IndyCar: Late race confusion has Robert Wickens, SPM team manager irate

Jim Ayello | IndyStar

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NEWTON, Iowa -- So just what the heck happened at the end of Sunday’s Verizon IndyCar Series race at Iowa Speedway? Depends on whom you ask. Robert Wickens and some on the Schmidt Peterson Motorsports team feel they were robbed of a podium finish.

IndyCar officials say the No. 6 team took a calculated gamble and lost.

Let’s start on Lap 294, when the craziness began. Ed Carpenter momentarily lost control of his car and nicked Takuma Sato as his No. 30 car breezed by in Turn 2.

IndyCar Race Director Kyle Novak explained the calculus behind throwing the yellow flag in the first place.

“First of all, we’re always looking to stay green," Novak explained. "(Carpenter) hit sideways and we see it clearly in race control. Obviously we know it only takes three seconds to get down that straightaway. (Sato) squares it up – what a save right? – and they’re going down. At that moment, I’m thinking let’s stay, let’s stay, let’s stay. (But) if you flash back to the incident, we got an end plate and pieces there, so it’s a yellow. Yellow, yellow, yellow right at that moment,” Novak said. “... (We had) no choice.”

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Throwing a red flag was not an option, explained IndyCar President of Competition Jay Frye, as the incident happened just beyond the red flag window.

So with the yellow out, teams were told through their radios that the track is yellow and that pits will open shortly – per IndyCar’s standard procedure. Teams were also told the intention was for the debris to be cleaned up as quickly as possible and for the race to finish under a green flag. However, no promises were made, Novak said.

“There is never a timetable given to teams because that timetable is uncertain,” Novak explained.

This is where the stories between IndyCar and SPM begin to diverge. Wickens, who was running in third place at the time of yellow flag, said he was told the race would, indeed, resume green. That’s why his team told him to pit.

“IndyCar made a big mistake on this one,” a frustrated Wickens said after finishing fifth. “They were greedy, and they wanted to make this race go green again for the fans, but (expletive) there was still a piece of wing on the track, so they opened pit lane for everyone to pit if they wanted to pit, knowing they said they’d go green next time by. Then they changed their mind and they don't (go green) after people came into the pits. Either keep it closed or don’t. Don’t flip your decision and just destroy a podium for Josef (Newgarden, who was running second) and I.

“It’s absolute bull (expletive).”

Frye was adamant that teams were not told the race would resume green. IndyCar wanted to, but the debris took longer to clean up that they had hoped.

“We did everything we could to go green,” Frye said. “The debris was much more than what we thought it was, and it took us longer to clean it up. We had to open the pits, tried to go green at 298, and we ran out of time.”

SPM's Piers Phillips said he knows about the debris, but that's not the whole story. The team manager said IndyCar told him after the race there was a glitch in the software that slowed the process of restarting the race.

“They had some issue with the program that does timing and scoring and the reordering in terms of who is a lap down,” an irate Philips said not long after spending around 30 minutes in a post-race meeting with IndyCar officials.

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“The (debris) wasn't the problem. The problem was they got screwed with whatever the reorder software -- I don't even know what they use. ... The reorder was all screwed up. It was all wrong, and by the time they got it sorted out, it was too late. ... For us as a team, a car leading on used tires and a car (in third place), it was like, 'OK, let’s split them. Leave (James Hinchcliffe) leading and have (Wickens) go for tires,' and if it had gone green, I think we would have won it. Around here, tires are so good, we would have had time. But we got (expletive). Same thing, we talked to IndyCar, and they go, ‘Yeah, we screwed it up, but we’re not going to change it.’"

Philips went on to say race officials assured him they are going to make changes to the end-race procedures “so when we get to the final 10-15 laps of the race, we don’t do the whole lapped cars to the back, pits are open, pits are closed thing. They’re talking about something where it’s just a yellow and if you want to pit, you can pit, and if not, you can run to the end.”

IndyCar officials acknowledged the glitch Philips referred to but were adamant that it had nothing to do with whether or not the race would resume green. The glitch only affected the ordering of Alexander Rossi and Ed Carpenter, and IndyCar swapped those cars – Rossi from 10th to ninth, Carpenter from ninth to 10th – after the race.

"Nothing happened wrong," Frye said. "That's the bottom line. We did everything we could to go green, and it didn't work out."

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