So Crazy It Broke My Voice!

The late 90's is a period in motorsport that a great many people look back on with fondness. I grew up through that period. I was a big Michael Schumacher fan. Colin McRae was shocking people with flat out rallying and the cars were majestic. F1 was beautiful, Le Mans cars were stunning and America had CART. It was a truly sparkling era of man vs machinery. For today's article, I'm writing about my experienced of driving a 1999 Champ Car at The Green Hell.

My own knowledge of CART and indeed the split in American open-wheel racing isn't great, but what I do know is the cars were animals, demanding big balls and a colossal amount of skill. It's a challenge that both former and soon-to-be F1 drivers took up. Juan Pablo Montoya, Michael Andretti, Christian Fittipaldi, Mark Blundell, Tarso Marques, Roberto Moreno, Jan Magnussen and Christiano da Matta all competed during the 1999 CART season. While they all enjoyed mixed results in F1, the fact they did gives you an idea of the level of driver in the series.

The cars themselves were stunning machines. They looked aggressive, advanced and they were lightning fast. Whilst they didn't possess F1 levels of performance or technological advancement, they provided an unrelenting test for drivers. Whilst the cars on their own weighed a little over 700 kg, the weight increased to over 800 kg in race trim -- these were not light for open-wheel cars. To make up for that? Near 1000 bhp from a 2.6 litre, turbo V8 engine. As I'm sure you can imagine, the power delivery was brutal. Combined with the weight, lack of power steering, sequential stick shift (yes, it really had that), steel brakes and low grip, these cars didn't just test your skill, but also your physicality.

Thanks to VRC Modding, I'm able to have a go at something that represents the 1999 CART regulations. As the specs above suggest, it was far from easy. You can really feel both the weight and lack of grip at medium and low speed. The car wants to understeer, but it also wants to move around at the rear. At high speed, the wings at least push you into the ground, but you still need near constant micro-corrections to keep it in check. Sometimes you just have to hold on and hope the tyre and wings have enough grip to keep it pointing straight.

Then comes the power...and my god is there a lot of it! It really is as brutal as you imagine it. In this car, there can be no throttle mashing. Feeding the power in isn't just a polite request, you have to be smooth. The power is so overwhelming, it can still spin up the rears at high speed. At no point can you take a break. Whether it was braking, cornering or power, this thing tested my skills in a way that few cars do.

Take all of those points and throw it on the Nordschleife, with all its undulations, bumps and jumps and you have a lap that was extremely difficult to commentate on. It's hard to do the challenge of this car justice. Perhaps the fact that I struggled to commentate and that my voice cracked tells you all you need to know!

I keep trying to imagine racing these brutes on both the road courses and the ovals (where they could hit 250 MPH) and the effort that would take. This was just one lap and it took everything I had to complete it. But despite the difficulty, can it beat the 2018 IndyCar? Watch and find out! It certainly beat me...

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Jimmy Broadbent

I like to make videos. Simple as that.