Power and Rahal warn of fuel-save race at Road America

The length of the track, 4.014 miles, means there’s only a minuscule chance of variation in strategy should the race run without a full-course caution, and the length of the pitlane imposes a severe time penalty.

In order to open up the strategy possibilities, IndyCar has this year added five laps onto the race length, making it 55 laps. However, drivers are saying that won’t be enough to stop them trying to save enough fuel to  make it through on three stops, and that IndyCar should have instead forced everyone to run hard and make four stops.

Penske-Chevrolet’s Will Power said: “They should have added 10 laps, not five, because it's made it so everyone has to save fuel. Everyone's going for a three-stopper and saving fuel because it's such a long pit lane penalty. It's 40 seconds.

“They added the wrong amount. Should have been 10 laps, or even eight laps.

Teammate Josef Newgarden, who narrowly edged Power to fastest time of the day, said: “It's close, yeah. I mean, you could do either one, depending on where you are. But, you know, you can do the three stop still, so I think most people will try to do that.”

Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing’s Graham Rahal stated: “I'm afraid we didn't lengthen it enough because we can still make it in three stops. Now it just becomes a severe fuel-saving race, which isn't what we wanted to do. We did the same thing in Long Beach this year.

“We just have to hit our number and try to get there. I think when I looked at the strategy, it's about 28 seconds faster to do a three-stop over a four, because pit road is so long here. We have the pit speed limiter at the start of the bridge, it takes forever. It's a big-time loss.

“A yellow or two in there will completely change this thing… But I don't bank on yellows any more because to me the driving talent is so high now, guys don't make mistakes like they used to, so we don't see as many yellows.”