INDY 500: Dome skid furor calmed after Day 1

"I want to commend the series; I think they did a great job with the downforce they picked," Marco Andretti told RACER.

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The miniature storm over the required use of dome skids at the Indy 500 (and all superspeedways), which raises the ride height of an Indy car and reduces downforce, was a bone of contention with many of the Honda runners last month during IndyCar's "Safety Test" at IMS. And with IndyCar's refusal to change the rulebook to allow the addition of strakes to the underwing's diffuser, which would have recovered the lost downforce, Chevy teams rejoiced and Honda teams cursed at the series yet again.

That Safety Test, which was conducted amid high winds and the specter of rain, managed to unsettle a number of drivers – even some from the Chevy camp – as the combination of high winds and reduced downforce made for a scary driving experience.

Given more than a month to take what they learned at the test, and for their manufacturers to conduct additional wind tunnel tests and computer-based simulation tests to find optimized chassis and aerodynamic setups, the fruits of their labor were rewarded on Monday.

Opening practice for the Indy 500 saw big speeds produced by all of the Honda-powered Andretti Autosport team as Marco Andretti led the field with a draft-aided lap of 228.978, and he also set the second-fastest lap without a tow – a 223.873 – under cool, overcast skies and relative calm air.

Even with the optimal conditions, Andretti said his car was a handful thanks to the downforce loss from the dome skids.

"It's definitely not easy to drive," he added. "If you saw my steering wheel, it was pretty lively."

2013 Indy 500 winner Tony Kanaan (right), who drives for the Chevy-powered Chip Ganassi Racing team, couldn't help but poke fun at his former team and teammates who went from the series' most vocal dome skid opponents to the fastest entries in the field on Monday.

"The guy who was crying is sitting at the top of the [timing] pole," Kanaan told RACER. "The dome skids are fine. They're different. Everybody has to deal with them. You saw today the speeds were a lot faster on Day 1 than we've seen. I was one of the guys on the other side of the argument. The cars are OK with the dome skids, which we saw today. They guys who were upset the most went fastest, and it wasn't just in a tow; they were also the fastest on their own. The Andretti cars looked pretty hooked up. They were all crying before but they are happy now."

Schmidt Peterson Motorsports' Oriol Servia (left), who sampled his Honda-powered car with dome skids for the first time, shared Kanaan's opinion but also warned against how the cars might perform in hotter, thinner air where downforce levels would be further decreased.

"I felt the same as those guys," he said. "I had the same question about [dome skids] in my head. Would it be horrible? And it wasn't. Now, it wasn't easy to drive. Not at all. But the running we did today was maybe irrelevant.

"It should be 20 degrees hotter on race day, and that's when the evil could show up in thin air. Today, it was not as comfortable as last year, but it wasn't evil at all."