Some good news happened over the weekend. After frankensteining a chassis to do things it was never designed for, testing began on the Dallara IR-28 this weekend at Indianapolis. There were renders shown online, but IndyCar did themselves no favors. These are actual looks at the cars with commentary from Marshall Pruett.







So far with only placing more races in March and the World Cup boosting 2 races, ratings for the year are up almost 20%. While last year races that exceeded 1 million viewers were the exception, only 5 races were not over 1 million in viewership with Barber coming in at 950,000 and Nashville getting rain delayed to Monday only getting about 775,000 viewers (last years non-Indy average). It's rather nice things are finally going in the right direction as Fox is looking into International Races and Fox involvement was enough incentive for Honda to pull out of IMSA and put all of it's US support into IndyCar.

Aeroscreen better integrated, and some 2024 F1 look to it on the wings.

There were pictures posted somewhere that covered changes to the engine, but starting power figures for the new 2.4L TT V6 is 760hp on road course boost and Indy 500 qualifying with 60hp more available with push to pass. Hybrid changes to a battery pack above the engine adding another 60hp with something like 14x more storage than the capacitors. Oval boost will be around 670hp. It'll be nice to have an engine battle again as the current 2.2L is maxed out as far as it can be without a complete redesign.

Even with going aluminum for the wheels, keeping the hybrid, and keeping the aeroscreen, Dallara has pulled 100lb out of the car while providing a little more cockpit room.

RACER reported the test mule with an older 2.4L V6 from 2022 and ballast weight for the hybrid lapped the Indy Road Course for an unofficial lap of 1m12.6s on a wet lap. The current IR-18 lapped in the dry at 1m09.7s.

It's a good start after years of false starts.

I don't think casual spectators will notice any difference.
There must have been some really high mileage chassis out there that were well past due for replacement. They were meant to be a three year spec chassis in that era.
I guess the hybrid had to be included for the engine manufacturers benefit. At least they didn't go way overboard on the electric part like F1.

Yep. Honda wanted a hybrid and refused to build something as "inefficient" as a V8. Honda is also the promoter of about 1/4th of the races so telling them to bugger off is not a wise decision. I do wish they'd toss push to pass and leave that for the hybrid to make things simpler and bump the horsepower to 780ish to make up for it.