Thermal Club reprofiles final turns ahead of IndyCar's visit

The Thermal Club has acted upon a request from the IndyCar Series to reprofile the final corner sequence leading onto the main straight.

As seen during last year’s visit, drivers sweeping to the left at the Turn 16-17 section rode over the crest and curbing, which launched their cars into the air before settling and making the hard right turn onto the start/finish straight. With a TV camera pointed directly at the cars, evocative slow-motion footage of drivers bounding over the corner before crashing down and continuing was shown several times during the event.

In the modifications carried out by the circuit, the jump-inducing section has been mostly leveled, which should also help to prevent damage to the brittle magnesium bellhousings that carry IndyCar’s energy recovery systems and sit between the engines and transmissions.

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“We've done a few revisions of that over the winter,” Thermal GM Nicholas Rhoades told RACER. “After each test, we've made a change, so hopefully we'll be good for the race. I think it's a big improvement over what it was.”

Andretti Global’s Marcus Ericsson was among the numerous drivers to test at Thermal earlier this year and says an improvement has been made, but the problematic bump hasn’t been entirely eradicated.

“They took some of the curbing out and put some concrete down,” Ericsson said. “It is definitely a bit flatter, but it's still like you go over that sort of grinding asphalt/concrete, and then you join the curve, and then you go back on the track, so the racing line is still over that whole change of things and it's not like it's completely smooth. It made it better, but it's still a bump – quite a big bump. But it's a little bit less aggressive compared to what it was.”