IRL opener exciting despite track’s problems

Associated Press

SAO PAULO

It was a wild season opener for the IndyCar Series, with track problems offset by exciting racing that brought hopes of another competitive year on the circuit.

The inaugural Sao Paulo Indy 300 was marked by a slick straightaway that made driving unsafe and jeopardized the race, but when the green flag dropped, there was enough action and overtaking to keep fans on the edge of their seats.

Will Power won the rain-shortened race by getting past Ryan Hunter-Reay with three laps to go. Organizers said there were 95 passes throughout the 61 laps, extremely high for a street circuit.

There was also a scary accident involving Marco Andretti at the start, and a red flag caused by pouring rain that flooded parts of the newly built track in South America’s biggest city.

“Despite the limited time to design and execute this track, it ranks with the best quality and the best racing environment of any [other street circuit we race on],” said Brian Barnhart, the Indy Racing League’s president of competition and racing operations.

For the first time in South America, there was the novelty of a race going through a stadium-like Sambadrome, and the allure of the series’ longest ever straightaway at just short of a mile.

The hype was there. But so were the problems.

It was clear that something was wrong only a few laps after the cars made it to the track for the first time on Saturday.

The front stretch at the Sambadrome so slick that the drivers could not fully accelerate without losing traction on the concrete surface. Several drivers crashed there in practice, and the complaints soon started pouring in.

“I was confident that it was going to rubber up, but it didn’t,” track designer Tony Cotman said.

Likely there would be no race if the problem wasn’t fixed, and officials were forced to work overnight to add grooves to the track.

“Thankfully it all worked well,” third-place finisher Vitor Meira said. “It would have been hard to race they way the track was before.”

The track allowed for a lot of overtaking, especially at the long back straightaway. Organizers said nearly half of the passes happened there, and it was at the straight that Power made the final move over Hunter-Reay, marking the seventh lead change of the race.