Sunday Qualification – delays continue! (Update)

UPDATE And to think, all that money spent on aero kits that appear to be causing the cars to snap out of control and fly thru the air, and they do not put one single additional fan in the grandstand. Instead the money should have been used to put all races on network TV.

The CART IndyCar were running faster than these cars run way back in 1996. The current underpowered Dallara was never designed to run at these speeds, so now they are adding all sorts of body parts to try and get the speeds back to where they were in 1996 – 20 years ago. And they call this progress? CART was light years ahead of the IRL (now IndyCar), but Tony George decided to spend a family fortune to kill it off and now we have what we have. And many of the teams owners currently in the paddock broke ranks with CART and sided with Tony George in the destruction of what was the greatest open wheel series in North America and a very close 2nd to F1 to create the current state of IndyCar Racing. Gentlemen take a bow.

05/17/15 As it turns out, Ed Carpenter's crash took out a big section of fence. When practice continued the damaged (apparently) hadn't been noticed, but the practice was quickly shut down after spotters saw it. This means that the situation here is "fluid" in terms schedule.

Speaking of fluids, there is a large cell of rain in Illinois that could be headed this way. Weather forecasts — we all become meteorologists here in May — peg the chance of rain at 50% for 2:00 this afternoon. This *should* allow everyone to have at least one chance to qualify.

Then again, IndyCar officials are meeting with team officials as I write this. The "sensible" thing would be to simply have all 34 cars run the 500. But Indy is tradition-bound, and so that's unlikely. What is more likely to happen is that the cars will try to run as fast as they can in "bankers" runs, meaning that they all know that the first one to hit the wall is likely to miss the race. Certainly those w/o backup cars and lots of spare parts and enough time to fix things would be Shucks Outta Luck.

So everyone in Gasoline Alley is nervous. No one is having fun. Long faces and tense moments.

— Tim Wohlford, reporting from IMS