I will always remember being at Indianapolis in 1979, after the rejected CART teams had been allowed to start practice for that year's 500. In the middle of the CART/USAC war, USAC had cut the boost limit from 80 to 50 inches in an attempt to handicap the turbos and encourage normally-aspirated stock-block engines. The reduction in power meant it was suddenly possible to lap the four-cornered Indianapolis Motor Speedway damn near flat and all the CART drivers, while delighted to be back in the race, grumbled mightily about the situation.
"This isn't racing," Bobby Unser declared, "You're not supposed to drive around here flat-out. You're supposed to lift, get on the brakes and drive the car through the corners. That's the test of the driver. Driving around flat-out is just no fun, no fun at all!"
Newman/Haas's Lisles agrees with the drivers old and new.
"Personally, I like the fundamental idea that you cannot drive around a track flat-out," he said, "As soon as you can do that, you've more or less got a spec series. To make it a true racing contest, you need to have an aerodynamic package that is such that you cannot go flat all the way around the track, rather than just a contest of who has the largest balls. That's the way it is if you have a car that will go 'round the track flat with so much downforce - like an IRL car. It's a lot more challenging for everybody not to be flat.
"The question is, is it something you need to solve? Or do you accept it for what it is? It is a very big problem and part of the nature of open-wheel oval racing. You can make
an argument from a safety point of view that you don't want guys two- and three- abreast, wheel-to-wheel, for lap after lap, because you're going to end up with somebody in the grandstands."
Indeed, that has happened already for the IRL with debris flying into the stands at Charlotte and Atlanta putting a stop to Indy racing at those tracks, while CART had its
