Danica Patrick became the first female winner in IndyCar history recently, winning the Indy Japan 300 by 6 seconds.
Some women’s advocates and Patrick herself are complaining about a new rule which feminists claim is “aimed at the women in Indy.” The rule says that lighter drivers have to carry ten more pounds on them.
Race car driver Robby Gordon has a different perspective, saying that Patrick is at an unfair advantage over the rest of the competitors because she only weighs 100 pounds. Because all the cars weigh the same, Patrick’s is lighter on the race track. He says:
“The lighter the car, the faster it goes. Do the math. Put her in the car at her weight, then put me or Tony Stewart in the car at 200 pounds and our car is at least 100 pounds heavier.”
I know nothing about auto racing beyond what I learn from watching old Speed Racer cartoons with my daughter, but Dan H., a reader, does. He writes:
“Auto racing is about accelerating and decelerating weight in a straight line and an arc (corner). It takes a calculated amount of fuel (power) to accomplish this feat with the largest variable by several orders of magnitude the amount of weight that is being thrown around. Ever hear of ‘Power-to-Weight Ratio?’ In heavily equalized cars weighing 1500 pounds, a 100lb driver vs. a 165lb driver is a rigged race. Robbie Gordon is dead right: Forget It!
“With nearly the sole exception of Tony George’s Indy Racing League, all of the major series, and quite a few of the club racers, recognize this and either weigh the car and driver together or separately and make adjustments. The IRL introduced a laughable adjustment just this year.
“While racing officials do not concern themselves with the driver’s height, muscle mass, shoe size, eye color, gender, carbon footprint, or about a hundred other personal characteristics, they very much want to balance the weight across the drivers then let ‘em race. In auto racing, the driver’s weight looms as large as horsepower, tire width, vehicle height, spoilers, and more.
“People demanding that Danica’s huge weight (speed) advantage be ignored have never fielded a $45,000,000 race team. She weighs 75 pounds less than the average male driver in a sport where the teams pay $500,000 to get 2 pounds out of the weight of a manifold.
“She is a mid-pack performer at best that finishes higher up because of her incredibly advantageous weight. Bolt 20 pounds in the chassis beside each shoulder and her gender-provided weight bias disappears…and so does her up front finishes.”
From what Dan H. says, it sounds a little like the Boston Marathon a few years ago where a woman “won” the race because the female runners started the race 29 minutes before the men. If they spend $500,000 to decrease a car’s weight by two pounds, a 75 pound difference seems staggering, and the 10 pound balancing that Patrick and feminists are complaining about seems pretty minor.
On the other hand, I wonder if Patrick’s strength disadvantage also means something. Let’s say, for example, that they equalized the weights, as they apparently do in most of the races. Would it then be unfair to Patrick because she is effectively forced to carry “dead weight,” while the male drivers’ extra weight is at least in the form of muscle that helps them drive the cars?
On another level, even to compete and be a “mid-pack performer” as a professional race car driver, as Patrick has done, seems like quite an achievement.
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Glenn Sacks, www.GlennSacks.com
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I don’t know much about racing, but if her weight is such an obvious huge advantage, why haven’t all the other teams been using tiny little guys, like jockey size? If the extra weight offers no help, only hindrance, it seems weird that 200 lb guys are racing in the first place.Â
So. She’s got a natural advantage. Boo fucking hoo. No one is suggesting that Derek Jeeter be hobbled so I can better compete with him.Â
Surely if 2lbs makes a difference, lighter drivers should have been winning for years. You would have seen an arms race where drivers would have been losing weight, doing everything the could to stay below certain limits. It wouldn’t be uncommon to see them fasting for days before a race– just like in amateur wrestling.Â
Lacking any evidence of this, I have to wonder: why was this only an issue when the woman won?Â
My gut feel is that race car drivers are professional athletes, and as such any natural or trained physical trait which gives them an advantage (be it lightness, strength, reaction time, good eyesight, etc) is just part of the total athlete package.
Horse racing has already dealt with this issue, which is why jockeys are all tiny. Of course, that’s a different sport with different rules, a different tradition, and a different governing body, so Indy would be completely within their rights to decide that they want to change the rules to reduce the impact of the driver’s weight.
If I read the story right, they in fact do try to equalize weight on the cars, and everybody’s car, including driver’s weight, is usually within 10 pounds of everybody else. If that is true, then, her 75 pounds would represent a significant disadvantage to the other drivers. Although the point that her upper body strength limitations would be a limiting factor for her also shouldn’t be entirely ignored.
I mean, this looks clear enough to me:
With nearly the sole exception of Tony George’s Indy Racing League, all of the major series, and quite a few of the club racers, recognize this and either weigh the car and driver together or separately and make adjustments.
So if everyone else makes weight adjustments, why should this one racing league ignore that?
