Wheels Blog: Franchitti and Castroneves Pause in New York Before Indianapolis 500

Richard Drew/Associated Press Scotland’s Dario Franchitti, left, and Brazil’s Helio Castroneves were interviewed in New York on Monday.

On Monday, IndyCar sent the drivers for this Sunday’s Indianapolis 500 on a press tour to cities around North America. New York can rest easy in its title as the media capital of the world: it got the only pair of three-time Indy winners in the lineup, Dario Franchitti of Scotland and Helio Castroneves of Brazil.

Franchitti, the defending champion who also won in 2007 and 2010, is stuck in midpack, in the middle of the sixth row, after a weak performance by most of the Honda-powered teams in qualifying. His Ganassi Racing teammate, Scott Dixon of New Zealand, is next to him, in 16th starting position. Castroneves, in a Chevrolet-powered Penske car, starts eighth, in the middle of Row 3.

“I am worried,” Franchitti said of the apparent disparity between the Honda and Chevy engines, although most teams will be switching to fresh engines for the race itself, giving Honda a chance to perform some tweaks.

“Last year, we had an even bigger deficit,” Franchitti said. Obviously, that didn’t hurt him on race day. “The Honda guys brought in a new engine and made a big step forward in fuel consumption and horsepower. Hopefully, they can bring something similar this time.”

Castroneves offered some hope for Franchitti. “It doesn’t matter if you have the fastest car,” said Castroneves, who won the race in 2001, 2002 and 2009. “You need everything going right for you.”

Both drivers said they were impressed by the depth of driving talent and quality of the teams in this 500. “There’s probably 20-something cars that can win that race,” Franchitti said. “There’s a drop-off in some of the cars, but it’s only maybe three, four guys.”

Like the Kentucky Derby in horse racing, the Indy 500 is an event that draws many viewers who do not regularly follow the sport. Asked for viewing tips for newcomers, Franchitti pointed to “the subtleties of what’s going on.”

“You’re not going to see big slides or big steering movements,” he said. Instead, the in-car cameras, Franchitti said, can be telltales: any driver using anything but the smoothest, slightest steering input is having a handling problem.

He also suggested that viewers call up indycar.com to follow the race timing and scoring. “You can see if someone is moving up from the back of the pack,” he said.

“If you see a car really close behind another car, you know that person has a very good car,” Castroneves suggested, referring to the difficulty most teams have in getting a car to handle well once it is in the turbulent air coming off a car ahead.

Indianapolis Motor Speedway has received approval from the State of Indiana for millions of dollars in loans for improvements. One planned project would light the track for night racing. But Franchitti would not want to see the Indy 500 run under lights. “I don’t think you mess with 100 years of tradition,” he said.

Jamie Squire/Getty Images Helio Castroneves, driver of the No. 3 Shell V-Power/Pennzoil Ultra Team Penske Chevrolet, after qualifying for the 2013 Indianapolis 500.

Franchitti can appreciate tradition, being a serious student of racing history. “I read anything I can get,” he said. “I collect memorabilia. I talk to drivers who have gone before. No matter how long these guys have been out of the car, they still get it.”

(A little more from the history department: Castroneves and Franchitti are tied with Bobby Unser, Johnny Rutherford, Mauri Rose, Wilbur Shaw and Louis Meyer for the second-highest number of Indy 500 victories.)

He is the second Scot to win Indy, the other being Jim Clark, in 1965. Franchitti had a dream experience not long ago when he had the chance to drive Clark’s Indy-winning Lotus 38-Ford at the speedway. “It was something I never thought would happen, ” he said. “I saw it at the Henry Ford Museum. They let me walk behind the rope and touch it. I thought that was as close as I’d ever get to it. It was one of the greatest days of my life.”

A fellow Scot, Derrick Walker, will take over as the president of operations and competition for the IndyCar series after Sunday’s race (during which he will be the team manager for the pole-sitter, Ed Carpenter). Franchitti and Castroneves said they were happy to see Walker get the job.

“I think it’s a great hire for the series,” Franchitti said. “I pushed for it years ago. The only facet of experience he doesn’t have is as a driver.”

Walker owned his own team for many years and before that ran the Penske IndyCar team.

“There’s nothing like putting a person in that position who’s had to struggle to balance the books each year,” said Franchitti. Either he or Castroneves would be tied with A.J. Foyt, Rick Mears and Al Unser Sr. for the most Indy 500 victories with a win on Sunday.

And that would mean another trip to New York.

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Safety: 2014 Forester Gets Top Rating in Offset Crash Test

The 2014 Subaru Forester was the only one of 13 compact crossovers and S.U.V.’s to earn the highest rating in a new, more severe front crash test by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. The new Forester was rated Good, and the 2013 Mitsubishi Outlander Sport received the next-highest rating, Acceptable.

The insurance institute, which is financed by the insurance industry, began conducting the new test, called the small overlap test, in 2012. The results are rated on a scale of Good, Acceptable, Marginal and Poor. Vehicles are rated separately for their structure, for how well the driver dummy is restrained and for potential injuries to the dummy. Those are combined into the overall rating.

Moreover, the redesigned Forester was the first vehicle of 47 tested to date to receive perfect scores in all of those categories.

