LIVE BLOG: 2014 Honda Indy Toronto

1:33 PM ET (Paul) — I forgot to mention this earlier, and by earlier I mean at Pocono, but I finally got a chance to follow up on a story Steph first reported on a podcast several weeks ago.  When being toured around the double header weekend at Houston, Steph found out that Chevrolet has a formalized relationship with Shell/Pennzoil to supply engine oil to all the Chevrolet teams.

I posed the same question to representatives from Honda Performance Development to find out if they too have such relationships.  It turns out that they do not and each Honda team is free to use the oils and lubricants of their choosing.  Honda does have relationships with manufacturers in other series, such as Magneti Marelli to supply ECU’s for their Tudor United SportsCar Championship entrants, but no such arrangements exist on the INDYCAR side.

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11:55 AM ET (Paul) — I had a chance to stop Beaux Barfield on pit road to ask him about the altered configuration of pit out and what it will do for race procedures. Beaux said the distance between Scott Dixon’s pit (who occupies the first pit box as a result of his pole position at Iowa) to the beginning of the narrow portion of the “chute” is 100 feet. Notably, that is also the standard distance INDYCAR uses from the last pit to the end of the pit-lane speed zone, thus removing some of the advantage the car closest to pit out used to have.

According to Barfield, first priority into the pit-out chute goes to the driver further ahead, as would make sense. In the event of a tie, priority goes to the driver in the outside “fast” lane. This could come into play if either of the Target teams are hurrying to win a race off of pit road. Unless they are ahead, they won’t have priority into the chute that is only about three feet wider than the race cars themselves.

When asked if the narrow pit out would alter his position on pit road incidents and perhaps show the drivers a bit more leniency in the event of an incident, Beaux simply replied, “Absolutely.”  Unfortunately, the tone of his response make it unclear whether he was being serious or facetious.  So… who knows??

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