Not only that, but the NASCAR weight limit is 3400 lbs. the 65 pound difference between her an the average man compared to the total weight of the vehicle is less than 2%. It seems to me that skill advantages of one racer versus another would make the 2% variation seem meaningless. But, of course, IANAND (i am not a nascar driver).
Punning is still right to pose the Jeter question. It works for any other sport as well. Should we sever the legs of basketball players so they’re all the same height? Every team is responsible for fielding the best players they can.
So if everyone else makes weight adjustments, why should this one racing league ignore that ?
It may not make a difference given that each auto has different horsepower, rate of fuel usage, tire wear and by the time you get to a 300 mile race, the benefit of politically correct fairness will have been nullified.
Feb 5, 2008
(Danica)Patrick, speaking to 6Sports by phone from Phoenix, Ariz., said she didn’t think the rule change would make much of a difference.
They can do whatever they want. They are the ones that make the rules, but I still think that if (driver weight) made a big enough difference, I’d have obviously gone out and won a bunch of races and qualified on pole every time," said Patrick, who has yet to win an IRL IndyCar Series race.
Obviously I’m losing what could be called an advantage, but like I said, if it made that big of a difference, I would have done a whole lot of things that were in first place, she said.
Why aren’t more teams using tiny drivers? Driving at this edge of the envelope is pretty rarified. There aren’t that many people with the right combination of reflexes, strength and courage, and so the pre-selection pool (all the lower, less glamourous race circuits) select more for driving ability than size.
But up at the top level, tiny things can make a huge difference. That’s why Formula 1 ballasts all drivers but the heaviest. The car has a set weight limit, sans driver, and it is up to the designer to get the most out of that weight.
Patrick’s weight is an advantage. It’s probably not quite as big an advantage as it would be in Formula 1, but it definitely exists. I’m not sure that she’s a middle-of-the-pack performer without the advantage: in the little I’ve seen of her she looked like a highly competent driver. The only way to find out is to even out the driver weights.
And yes, in order to compete at this level, Danica is a remarkable athlete. Driving a race car, particularly the open-wheel cars in IRL and Formula 1, is a job requiring extraordinary skill and stamina. Even ballasted, Patrick will be a contender.
Change the rules!
Make it even. All the cars with the driver included must weigh the same. BUT ( big but here ) make the over weight cars remove weight to match the lightest. This will increase compitition and improvement to civilian vehicles. Making milage improvements and saving on gas emmissions…( hey, if we’re going to save the enviroment why haven’t they banned auto racing . Just asking), also making the sport more intresting if the teams can change drivers 10 minutes befor the start. Now just how important are those brakes anyways…
Make for better viewing. Problem solving. Talk about survivor-esk reality.
In all seriousness though is the size of the driver. Volume and surface area, not weight. For the heat and dehyration should be placing this little lady at a disadvantage so severe as to be criminal. It is a hot, strenious job. Why do you think they have been drinking milk after the races all these years? It is not a bid to show the sport in a wholesome light. They don’t want thier champions passing out on the podium.
As for the horse race balancing act…they don’t balance the horse and jockey. Just the jockies. So boys and girls maybe they can tinker with the cars or the drivers but not both. If everything was equal. Exactly equal. Then there would be no reason to race. The result is going to be a tie. Work with what you got. If you lose…get better. Now you’ve got yourselves a hore race ( car race?).
Boys, get better, or get used to it.
Professional car racing has been splintering into different groups and associations that you might mistake it for Yugoslavia.
I don’t have a problem with handicapping for driver weight–that’s what they do in thoroughbred racing and most other of the car races noted.
But I don’t have a problem with one sector of the not handicapping, either.
If the lack of driver weight handicapping presents a major difficulty, then someone, I’m sure, can start up a new race or car series to include it, seems to me.
Before simply saying ‘weight is all that counts’, though, I’d really like to see some studies on upper body strength differentials between men and women, some studies on endurance–M v. F–and the like. I mean, if we’re going to be getting that technical, let’s do it right and all the way.
BTW, I’m looking forward to televised weigh-ins. I suspect Patrick would be a sight to behold in her skivvies. Robbie Gordon, not so much….
For everyone’s information, the Indy Racing League DID change the rules before this season began, to take the driver’s weight into account.
Danica’s win in Japan was run under the new weight rules.
So the logical endpoint is that all Indy car drivers will be petite, fit babes like Danica Patrick.
What are you guys arguing about?
Everything about the cars is regulated to death, so I suppose it’s time they started on the drivers, too.
