Big Friction at Belle Isle

[KC]

Both Honda and Ford have pulled their cars from the morning practice session after CART has mandated a spacer be placed between the intake plenum and the pop-off valve. This has been done by CART because they believe that both Honda and Ford have gained an extra inch of boost by shaping their intake plenum in such a way to generate a pressure wave of air that allows more boost below the pop-poff valve. This could seriously hamper the qualifying for the Ford and Honda teams as rain is expected for the second practice session this afternoon.

I wonder why Toyota was not forced to employ this same spacer. The concept employed by Honda and Ford has been used for the last three or four years and now it has somehow become a problem. Several of the team owners are very upset with CART as the tensions have been running high with the engine suppliers over the last few months. CART cannot afford to alienate either of these manufacturers or they could face a series without powerplants very quickly. Why would CART wait until the day of practice to institute a change for only two of the engine suppliers?

[KC]

I apologize for an inaccuracy, Toyota is being required to run the spacer device as well.

[Dave S]

Although Toyota developed it from what I hear. Is the plenum tampering something that was only discovered this morning to mandate an 11th hour rule change, & if so, why did they already have a spacer machined & ready?

[Laagri]

Autosport.com claims that Toyota undertook an investigation after their poor showing at Motegi, and they obviously think it's something to do with this spacer. Apparently CART was tipped off by Toyota that Ford and Honda may not have been playing quite by the spirit of the rules.

[KC]

This was reported and known about 3 years ago, when Ford began investigating how Honda was making so much power. They figured it out as well. I don't think this is cheating however. CART mandates the pop-off valve and supplies them. They mandate where the pop-off valve must be mounted on the car. If the manufacturers found a way to exceed for short periods of time the boost limits, then that is good engineering for them.

[Neil C]

The buzz at the track yesterday was that Honda and Ford were upset because Toyota tested the device at Mid-Ohio last week and declared it workable. Then it was sprung on Honda and Ford with no chance to test it themselves. In the paddock, guys were running around with these starter-sized things, switching them around, replacing them. On the cars they looked like stacked hockey pucks sticking up through the cowling.

The spacers merely took the air pressure sensing unit out of the airflow of the plenum, where Ford and Honda discovered that Bernoulli's Principal fooled the sensor into detecting lower than true boost pressure. They broke no rules, they just used the devices supplied to them to their greatest advantage, as KC points out.