“It’s what we envisioned when we were first developing this test,” said Joe Nolan, the institute’s vice president for vehicle research. “They addressed the issues of structure. They addressed the issues of keeping the occupant engaged with the frontal air bag; keeping the steering wheel in front of the driver; deploying the side curtain air bag. All of those things, when they work together, they work very well.”

Receiving an overall rating of Marginal were the BMW X1, Honda CR-V, two-door Jeep Wrangler, Mazda CX-5, Nissan Rogue and Volkswagen Tiguan.

Receiving the lowest rating, Poor, were the Buick Encore, Ford Escape, Hyundai Tucson, Jeep Patriot and Kia Sportage.

Conspicuously absent from the latest tested group was the Toyota RAV4, which will not be tested until later this year. In a press release, the institute noted that Toyota had “asked for the delay” so it could make changes “to improve” the RAV4’s test performance.

The new small overlap test is intended to replicate what happens when the front corner of a vehicle collides with another vehicle, or with an object like a tree or utility pole. In the test, 25 percent of the car’s front end on the driver’s side strikes a rigid barrier at 40 miles per hour.

Because the impact is to the car’s outer edge, it misses the main crush-zone structures that reduce crash forces to the passenger compartment, increasing the risk of severe damage to the structure that surrounds the occupants.

In these impacts, vehicles tend to rotate and slide sideways. This movement can fling the dummy toward the windshield and front door pillar. And it can push the steering wheel, which contains an air bag, so far to the right that the dummy can fall into a gap between the steering wheel air bag and the side-curtain air bag that is meant to protect the head.

In the Jeep Patriot, for example, the steering wheel moved up eight inches and to the right almost six inches, causing the dummy’s head to slide off the front air bag. And the side curtain air bag did not deploy.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 21, 2013

An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to the overall vehicle ratings in crash tests by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. While the Subaru Forester was the first of 47 tested vehicles to get a perfect score, it was not the first to receive a Good rating in all tests. The Volvo XC60 was also rated Good in all categories, though it received a demerit because its side-curtain air bag did not provide enough forward coverage.

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Wheels Blog: Consumer Advocacy Group Calls for a Recall of 5 Million Jeep Grand Cherokees

Chrysler The Center for Auto Safety wants Chrysler to recall five million Jeep Grand Cherokees made from 1993 to 2004 for a potential fire hazard from their gas tanks.

The Center for Auto Safety is asking top officials at the Chrysler Group and its parent company, Fiat, to recall about five million vehicles. The nonprofit consumer advocacy group said, “Children are dying in Jeeps in rear-impact fires.”

In a letter to John Elkann on Wednesday, Fiat’s chairman, the center cited the deaths of three children since 2006 in fires that occurred when the Jeeps in which they were riding were struck from the rear.

The Center for Auto Safety has also been urging, since 2009, a recall of 1993-2004 Jeep Grand Cherokees, saying the vehicles have two problems. The first is a gas tank behind the rear axle and somewhat below the bumper, in an area that safety engineers call a crush zone. Chrysler moved the tank in front of the rear axle when it redesigned the vehicle for the 2005 model year, but a company spokesman said the move was not related to concern about fires.

The second problem is a fuel filler pipe positioned so that it can rip away from the tank in a rear impact, allowing gasoline to escape from the tank, the center said. Chrysler has repeatedly denied that the Grand Cherokee posed a fire risk, noting that the vehicles met federal safety standards.

On Wednesday, the automaker issued a statement reconfirming its own analysis of the Grand Cherokee models called into question by the center, saying the S.U.V.’s “are neither defective, nor do their fuel systems pose an unreasonable risk to motor vehicle safety in rear impact collisions.” However, almost a year ago, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said its investigation of the center’s allegations were reason enough for the agency to upgrade its investigation to an engineering analysis.

In what appeared to be a direct rebuttal of Chrysler’s continuing claims, the traffic safety administration said its study found that “rear-impact-related tank failures and vehicle fires are more prevalent in the J.G.C. (Jeep Grand Cherokee) than in non-Jeep peer vehicles.” At that time the safety agency said it was expanding the investigation to include 1993-2001 Jeep Cherokees, as well as 2002-7 Jeep Libertys.

In 2011 the center released the results of crash tests it commissioned, showing that other S.U.V.’s of the same vintage fared far better in rear-impact crashes than did the Jeep Grand Cherokee.

The center says it has reports of 157 deaths in which Grand Cherokee crashes resulted in a fire. That tally includes rear impacts as well as rollovers in which the filler hose might have ripped loose, Clarence Ditlow, the center’s executive director, said in an interview. The safety agency listed 15 fire deaths, but Mr. Ditlow said it was strictly looking at rear-impact crashes.

One of the child deaths mentioned in the center’s letter was that of Cassidy Jarmon, a 4-year-old who was riding in her family’s 1993 Grand Cherokee in February 2006 in Cleburne, Tex. Her mother was stopped on a two-lane highway, trying to make a left turn, when her Jeep was hit from behind by a 2001 Chevrolet Lumina, according to the police report. Cassidy, who was in a child restraint, survived the impact but couldn’t be easily freed from the seat because the fire happened so quickly, said Detective Kelly Summey, who arrived at the crash while the rescue was under way. She died two days later from burns and smoke inhalation.

Detective Summey said her investigation concluded that the gas tank had been punctured by the Jeep’s trailer hitch. The deaths of the two other children occurred in 2011 and 2012. The safety agency’s investigation is still under way.

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