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Phoenix
 A
Tough Day at a Tough Track
Phoenix is one of the toughest tracks on the Indy Racing League
IndyCar Series circuit. I have won there (four times) and I have
crashed there (enough) to know just how tough.
And now so does A.J. IV.
But both cars came home with little damage which is more than many
teams could say. There were a lot of accidents. Shigeaki Hattori
finished 10th in a brand new Epson/Dallara and my grandson was 18th in
the Conseco/Dallara despite completing only 64 laps. By the time I got
out of Phoenix, I was feeling pretty good.
A.J. IV was not feeling quite so good though. He struggled to find the
right line around the track the whole weekend. We both got frustrated.
At some points, I thought he had it figured out because he looked good
in the Conseco Dallara, but on race morning he was hunting all over
again. One big reason was that we had some track conditions he wasn't
used to, namely excess rubber on the track which wasn't there in our
testing sessions.
Where did that rubber come from? From the cars I used to love to
drive.
The Copper World Series has been at Phoenix for years but it wasn't
until two years ago that the Indy cars became a part of it. It's a lot
of racing packed into two days. PIR hosts two USAC series besides the
IRL and the Infiniti Pro Series.
The USAC midgets and Silver Crown cars (or championship dirt cars for
old-timers like me) put on a heckuva show and I really enjoy watching
those races but, they use a different tire manufacturer. Their tire
rubber (that gets laid down on the track during a race or practice)
doesn't work well with our Firestone rubber. That makes for a very
slippery race track.
A.J. IV never got really comfortable with the car or the track. To
compound the compound troubles, when you get out of the groove, you
pick up the marbles of rubber (from other cars) on your tires.
Technically you're not running on your own rubber until you clean your
tires off. Rookies (and some vets) have a hard time telling whether
it's the excess rubber or the car's chassis set-up that's making the
car feel so bad. So you spend a lot of time chasing your tail.
On Sunday though, even the veterans (and some past champions) were
having trouble keeping their cars off the walls -- six of the 10
cautions were for accidents.
A.J. IV was involved in one of the accidents when Sam Hornish was
lapping him on the outside through turns three and four. Hornish cut
it too close and caught A.J.'s right front wheel which sent Hornish
spinning into the wall backwards. Hornish was done and A.J. might as
well have been.
He pitted, my Conseco crew changed his tires and inspected the car as
best they could in 15 seconds. On the restart, the car would hardly
turn at all. A.J. tried to deal with it but I told him to pit again,
we gave him another set of tires (in case the tire stagger was off or
reversed) but that didn't make a difference. I told him to park it.
When we got it back to the garage, we found the front end was badly
misaligned because of a bent heim joint which we couldn't see at first
because of its location. If A.J. had more experience he might have
been able to deal with it, but with the veterans getting into trouble,
it didn't make sense to keep him out there with a car not up to par.
Hattori did a great job to finish 10th after starting 18th. It was his
first time in the Epson/Dallara (he ran a G-Force chassis at Miami),
so he used Friday and Saturday as test sessions.
He got down a lap and Craig Baranouski, my team manager who was
calling Hattori's race, made a couple attempts to put Hattori in a
different fuel window to give him a chance to get his lap back.
Unfortunately, the cautions didn't play into our strategy like we
hoped. Still, I was very happy with Shige's performance. During one
stint, he ran over 30 laps between second and third place. I thought
he might unlap himself on the track but that didn't work out either.
Tony Kanaan won the race, pulling away on a restart from Helio
Castroneves with just three laps to go. Ironically, Kanaan's and
Castroneves' teammates – Michael Andretti and Gil deFerran--were the
reason for the yellow flag and subsequent restart. With 13 laps to go,
they tangled going into one and the impact sent them both into the
wall hard. It looked really bad but Andretti walked away. According to
the reports put out by the IRL, DeFerran sustained a minor fracture in
his lower back.
This track is tough on rookies but even the veterans don't have it
totally figured out. It was a tough day for rookies and vets alike. |
