Welcome to the RACER Mailbag. Questions for Marshall Pruett or any of RACER’s other writers can be sent to mailbag@racer.com. Due to the high volume of questions received, we can’t guarantee that every letter will be published, but we’ll answer as many as we can. Published questions may be edited...

Every aspect of an Indy car’s performance is transferred to the ground through four remarkably small contact patches. It’s in that interaction between those Firestone tires and city streets at St. Petersburg, or Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s blend of flat surfaces and banking, where Verizon IndyCarSeries teams focus their efforts to...