In a more interesting racing world, the other teams would be encouraged to compensate for that weight advantage by increasing horsepower, improving the car’s aerodynamics, etc. Unfortunately Formula One has decided that regulation, uniformity, and safety are more important than rewarding that kind of ingenuity, so the teams are pretty much forbidden them from doing any of those things. It seems like the only response possible to any innovation is to make a new rule to forbid it as quickly as possible. They’ll turn it into NASCAR before they’re done. Smokey Yunick would be bored to tears.
bcostin’s last blog post..Today we’ll be reading from Pelosi 4:22
I used to drive a real 2-seater sportscar back in the late 1950s. An Austin-Healey 100, to be exact. My sports use of the Healey was driver and navigator TSD (time-speed-distance) road rallies. Now and then I hung around at sportscar race tracks of that era, and did some readings on professional auto racing.
One of the things I learned was that at the end of one of the 500-mile Memorial Day races at the Indianapolis Speedway, finishing drives would have lost five pounds of weight. Clearly, race car driving is one of the most physically demanding of sports, and the body muscles probably are used in ways that most of the rest of us could never even conceptualize.
So Danica Patrick must be one tough woman, even at 100 lbs. I’m certain she wins races because she is a better driver, not because she is 100 lbs lighter than some fat-ass whose body perhaps is more suitable for football than staying alive to finish a race on the ground at speeds exceeding 200 mph.
As has been suggested here. Try looking around for smaller skilled drivers. Best of all, hire a lot more women like Danica Patrick. Probably it will improve the competition.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WIÂ
Heh, this is a great and erudite discussion.
My only thought looking at that picture, is "Damn, that is one smug-looking self-satisfied woman." She looks like she just ate the canary, the goldfish and chased the doberman out of the house. All she needs is a thought balloon saying "Yeah, I’m bad. Badass! Badder than baddass! Kiss my shapely Sports Illustrated model butt you pathetic losers!"
CosmicConservative’s last blog post..The Daily Toon
My god its pathetic this whingeing in it? So she has a small weight advantage. Its not like she is <i>dominating</i> the sport she just won one bloody race. This smacks of egos being hurt.
The whinging seems to be twofold: Robby Gordon’s claiming that he won’t race against Patrick because of the huge weight advantage she has, and Patrick’s and Feministing et al claiming that any enforcement of weight equalization is sexist.
Gordon’s whinging is standard in the racing business, which at the top end is as much political as it is technical. Feministing’s whinging is because they see absolutely everything through a pair of evil-patriarchy sunglasses.
At this level of performance, differences don’t have to look huge to be huge. The estimate of 100 lbs = 1 second per lap in Formula 1 is probably not far off. In F1, a second a lap is big. On some circuits, it’s the difference between 1st and 10th. That’s why F1 uses ballast. The cars have a dry weight limit. They all carry the same driver/ballast weight. The differences after that are all skill: engineering skill to get the car as light and powerful as possible without sacrificing reliability, driving skill of course, and team management skill. Cars full of fuel are markedly slower (and anyone who doubts that Patrick’s weight is an advantage need only watch an F1 race at, say, Monza) than cars low on fuel, and management of that is very important.
All in all, Gordon’s blustering, Feministing don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about (nothing new there) and Danica Patrick is a hell of a driver.
Deangc say it isn’t so!
 There is a rule that they ballast the cars to match weights of cars and drivers? Then it comes down to skill? "Skill of engineering to make the car as light as possable", you said.
Why?
Why waste the time , money and more important"skill" of the engineers to make the cars light if they are then going to be weighted down to balance the field. Where is the incentive to increase mans’ ( not forgetting Danica and her sisters ) ablity to strive for ever better?You could argue that the ability to distribute the weigth to enhance performance will…but wait! No! this is formulae 1. Not NASCAR,which only turns to the left. These cars are balanced. Claiming that engineering developements on the track will aid in advancing safer cars for the general public. This kind of rule is delaying safer roads for us all.
Heheh..
She might have won the race, but she still drives like a woman on a cell phone:
http://www.wishtv.com/global/story.asp?s=8301490
" Danica Patrick hit a member of Dale Coyne’s crew on pit road Friday afternoon."
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"Why waste the time , money and more important"skill" of the engineers to make the cars light if they are then going to be weighted down to balance the field. Where is the incentive to increase mans’ ( not forgetting Danica and her sisters ) ability to strive for ever better? You could argue that the ability to distribute the weight to enhance performance will…but wait! No! this is formulae 1."
Ummm. No, this is not Formula 1. This is Indy and they just turn left so the ability to distribute that weight is a significant advantage. I think Danica is a superb driver but, until the recent rule changes, she had a significant weight advantage, period.
It would be interesting to know what the average driver weight in the IRL is. I would be surprised if Danica had a 100 lb advantage on any competitive driver before the rule changes. I do believe that before the rule changes, her team had at least a 1 mph advantage over any other IRL team and that is huge. So why did she not win a bunch of races before Japan? Personal opinion (and that is all it is), she was not that great a driver before Japan (has absolutely nothing to do with her gender). I expect to see Danica win more IRL races. She is a very good race car driver, but there are several other current IRL drivers that, under even conditions, will beat her badly. Just my opinion…
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