oval shootout

[ringo]

what is the time difference between a champ car and an IRL car on the same track in similar conditions (not in mph, thats just confusing). Also if an F1 car (set up for an oval) went up against a champcar on a superspeedway what would the time gap be around?

[Russfeld]

My recollection is that at Phoenix CART and IRL did similar lap times during the winter testing. I even recall instances where they ran together. The difference was CART was running low DF so was hauling down the straight, but IRL was high DF so was creaming the corners. If CART was running their old high DF oval package they'd have creamed the place.

Its difficult to say about an F1 car, it'd take a complete redesign, but the signs indicate an F1 car optimised for ovals would beat a CART car optimised fr ovals

[Raven]

Well we have the numbers from Fontana last year, where they both raced - IRL in March and CART in October. Here are the pole times/speeds:

IRL
Cheever: 32.517 (221.422mph)

CART
Kanaan: 31.483 (232.011mph)

[Asp]

As regards adding F1 to the equation, it'll never happen. The engineering involved in turning left is not was F1 cars are set up to do, and the cars would need to be completely re-designed - maybe to look a little bit more like a Champcar!
I think the general opinion though is, because the tend to have more downforce, that they would be slower overall.

[Snrub]

As Russfeld is saying, I remember one of the engineers (Anderson?) or someone discussing a test (I think @ Phoenix) where CART and IRL were on the track at the same time fairly recently. The CART car pulled on the straights, IRL car on the corners. IRL cars don't have much of a difference between straights and corners. Thus it creates the "exciting" wheel to wheel action. It's difficult to get that ideal combonation where you have enough downforce to pass, but not so much that there isn't as much required of the driver and it's sort of artificial.