Will Power has apologized to Scott Dixon for what happened at Baltimore and continues to fault double-file restarts on road and street courses for being more trouble than they are worth.
Will Power says no to double-file restarts on street circuits
Team Penske driver Will Power says he feels IndyCar should outlaw with double-file restarts on temporary street circuits.
Rob Carr
Writing in his Autoweek.com blog, Power said that he got a run on Sébastien Bourdais at Baltimore and just assumed that it was unlikely that someone (Dixon) could have made a move on him given that he was on the push-to-pass button and that he was in the draft of the four-time champion.
“I just feel bad for him,” Power wrote of Dixon. “He’s been as strong as you like in the second half of the year and a thing like that, I feel bad for him and his whole team that it happened. I spoke to Scott and he was fine. He understood, and he knows it wasn’t deliberate.”
At the end of the day, Power blames the double-file restart, a format he has been a tenured critic of.
“Double-file restarts on a street course -- where you really only get the first few rows lined up correctly, anyway -- it’s just causing too much mayhem,” Power continued. “I think it sometimes disrupts the continuity of the races.”
Power has been victimized by double-file restarts on several occasions this season.
He was run off course several times at Barber Motorsports Park, tangled with Bourdais at Belle Isle, all leading up to his most recent accident at Baltimore. The end result is that the Penske ace has won only once this season and is ninth in the standings with three races remaining.
Ultimately, Power is content with double-file restarts on permanent road courses but doesn’t feel street courses provide the space needed to make it work without carnage.
“Double-file restarts are okay on most road courses because you have the grass to run off into and you also have flowing corners that accept a two-wide formation,” he wrote. “But most street courses are surrounded by walls, and you can barely fit two cars through -- if someone gets choked up a bit, then boom, you’ve got a massive traffic jam.
“It’s just frustrating from the driver’s seat.”
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