Racers Unchained with Paul Tracy
Oct 12, 2026 · 45 min · 14 segments
Townsend Bell joins Racers Unchained for a wide-ranging conversation about a racing career that took an unconventional path. Bell didn't climb into a race car until he was 21, but once he discovered…
Townsend BellGuest
Paul TracyHost
So, so you, you and I, over the years, I mean, you and I sit and talk a lot about, uh, the direction of IndyCar.
But now that I've seen real life pictures of it, I think the car has kind of grown on me.
It looks okay, but What's your opinion? How do you feel? Is this car going to go 236 at Indy? Can you push that car with 700 horsepower, 236? I
Just talking about the aesthetics for a second, what I love about open-wheel race cars or race cars of any kind is when form follows function.
You start with an exercise, which is how do we build the fastest thing we can within this set of parameters? And then that's what it ends up looking like.
So I'm never really crazy about exercises that start with what do we think it should look like and then how do we make it fast? I kind of prefer the opposite.
like to see it in person because the real pictures that I've seen, it looks better in the pictures than, like I said, than AI.
But, you know, everybody that I've heard say it's physically, it's big, it's wide, it's mean, it's mean lucky.
But, you know, when you get big and wide, I mean, you're pushing a lot through the air.
And I know what it took back in the days to go 245 miles an hour down the straightaway at Indianapolis.
And let's not forget that the air is dumb, right? When the air sees an open-wheel IndyCar coming at it, all it sees is this block.
And it takes a certain amount of horsepower, depending on how much that block weighs, to push it.
So, so you, you and I, over the years, I mean, you and I sit and talk a lot about, uh, the direction of IndyCar.
But now that I've seen real life pictures of it, I think the car has kind of grown on me.
It looks okay, but What's your opinion? How do you feel? Is this car going to go 236 at Indy? Can you push that car with 700 horsepower, 236? I
Just talking about the aesthetics for a second, what I love about open-wheel race cars or race cars of any kind is when form follows function.
You start with an exercise, which is how do we build the fastest thing we can within this set of parameters? And then that's what it ends up looking like.
So I'm never really crazy about exercises that start with what do we think it should look like and then how do we make it fast? I kind of prefer the opposite.
like to see it in person because the real pictures that I've seen, it looks better in the pictures than, like I said, than AI.
But, you know, everybody that I've heard say it's physically, it's big, it's wide, it's mean, it's mean lucky.
But, you know, when you get big and wide, I mean, you're pushing a lot through the air.
And I know what it took back in the days to go 245 miles an hour down the straightaway at Indianapolis.
And let's not forget that the air is dumb, right? When the air sees an open-wheel IndyCar coming at it, all it sees is this block.
And it takes a certain amount of horsepower, depending on how much that block weighs, to push it.
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