Indy Thursday Pre-Practice Notes

Legge

Number of the day Exhibit A — Yesterday, Grace Autosport's effort to put Katherine Legge into this year's Indy 500 officially came to a close, and did so with a rather puzzling, maybe bitter, press release. The all-woman effort cited a "lack of cars" that were available to them, 'cause teams were cutting down the number of cars or something.

Which, if true, would be strange — there are a least a couple of extra motors to be had, and certainly the current spec car seems to have ample numbers among teams. Talking with Gabby Chaves — who had an aborted effort with Michael Shank for this race — the problem isn't one of "lack of cars" but rather "a lack of cars at a reasonable budget." Judging by the comments of Chaves and others, the price for a ride this year seems to be somewhere north of $750k, which is a hefty chunk of change if you're a new team w/o an announced major sponsor.

At any rate, the betting is that if someone shows up with Katherine and a cool $1 million, there would be a car for her.

Number of the day Exhibit B: All 33 cars took the track yesterday, and 31 of them were within a second of the top speed set by Ryan Hunter-Reay. Only Buddy Lazier and Jack Hawksworth fell outside of that margin.

Finally for this report: Exhibit C: The 2-seater ride at Indy costs $500. Considering this is probably lasts around 4 minutes, it probably isn't considered a prudent expenditure, but the memories will certainly last as long as any of your memories hold out.

— Tim Wohlford, reporting from Indy