INDYCAR: Dome skids still divisive after Texas test

Opinions of IndyCar's dome skids remain divided after the safety feature was tested again at Texas Motor Speedway on Tuesday.

The devices, which will be used at superspeedways, are intended to help stop cars from becoming airborne in the event of a high-speed spin, although their use has been an ongoing point of contention, with opinions loosely split between the Honda and Chevrolet camps.

Fifteen cars participated in the test at Texas, with cars running mostly alone or in small groups before heading out in larger packs for the final two hours. Penske's Helio Castroneves (below, LAT photo), whose airborne crash at Indy last year was one of the driving factors behind the dome skids' introduction, insisted that they are the right move.

"I'm not going to go into a Honda-versus-Chevrolet dispute, but my thing is that I was the one upside down last year, and no question that's what we are looking for with safety," he said.

"It doesn't matter what car it is; we are looking to make sure that when you have the dome skid when the car is sideways. It adds at least 500 to 1,000 pounds more downforce, which means you are going to keep the car on the ground. That's basically what we are doing. I feel the IndyCar Series is doing the right thing to test that.

"The dome skid is not going to hurt the quality of the racing. Right now, there seems to be a big challenge between Chevy and Honda with the aero kit. I think this is more about that. I still don't think it's going to hurt."

However, Graham Rahal (pictured at top), whose RLL team is aligned with Honda, said that his car felt unsettled with the skids in place.

"They make a difference," he said. "My car is pretty loose here. It was really loose during testing at Indy. The guys that tell you it doesn't make a difference are lying, to be honest. There is obviously some politics going on.

"The Chevy guys don't want the sidewalls, but we need it. It definitely affects my car a lot, but we are going to keep working hard and put our heads down and try to make the best of it. I hate that this has become a topic of conversation. We should be talking about how great the Indy 500 is; instead we are talking about dome skids. Nobody even knows what the heck that is."

Participating in the test were Penske quartet Castroneves, Simon Pagenaud, Will Power and Juan Pablo Montoya, Ganassi's Scott Dixon, Tony Kanaan, Charlie Kimball and Max Chilton, Andretti's Ryan Hunter-Reay, Marco Andretti, Carlos Munoz and Alexander Rossi, ECR's Ed Carpenter and Josef Newgarden, and Rahal.

Teams also did general setup work ahead of the race there on June 11, and Kanaan told RACER that he expects that cars will be able to run closer together than they were last year.

"We ran in a pack of six or seven cars, but it's not going to be a pack race, and it's not going to be like last year either," he said. "It will be somewhere in between.

"We ran the dome skids and the strakes and we learned a lot. Because the car is raised up, it's got less downforce and the car feels lighter and you have to figure it out, because it's a different way of driving. It's a lot more difficult to drive. But we'll deal with it. It's going to be 20 degrees hotter when we come back to race, but it was a productive test."