For a team to succeed on race day, many elements must come together to allow a driver to pull into victory lane.
The right car, the right driver, the correct strategy and a small dash of racing luck are some of the larger elements that go into determining race winners. If something isn’t quite right, winning becomes that much more difficult.
At Indianapolis, the entire field is underneath a massive performance magnifying glass because of how many components are similar. Any differences can make the difference between pulling into victory lane and pulling into your team’s pit stall after the checkered flag on Memorial Day weekend.
It all begins with preparation. The team that wins at Indianapolis will need to be the most prepared to win. But in order to be prepared to win, a team must also be prepared to qualify and practice at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Technical gremlins, setup miscues and other obstacles can quickly add up to loss of practice time, qualifying speed or even race lineup position.
Enter PREMA.
New teams are a constant in motorsports. Many times they have teething troubles and mitigating those troubles can be helped with the right staffing hires.
Michael Cannon was that hire. Cannon has been widely regarded as one of the top engineering minds in IndyCar, right alongside Julian Robertson (Alex Palou‘s engineer), Brad Goldberg (Scott Dixon‘s engineer), David Faustino (Will Power‘s engineer) and Olivier Boisson (Marcus Ericsson‘s race engineer).
Cannon’s wealth of knowledge resulted in him being trusted by one of the more storied racing organizations in Europe with prepping their cars for Indianapolis.
Until Cannon decided to leave in January, that is.
Why? Because Cannon felt like he wasn’t being listened to.
“It was my opinion that my time at PREMA was not going to be used wisely and I thusly resigned my position,” Cannon said in a statement given to TrackSide Online.
PREMA completed St. Petersburg with radio issues affecting Robert Shwartzman and Callum Ilott‘s weekend. Moving ahead three weeks to the second race weekend at The Thermal Club, Shwartzman’s No. 83 Chevrolet had a fuel system issue that resulted in the team having to build his backup chassis into a new car.
It was discovered after the fire that the pull cable to activate the fire extinguisher “was not used as supplied and was replaced by the team with an unapproved product that failed to activate,” per IndyCar’s release.
Come again? How was that possible?
Fast forward again to Tuesday’s (May 13) beginning of Indianapolis 500 practice. While most of the field was circulating around Indianapolis Motor Speedway during the abbreviated session, both of PREMA’s cars were stationary in their garages in Gasoline Alley.
The team had used their road course cars in April’s open test while building up their superspeedway cars. Sometimes teams will do that because their superspeedway cars aren’t quite ready. Sometimes teams will do that so they don’t risk destroying their “good stuff” a few weeks away from the beginning of practice.
But late in the first day of practice, the team’s cars were still in the garage getting worked on. Shwartzman’s car wasn’t brought to technical inspection until shortly after 4 p.m. ET, with the session scheduled to end at 6 p.m. ET.
Shwartzman only turned six laps in practice on Tuesday, while Ilott turned 16 laps. They were at the bottom of the speed chart that day but ran a bit higher in Wednesday’s running order with Shwartzman in 28th and Ilott in 31st.
Correct preparation goes a long way to helping make sure that a team makes the Indianapolis 500. McLaren and Carlin learned that the hard way in 2019 when Fernando Alonso missed the field after what can only be described as an unmitigated disaster of epic proportions.
If you fail to prepare, then prepare to fail. It’s very rare that a team can pull a rabbit out of the hat at Indianapolis, but it’s very common for a team to destroy their chances because of not being prepared.
PREMA has two more days of practice before qualifying begins on Saturday. The team made some progress on Wednesday, but they have to work extra hard to make up the time.
The pressure is on to make sure one of their cars isn’t going to remain in their garage stall when the calendar turns to May 25. Only time will tell if their cars will be as fast as the progress they have made.
Christopher DeHarde has covered IndyCar racing and the Road to Indy for various outlets since 2014. In addition to open wheel racing, DeHarde has also covered IMSA and various short track racing events around Indiana. Originally from New Orleans, DeHarde moved to the Indianapolis area in 2017 to further pursue a career as a motorsports writer.