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den 26 mars 2003
An eventful weekend
Dear friends,
I am sitting on an airplane on my way from Long Beach California to Columbus.
Yesterday we raced in Phoenix and finished 5th. My personal goal before the weekend was to be able to finish in the top 5-6 so that's all good and fine. But the saying "Own luck is good, but other's misfortunes are not so bad either" was certainly the name of the game for us in Phoenix. Anyway, for me personally it was a good result, considering this was my first finish there in 5 tries.
But it certainly was an eventful affair to say the least.
Since Homestead we've been testing twice, once at Phoenix and once at Fontana, to try to refine our package and we have made some progress, especially in qualification mode.
This time we were the team to beat in pretty much all practice sessions on Friday and Saturday finishing 1st , 2nd and 1st.
This, despite only running a few laps in qualifying simulation in each session, in favor for testing most of the time in race trim.
We qualified 6th which at the time was a little disappointing since we had been so fast earlier.
Of course you get a little greedy when things start off the way they did for us but when considering
"pre-weekend" goal I think, at least for me, we were right on target. The reason for us slipping down somewhat I think, was that the track conditions got better and better as we qualified in the early part of the session as other cars had been on the track before us with other tires. Having said this it is so close that it really is anybody's shot to sit on pole. Had we been 4 hundreds of a second (!) faster we would have been 4th and 2 tenth would have been pole.
The race itself was as usual quite exciting. I think I now know how Luke Skywalker must feel like when he's in one of those dogfights in Star Wars, ducking and diving with debris flying everywhere around him.
It started with De Ferran who spun right in front of us out of turn 2. I never know how he got out of that one in one piece, all I know is that I instinctively ducked down to the left just enough not to t-bone him. We did touch though and it broke off a piece of our front wing end plate.
A few laps later Michael Andretti and Jaques Lazier banged wheels right in front of me, then Schekter and somebody tangled, and a few laps from the end Andretti and De Ferran crashed together sending both into the wall hard in a cloud of smoke and debris. I am not sure I've seen as much action in one race in my whole career before. Luckily nobody got seriously injured.
For us the race was tough.
First I brushed, Mike, one of my crew guys in the first pit stop. There was a bump leading into our pit-box and I locked up my brakes over it and skidded a little too much to the left before releasing the break steering into the box. To tell you a little bit how tough he is, he still finished his wheel change before getting rushed off to hospital.I feel bad about causing him a lot of pain but luckily he did not break his leg or anything.
Then, despite having focused quite a lot on our race set up, our car was not handling as good as we had anticipated. It had a big push (under steer).
In this series you need to be able to drive both a high and a low line in order to make it through traffic and be able to protect your position and because of the push we could not do that. Mostly I had to stay on the bottom of the racetrack to be able to keep any kind of speed through the corners.
Therefore cars took shots at us on the high side, many times managing to make the move. That's the beauty about this series, you can pass if you're faster, but for us it was obviously not good this weekend. We were able to make a little forward headway on our own in restarts and in lapped traffic but for the most part we had to fight hard to keep cars behind us.
It is safe to say we still have some work to do to understand this car. But I believe that it is not a whole lot that we are missing but nonetheless a very important element.
It was Hondas first victory as an engine manufacturer through Tony Kanaan's win. I feel good about that fact because first of all we are very much involved in the development of the engine. Secondly, when I signed up with Team Rahal to drive a Honda powered car a lot of people told me Toyota was going to be the engine to beat because Honda had not had enough time to develop their engine. I think its safe to say that that was not the truth.
Later after the race I left for Long Beach. That's where Pioneer, one of our main sponsors have their head quarters. We had a meeting there this morning to discuss some music plans. Perhaps there will be some exciting stuff happening at the races this summer for all you fans.
Speaking of fans, there were quite a lot of people at the Phoenix oval during the weekend. The race itself was decently attended and clearly another success from a TV standpoint. Overnight numbers showed a rating of 1,5 percent of the total amount of TV watching which is very good, especially when considering all other major U.S sports what was on at the same time.
Next stop is Japan in 3 weeks time. That is a very important race since both Honda and Toyota take great pride in winning in their home country. It's a great facility and the Japanese fans are so into their racing drivers.
It was there I won my first race together with Team Rahal. I promise you we are doing everything we can to fine-tune the car a little bit more so we will be able to challenge for the victory.
Before the Japan race Anita and me are planning a stop halfway in between, Hawaii, to have a 1-week vacation. With all the racing, testing, house hunting, moving etc., if feels like it was ages ago when we just had a few days to do nothing. I am looking forward coming to Japan all revitalized!
Talk to you soon,
Kenny
kennybrack.com
KB
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