Dominating Team or Dominating Driver: Which Counts More?

Two Years of Indy Pro Series Experience Point to Who Sits in the Cockpit

by Allan Brewer
allan@indyproracer.com

Leilani Munter. Photo: DanaGarrettIRL

If you put talented Indy Pro Series newcomer Leilani Munter into the seat of teammate Alex Lloyd’s dominating No. 7 Lucas Oil Special would she win as often?

If you put Alex Lloyd into the seat of Bobby Wilson’s Brian Stewart Racing No. 1 Dallara would you win more?

Fans (and auto racing reporters) like to speculate about which counts more: great team or great racer. And drivers, smart ones at least, are lavish in their praise of the teams that put them on the podium.

So what happens when you compare two years of outcomes data on the Indy Pro Series entrants with who’s behind the wheel and who’s turning the wrenches?

There’s no doubt Sam Schmidt Motorsports is a great auto racing team. They’ve racked up nine cumulative race wins in the 2006 and 2007 seasons, capturing the winner’s share of the prize money in excess of one third of the time that the Indy Pro Series takes to the track.

Could they do it with a driver other than Alex Lloyd?

Some Speculative Number-Twisting Offers a Hint at Relative Importance

Back out the seven wins that SSM has scored in 2007 with Lloyd behind the wheel and they become no more than an average Indy Pro Series producer with only two wins (both with last year’s Series drivers champion Jay Howard in the cockpit) in the last twenty-five races.

The results leave them tied with Guthrie Racing, Kenn Hardley Racing, and Panther Racing (in its first year back in the series) over the ’06 and ’07 campaigns.

Even a casual fan, though, would argue that SSM is better than that. Give them two wins as though Howard repeated in the seat for the current season, and that brings the speculative win total to four.

That’s tied with Brian Stewart Racing for most, but only one win ahead of AFS Racing.

Of course this gate swings both ways. Put Lloyd’s seven wins this season into the Brian Stewart column as though he were driving the black and red No. 1 Dallara and suddenly you have BSR an eleven-win juggernaut (notwithstanding Bobby Wilson’s victory in Liberty Challenge race two at Indianapolis) in twenty-five tries.

Or add them onto AFS Racing’s three wins (two of which were actually earned by Lloyd in the 2006 season) and that team suddenly becomes a ten-win behemoth that dominates the Pro Series terrain.

Three Teams Dominate the Indy Pro Series (Usually)

Indianapolis Star ace IndyCar Series journalist Curt Cavin is well-known for his unique numerical obsessions and observations. He once very famously counted all the seats in Indianapolis Motor Speedway three times in order to satisfy himself of their number: 257,325.

In his well-read article of August 11th, 2007 he came up with another staggering statistic when he pointed out that three IndyCar Series teams and their drivers account for 97 percent of the victories over the last 33 races.

The Indy Pro Series also has its “Big Three”, though their lock on the podium’s top spot is hardly as secure.

Sam Schmidt Motorsports, AFS Andretti Green Racing and Brian Stewart Racing accounted for nearly two thirds (64 percent) of the victories recorded over the last twenty-five Indy Pro Series events.

Significantly, only four drivers account for those wins: Alex Lloyd (9), Wade Cunningham (4), Jay Howard (2) and Bobby Wilson (1).

Lloyd and Cunningham account for the lion’s share, taking all but three of the trophies home and accounting for a huge 13 out of 16 slice of the hardware hauled away.

Furthermore, Lloyd accounts for two of AFS Racing’s wins in 2006, and Cunningham scored big for Brian Stewart Racing as he rolled to three wins for the team in the same season, clinching for them the 2006 entrants’ championship.

All of which seems to flow towards the notion that the results follow the driving talent. Or is it simply that good teams facilitate the emergence of that talent with big race-day successes?

Figures Sometimes Lie, But They Have a Way of Leveling Out Over Long Haul

None of this number-shuffling, for example, takes into account the relationship that exists between driver and team.

Or, as Einstein once acknowledged, "Not everything that counts gets counted."

Where would Lloyd be without racing engineer extraordinaire Tim Neff, and the uncanny ability the two of them have to dial in a car to the raciest level? Or the experienced SSM crew that lavishes princely attention over every part and seam of the white wonder-car that’s flying away with the Indy Pro Series title in 2007?

And where would Wade Cunningham (and Lloyd) be if neither had been forced to the sidelines by illness for at least two races in the previous seasons of racing? Or if Howard returned to defend his championship?

There’s a term in statistics called “reversion to the mean”. It stipulates that any period of extraordinary observations shall be bracketed by periods of “normal” results.

The numbers say that when nature takes its course and Alex Lloyd and Wade Cunningham are plucked off into the higher reaches of the Indy Racing League to take two well-earned seats in IndyCar rides; then we’ll see just how much of the results were the driver and how much of the team.

The challenge for both drivers and three teams will be to maintain their success without the other, and validate the results of the phenomenal two-year run they mutually shared.

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The next Indy Pro Series event is the Carneros 100/Valley of the Moon 100 doubleheader on August 25th-26th at Infineon Raceway. The race will be telecast at 5:30 PM EDT on August 31st by ESPN2.

Comments

[Michael]

One issue here is how the drivers who have stepped out of the Sam Schmidt machine have done later i.e. the Travis Gregg Syndrome.

Gregg driving for Sam Schmidt - 7 poles, 3 wins, 9 Top-5's...

Gregg driving for someone else - best starting position 13th, best finish 10th...