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den 13 april 2003
Second in Japan
Dear friends,
Sometimes a second place feels like a win and sometimes it feels..well, like second place.
This weekend´s second place feels like second place.
Of course I am being a bit greedy because second place really is a very good result. But the thing is that I feel we should have won the Japanese G.P at Twin Ring Motegi had it not been for a puncture in the first part of the race.
After leading initially we were in third position when about 1/3 into our second fuel stint the tire pressure alarm came on. This catches your attention I can assure you as everybody knows what happens is you get a puncture at the wrong time at 220 mph when driving next to a concrete wall. I kind of noticed and ignored it, reset it and kept my foot on the throttle and was hoping it was a bogus reading. But a lap later the alarm went off again and this time I reported over the radio back to the team that I thought we had a puncture. At the same instance the car started hitting the ground and that confirmed it was not a faulty sensor, it was in fact very much right!
Luckily it was the left front tire that was going down and not any of the outside tires, the bad thing was we had to make a pit stop to change tires, which was going to mess up our race strategy.
Anyway we fixed the tires and leveled off a lap down in 15th place. We kept running as hard as we could. We made up a lot of time in turns 3 and 4 on most cars but lost it all on the straights as we had to have the fuel turned way down. With about 25 laps to go we had finally saved enough so that we were able to turn the fuel up. We passed a bunch of cars immediately then a series of yellow flags came out. Unfortunately some drivers thought it was a demolition derby out there and we simply ran out of laps in the end as the race ended under yellow. In my opinion all we needed was another restart and a couple of laps of green as to win the race. But it was not to be. For us it would have been a great honor to win Hondas first Motegi victory and a good follow up to our victory here in 2001. But we will try again next year.
Scott Sharp drove a good race to win and Felipe Giaffone finished third.
As you can imagine I feel good about the weekend, as we have made huge strides forward in understanding the car. I am not saying we know everything yet, far from it, but we have proved that we can make the car fast and we have a defined plan on how to improve even further. The guys in the team also did a very good job and we had awesome pit stops. I know that it has taken us a couple of races but from now on I am confident we will be competitive most places.
It also looks good from a championship point of view. We are in 4th place, 17 points behind Sharp who leads. The winner gets 50 points in the IndyCar series so you do the math. Its really close.
Tomorrow the Japan trip is over for this time and apart from racing it´s also been a fantastic time here. The fans have been so fun and supportive it feels sad to leave.
I´ve met the "Super Fan" Taiko who carries the Swedish flag and all kinds of Brack apparel (that even I did not know even existed), I´ve met the sweet girl that has learned Swedish just to be able to carry a conversation during this particular weekend (I hope she will have some more use for it as it must be very hard for a Japanese to learn this language) and I´ve seem Emi who follows every race, and on top of it I have a suitcase full of presents I´ve been given, with everything from Kimonos to CD´s, cookies and teddy bears in it. As you can imagine, to race in Japan is very special.
The next race will also be very special. That´s the Indy 500, which we are going to start testing for in one week´s time. We will have plenty of time to test during May but we want to get some previous data to look at before we come back and start preparing for the actual race beginning of May.
Before coming to Japan, Anita and I stopped in Hawaii for a week´s vacation. We´ve been there once before, in Maui, so this time we went to Honolulu and Waikiki Beach. It was very nice (although I would recommend Maui for anyone who´s over 20 years of age). We were so tired after having been flat out since September -02 with changing teams, moving, testing and racing that apart from working out every day we slept, ate and read books most of the time. It was nice weather and now I feel like a brand new Energizer battery again!
Now I am going to bed as I am getting up at 04.30 to catch a car to Narita Airport tomorrow.
All the best,
Kenny
kennybrack.com
KB
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