A Saturn IB rocket stands by the interstate halfway between Nashville and the Barber Motorsports Park near Birmingham, Ala., a pointy reminder that Alabama has a long history in aerospace technology and building vehicles that propel humans at high rates of speed. This has much in common with the activities at Barber on a recent April weekend.
Josef Newgarden arrives at the race track on Thursday around lunch time. He’s in a black team jersey and a mandatory Fuzzy’s Vodka ball cap — sponsors are life to the series. The mobile headquarters of Ed Carpenter Racing, a thoroughly customized, high-tech semitrailer, sits in a row of similar vehicles, defining the weekend’s temporary IndyCar paddock. Between the two dozen trucks, tents make temporary open-sided garages. In back of Newgarden’s tent is a catering operation. In front, amid stacks of Firestone racing tires and surgically tidy tool carts, is another kind of rocket, in a semi-assembled state.
“When I was a kid, they looked like jet airplanes that drove on the ground,” says Newgarden. He’s all contained enthusiasm, part 25-year-old elite athlete and part go-kart-driving teenager, with bright blue eyes, dimples and a matinee-idol chin. “Which is why I loved them.”
In race trim, Newgarden’s car, No. 21, sports a handsome white-and-gold livery, but on this day of preparation, its carbon-fiber skin and elaborate wing structures are resting as detached parts on bespoke racks. Revealed are the hoses and wires of the car’s respiratory, circulatory and nervous systems, clinging vine-like to a turbocharged V6 engine. With its tires off, the car looks like a robot insect sent through a wormhole to menace humanity.
“I watched NASCAR, sports cars, F1, IndyCars,” says Newgarden, “and I always thought open-wheel cars were the coolest. That’s why I wanted to be an open-wheel driver. They don’t look like anything else on the planet. They’re fascinating.”
That term, “open wheel,” is critical to understanding the world that Newgarden inhabits, as well as his nerve-jangling, body-stressing experience inside the car. It means that the tires extend from the side of the vehicle on wishbone-shaped suspension. We drive above our wheels. Open-wheel racers drive among them. The cars also have open cockpits, so the driver’s helmeted head and gloved hands are exposed to the air, which is often rushing by at 200 mph.
What it’s not is NASCAR, though as a Southern-born racer, Newgarden gets that misunderstanding a lot. Those “stock” Fords and Toyotas have roofs and fenders. They bump and jostle one another during races, which has its own thrills. Open-wheel drivers avoid touching like a hot stove, because tire-on-tire encounters usually (continue reading at Nashville Scene)