Brown blasts IndyCar 's**tshow' as call for MAJOR changes made

McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown has called for harsher punishments in IndyCar after branding previous races at Laguna Seca and Detroit as a 's***show'.

The 2024 season has seen the introduction of hybrid engines in IndyCar, but interestingly, the sport's decision-makers decided to do so mid-season, rather than at the start of the campaign.

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There have now been four races completed with the new units in cars, but since their arrival, there has been a noticeable drop-off in both the total number of passes in races and the number of passes for position in races - statistics that IndyCar usually loves to boast about.

The final race at Laguna Seca before the hybrid units were introduced in Mid-Ohio yielded 564 total passes, with 264 for position. However, in the four races since their arrival, there have been a total of just 652 passes, 390 of which were for position - a clear drop off in terms of race average.

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Zak Brown calls for harsher penalties

Brown, however, believes that instead of focusing on the quantity of overtaking in races, IndyCar should be looking at the quality of moves.

Several races in recent memory have been impacted by delays after collisions on-track as a result of poor overtaking moves, and Brown has called for stricter punishments for drivers at fault to try and address this moving forward.

“We also need to more penalize the drivers when they make an error,” Brown explained to Motorsport.com.

“If you give someone a free shot at someone and their penalty is to just give the position back, it’s not really a penalty; all that encourages is overdriving and irresponsible overtaking at times. ‘Hey if I get it wrong, I just have to give it back.’

“A penalty would be, 'no you got to give it back and you’re gonna have 10 seconds on your next pitstop'. Then drivers would be a little less likely to be banzai-ing their moves because there is actually a penalty.

“Right now, it’s ‘Hey, I got a free punt. I can just try a crazy move and if it doesn’t work, I just have to give the position back’. That’s not a penalty. So, I think there’s cleaning up that needed to be done that I’m seeing, that we have open communication on, that will make the quality of racing better.

“I think we have a tendency to think the quantity of passes is what we’re looking for, I think it’s quantity of passes is what we need to be looking for.

“I think Formula 1 has proven how popular that sport is, with high-quality racing and few passes versus demolition derby we’ve seen at Laguna and Detroit; there might have been 5,000 passes but it was a s**tshow.”

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