Big race coming to Austin
A Q&A with IndyCar driver Alexander Rossi
Mar 1, 2019, 8:29 am
Alexander Rossi is one of Indy-car's brightest stars. Over the course of his four years, he has won five races including the 100th annual Indianapolis 500 back in 2016. I was lucky enough to be able to talk with him over the phone about this year's Indy-car Classic in Austin's Circuit Of The America's and what you can expect for this year's Indy-Car Season:
Q: So first and foremost, this is a brand new track for you guys. I saw you were No. 1 on the speed chart for your test session, I know you had some experience here in F1 but how was it getting a feel for this new track here in Indy-Car?
AR: Yeah You are absolutely right. It might as well have been a new track because the cars are so much different but, yeah it was a really positive two days for the whole Andretti Auto-sport Organization and we learned a lot of what works and what doesn't and how to maximize the car around that track and definitely having some prior circuit knowledge was a good thing for us and looking forward to using that to our advantage next month.
2- While both cars are vastly different, how does your prior experiences in F1 kind of translate over into what you have going on now?
AR: Very Roughly, yes. I mean it's still the same racetrack regardless of what you car you're driving, you still have the areas where you need to maximize your lap times and of course you have little tricks you do in certain corners but at the end of the day it's a very different race car so you have to kind of rework your driving style a little bit and in a way kind of relearn parts of the racetrack in order to be fast in an Indy-car.
3-For maybe some of the newer fans of open-wheel racing, can you kind of explain the difference between an F1 Car and an Indycar?
AR: The biggest thing really is money. They're both open-wheel cars, they both have a huge amount of Down-force, very lightweight but the biggest thing is a Formula 1 team's budget. If you look at a like a Mercedes Benz type of team, they spend about $300 Million whereas a single-car Indy-car team spends about somewhere in the $4-5 million range, so it's a tenth of the budget so the car's are a little bit rougher. These car's don't have power-steering, they slide around a lot more and you have to work a bit harder to achieve your lap times but at the end of they're still the second quickest open wheel cars on the planet, we are just doing it at a tenth of the budget. With that being said, the racing we are able to put and the show we are able to create with our cars being SPEC puts a whole lot more on the teams and drivers and you have results are that are whole lot closer.
4-To kind of get back to Circuit Of The Americas, with you being sort of the world renowned racer that you are is there any tracks that this track reminds you of?
AR: Yeah, I mean it was designed by one of the same guys who designed a lot of the tracks in Europe so some of the corners are very similar. You know the Esses are similar to the corners in Silverstone, the stadium section you see at Hockenheim so it's very much like a track where I grew up racing around. Austin is a very special track in that sense, you know it's got a little bit of everything.
You can hear the entire interview above.
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A lockout appears unavoidable! Photo via: Wiki Commons.
Looming over baseball is a likely lockout in December 2026, a possible management push for a salary cap and perhaps lost regular-season games for the first time since 1995.
“No one’s talking about it, but we all know that they’re going to lock us out for it, and then we’re going to miss time,” New York Mets All-Star first baseman Pete Alonso said Monday at the All-Star Game. “We’re definitely going to fight to not have a salary cap and the league’s obviously not going to like that.”
Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred and some owners have cited payroll disparity as a problem, while at the same time MLB is working to address a revenue decline from regional sports networks. Unlike the NFL, NBA and NHL, baseball has never had a salary cap because its players staunchly oppose one.
Despite higher levels of luxury tax that started in 2022, the World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Mets have pushed payrolls to record levels. The last small-market MLB club to win a World Series was the Kansas City Royals in 2015.
After signing outfielder Juan Soto to a record $765 million contract, New York opened this season with an industry-high $326 million payroll, nearly five times Miami’s $69 million, according to Major League Baseball’s figures. Using luxury tax payrolls, based on average annual values that account for future commitments and include benefits, the Dodgers were first at $400 million and on track to owe a record luxury tax of about $151 million — shattering the previous tax record of $103 million set by Los Angeles last year.
“When I talk to the players, I don’t try to convince them that a salary cap system would be a good thing,” Manfred told the Baseball Writers’ Association of America on Tuesday. “I identify a problem in the media business and explain to them that owners need to change to address that problem. I then identify a second problem that we need to work together and that is that there are fans in a lot of our markets who feel like we have a competitive balance problem.”
Baseball’s collective bargaining agreement expires Dec. 1, 2026, and management lockouts have become the norm, which shifts the start of a stoppage to the offseason. During the last negotiations, the sides reached a five-year deal on March 10 after a 99-day lockout, salvaging a 162-game 2022 season.
“A cap is not about a partnership. A cap isn’t about growing the game,” union head Tony Clark said Tuesday. “A cap is about franchise values and profits. ... A salary cap historically has limited contract guarantees associated with it, literally pits one player against another and is often what we share with players as the definitive non-competitive system. It doesn’t reward excellence. It undermines it from an organizational standpoint. That’s why this is not about competitive balance. It’s not about a fair versus not. This is institutionalized collusion.”
The union’s opposition to a cap has paved the way for record-breaking salaries for star players. Soto’s deal is believed to be the richest in pro sports history, eclipsing Shohei Ohtani’s $700 million deal with the Dodgers signed a year earlier. By comparison, the biggest guaranteed contract in the NFL is $250 million for Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen.
Manfred cites that 10% of players earn 72% of salaries.
“I never use the word `salary’ within one of `cap,’” he said. “What I do say to them is in addressing this competitive issue that’s real we should think about whether this system is the perfect system from a players’ perspective.”
A management salary cap proposal could contain a salary floor and a guaranteed percentage of revenue to players. Baseball players have endured nine work stoppages, including a 7 1/2-month strike in 1994-95 that fought off a cap proposal.
Agent Scott Boras likens a cap plan to attracting kids to a “gingerbread house.”
“We’ve heard it for 20 years. It’s almost like the childhood fable,” he said. “This very traditional, same approach is not something that would lead the younger players to the gingerbread house.”