I've never really understood why people get wide there if no one is under them. Granted, I only raced there in a low power GT4 Datsun, but it always seemed to me that T7 was one of those easy turns you went through on autopilot. Usually by the time I got there I was already bumming out about how badly the competition was going to eat me up in the Carousel because my locked diff was going to push me out into the marbles about two-thirds of the way through, and allow every Tom, Dick and Pinto to get by me at the exit..
henry albert wrote:
I've never really understood why people get wide there if no one is under them. Granted, I only raced there in a low power GT4 Datsun, but it always seemed to me that T7 was one of those easy turns you went through on autopilot. Usually by the time I got there I was already bumming out about how badly the competition was going to eat me up in the Carousel because my locked diff was going to push me out into the marbles about two-thirds of the way through, and allow every Tom, Dick and Pinto to get by me at the exit.....Show more →
Ask Fisichella, Pilet, Pumpelly, Gugelmin, Kanaan, Aleshin, etc what it takes to go wide in T7 - I have photographed them all going into the greenery in this turn. One car even wrecked in the session I took the above photo, going all the way around and to the inside wall tires on the right. I wasn't shooting that way, though - had the camera pointed to 6 at that time.
These days the rumble strip is quite a bit wider than back in 2000, but they all still manage to go well beyond the limits:
Must be a big horsepower/low downforce thing. I suppose the wider you are on entry, the faster you are through there if you have have power on tap to make it work, especially if you're trying to make a run at someone going into T8. Low power cars would just be slower because we'd already be flat out, and wider would just make the turn longer.
I must've let my low-power club racer bias affect my photography gland, because it never occurred to me that I could get some good shots there until I started seeing your results.
There was even a wreck there on Sunday. Went off and then overcorrected, hit the tires on the inside right. One spec racers less in the garage. I was shooting the wrong direction towards Turn 6 when it happened.
Indycars can almost go flat through there. With fresh tires and low fuel, and the right setup, the old cars back around 2000 did it flat in qualifying. However, there was always a fine line between fast and off the edge. They were also faster than those high downforce kit cars today, but clearly, they still go off looking for some time by flattening that turn as much as possible.
Forgot Fisichella among the examples above - guess it was posted here before a couple of weeks ago. But hey, it's a good one
.. Turn 5 .. Nice .. 
