver and Road & Track magazines, current Verizon IndyCar driver James Hinchcliffe got to sit down with three legends with multiple Indianapolis 500 wins between them each: Rick Mears, Al Unser and Arie Luendyk. The discussion ran in conjunction with the New York International Auto Show. During the conversation the four drivers talked a lot about racing, each with a few different stories that covered their racing exploits and memories.
Racing and how it has changed was one of the many subjects touched on. Mears stated that the biggest change is safety.
“The biggest change is safety,” he said. “Cars are as safe as they’ve ever been in the history of the sport, period. That’s one of the biggest gains we’ve ever had. The other is how we get to that balance and how we measure things, and that’s the electronics.”
Mears then went on to mention that when he started in IndyCar the only thing that was measured was steering, throttle and speed. He also brought up that they had just started making laptops and at that time he didn’t even know how to turn one on. He said after practice the crew members would load their data onto a floppy disc with a post-it note on top saying stick this in the side, push this button and turn this on. Mears would then take the disc back to the hotel where he would pull up the graphs and other data and look at it.
Hinch had a good laugh at that story and then chimed in.
“It’s funny to hear you guys talk about the (tachometer), water temperature and oil pressure,” he said. “Now I can tell you what my brake bias is, what my roll bar positions are. The technology has developed in such a way from three channels of data to about 130 channels of data. My data reading experience is much different than what Rick’s was. … Floppy disks don’t exist anymore. Eight-track (players) are on their way out, too.”
Whenever you have drivers from past eras together they are going to bring up what racing among other things were like in their time.
Luendyk mentioned that there was no pit speed limit during his time racing and that if they were at the end of the pit road then they could afford to come down at 200 plus mph and that they would be happy if they came to a stop in their pit box.
Hinch was eyes wide and jaw as well in shock at this information. He then said that tidbit of information was terrifying and that he didn’t know it was like that back then.
Mears added to Luyendyk’s story saying that the sport was also self-policing. He then went on to explain that that if he sat a driver coming down pit road at 200 mph he wasn’t going to pull out in front of him even if his crew was saying go go go.
Hinch made a good comeback to that statement saying that if his outside right tire changer tells him to go go go when another driver was coming down pit road at 200 mph he would fire his right tire changer.
Hinch also had the best line of the night when they were discussing the 100th running of the 500 presented by Penn Grade Motor Oil in May.
“It’s super cool that we’re sitting up here and between the four of us, there’s eight Indy 500 wins. We’ve got two (pointing to Luyendyk), four (Mears), two (Unser) and I’m here (with zero), so it’s super cool to be a part of such an esteemed panel.”
