IndyCar midseason review, part II: What's gone wrong

Jim Ayello | IndyStar

Show Caption Hide Caption What has happened in IndyCar Key story lines for IndyCar through the first half of the season.

INDIANAPOLIS – Parity, a thrilling Indianapolis 500 and Fernando Alonso have highlighted this Verizon IndyCar Series season, but it hasn't all gone right in the first half. The following is the second in a three-part series outlining what's gone wrong this season. Part I looked at what’s gone right, with what’s still to come in this wild and unpredictable 2017 season next.

Scheduling

For most anyone not apart of the Rahal Letterman Lanigan crew, the doubleheader in Detroit was a bear. Actually, even after sweeping the weekend, Graham Rahal admitted the fond memories might soon be hazy at best. That’s because they, along with the rest of the IndyCar paddock, were exhausted from a two-month stint that saw the series drive cross-country from Alabama to Arizona, then to St. Louis for a test, then back to Indianapolis for the IndyCar Grand Prix, which led right into Indianapolis 500 qualifying then to the 500 itself, then the aforementioned Detroit doubleheader, which was followed by the chaotic race at Texas.

More: IndyCar midseason review: What's gone right

“You go into the month of May, straight into a doubleheader, it’s really the cruelest thing that IndyCar could do to us,” Schmidt Peterson Motorsports’ James Hinchcliffe said before turning on his signature sarcasm. “But you’ve got to keep that momentum from the 500 with two really exciting races in Detroit.”

What’s been most disappointing to Hinchcliffe is that IndyCar promised a schedule that would be easier on the crews — who have to drive, not fly, to every race and every in-season test. But that hasn’t happened.

“Everyone’s tired, man, there’s no doubt about it,” Hinchcliffe said a couple days before the mayhem in Texas. “We really, really had to grind through the 2016 season, with all the testing. We were on track almost every week from the start of the season to the end, and the guys had very few days off. We were told it was going to be different this year, and up to this point, it hasn’t been. I think we’ve been on track every week since two weeks before the season started. Between tests and things like that, the guys are burning out.”

Even this two-week break between Texas and Road America isn’t a true break as many teams were testing this week. While the schedule lightens up a bit from here on out, IndyCar certainly did no favors to its teams over the past two months. Hopefully, this is a situation that can be rectified in the near future.

Honda engine failures and rotten luck

Takuma Sato’s 500 victory and Scott Dixon’s championship lead are likely little consolation to Ryan Hunter-Reay, Charlie Kimball or Alonso right now. Over the course of the season, more than a dozen of Honda’s engines have quit, many amid races, and those failures have come at a high cost.

The 500 was a decidedly exciting race, start to finish, but there’s little question some air was let out after smoke began bellowing from the back of Alonso’s Honda. While many disagreed over whether it would be good for IndyCar if the two-time Formula One champion won the race, none debated that it was important Alonso at least finish on his own terms. To have his car quit with more than three quarters of the race behind him was a big blow to IndyCar and embarrassing for Honda on an international stage.

But Alonso’s engine wasn’t the only one to bow out at Indy. Hunter-Reay and Kimball, the poster children for rotten luck in 2017, each looked to be in contention for a career-defining win when their cars quit. For Kimball, it was the second consecutive race his car lost power. Both he and Hunter-Reay have been knocked out of four races this year, with the majority due to circumstances out of their control. With Hunter-Reay in 14th and Kimball 18th, each has all but been knocked out of championship contention, a tough pill to swallow for drivers on two of IndyCar’s top teams.

TV ratings and blackout

There are ways to spin it so that a 3.4 TV rating doesn’t sound that bad — it was the most-watched sporting event of the weekend, fans consume live events in different ways, etc. — but at the end of the day, the 2017 Indianapolis 500 was the least-watched 500 since ABC began start-to-finish coverage of it in 1986.

For a series that is negotiating a new TV deal, this is unwelcome news. And to make matters worse, sportsmediawatch.com reported than IndyCar’s season-long ratings and viewership slipped on ABC. According to the site, in the five races ABC televised, including the 500, it averaged a 1.5 rating and 2.3 million viewers.

That’s down from last year (1.6, 2.5 million viewers) and before countering that the 2016 numbers were inflated by the excitement surrounding the 100th running, this year’s totals were slightly worse than 2015, as well (1.5, 2.4 million viewers).

Of course, those low 2017 ratings and viewership don’t include Indianapolis, but that’s no one’s fault but IndyCar and Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The track has continued to black out the race locally despite lofty attendance figures.

With more than 300,000 fans walking through the gates on Race Day – for the second year in a row — it’s past time for IMS to trust fans will fill out the stands next year and air the race live in Indianapolis.

Coyne catastrophes

There was an argument to be made that no team or driver enjoyed more good luck to start the year than Dale Coyne Racing and Sebastien Bourdais. Bourdais went from worst to first in the season-opener on the streets of St. Petersburg after a well-timed yellow flag flipped his fortunes. He then drove well and benefited from a similar stroke of good luck in Long Beach and snagged a second consecutive podium finish.

But he’s paid dearly for his early-season good fortune ever since. First, his car was caught up in the Mikhail Aleshin-caused crash at Phoenix, leaving no salvageable parts.

Then Bourdais endured one of the most horrifying crashes of the season during qualifying for the Indianapolis 500. The hit left Bourdais with a fractured pelvis and hip and team owner Dale Coyne with a wrecked car and no driver.

Bourdais crashes hard during Indy 500 qualifying Sebastien Bourdais suffers violent crash during qualifying for the Indianapolis 500.

Coyne landed James Davison on short notice, and the Australian ran the 500 splendidly, even leading a couple of laps before Oriol Servia clipped the back of his car and ended his day. A week after that, Esteban Gutierrez replaced Bourdais and managed to escape the Detroit doubleheader without damage, but the same could not be said of full-time Coyne driver Ed Jones, who damaged a front wing during the second race.

Finally there was the mess at Texas, where Jones and the latest Bourdais replacement, Tristan Vautier, were enjoying excellent runs before getting taken out halfway through the race in the Tony Kanaan-caused pileup.

“It's just a shame to be taken out by something out of our control, and the team really did not need another crash because of all of the crash damage they already had,” Vautier said after Texas. "I tried my best to avoid that and race well. Sometimes you can't do anything about it."

Unfortunate words to live by for Coyne this season.

Foyt lagging

The only full-season team in the paddock without a podium finish in this season of parity is A.J. Foyt Racing. And for the most part, it’s been no fault of its drivers.

Conor Daly has had two big problems this season: His cars haven’t held up very often, and when they do, they haven’t packed the power to compete.

Daly has started a race better than 15th once this season, and has one top 10 finish after managing to survive the carnage in Texas. A litany of mechanical problems and one rare engine failure has led to Daly finishing just two races this season on the lead lap.

Meanwhile, after racking up seven podium finishes over the past four years — at least one every season — Daly teammate Carlos Munoz has not sniffed a podium with a season-best finish of seventh (Long Beach). Munoz hasn’t had the same constant battle with mechanical issues that Daly had endured, but each has struggled to find pace this season.

To be fair, neither car was expected to be a frontrunner with Foyt switching from Honda to Chevrolet during the offseason and Munoz and Daly joining a largely new crew in the split Foyt garages (one in Texas, one in Indianapolis). But there was hope the offseason makeover would to lead to some better results than those that left former drivers Sato and Jack Hawksworth at the back of the pack last year.

So far, that has not been the case.

Follow IndyStar Motor Sports Insider Jim Ayello on Twitter and Instagram: @jimayello.