« Back
den 29 maj 2003
May - exciting as always
Dear friends,
Once again the month of May is over. I am a little heartbroken as I had my hopes up for a good result as we executed our program well and without any big problems all month. The team worked really well and the best thing I think, is that we are having fun together while we’re doing it. Otherwise this stretch can be quite a challenge. We qualified well at an average speed at 229.5 mph, which was good enough for 6th place and outside second row. Beforehand I felt we were good for perhaps a little bit better but the conditions during Qualifying Day were very special to say the least. Gust winds of up to 40 mph and you can imagine what that does to the car. I would describe Qualifying at Indy as the most mentally challenging task you can do in motor racing during normal weather conditions. When you turn into turn 1 on that first flying lap at about 240 mph with cold tires and not really knowing whether the car will stick to the road surface and knowing you have to keep the throttle flat or your whole run will be destroyed, is like opening the door to a public rest room. You never know what you will find….
The wind did not make it any easier and the car was blowing about back and forth on the track but somehow we managed to keep it between the walls during the 4 lap run. A lot of cars pulled out of qualifying line to try to wait for the weather to calm down a bit but we did not want to gamble as rain was in the air so we ran our run. One that did just that was Helio Castroneves and later in the day he put in a 4-lap average at nearly 232 mph, which I was absolutely stunned at. Nobody had run such a speed on their own. Anyway my hat’s off to them. For us it was a good feeling after about 7 days of running to stick it in the show in a good position because at Indy anything can happen and you are not sure to be in the race until you actually have a starting position.
The week after Jimmy Vasser joined us and we worked together on the race set up. It was nice to have a team-mate, as you can go forward with set up changes so much faster. One car can do a sweep on lets say shock settings while the other work on springs. Of course it only works if both drivers are experienced and Jimmy certainly is .He qualified on bump day and got stuck in the ninth row. His speed was good for a little further up the grid had he qualified the same day as us but the rules at Indy are a little special. Anyway qualifying is not all together that important in this type of racing.
We were fastest on Carb Day, which is the last test before the race and we felt we had a very good race set up but in the race it took us only 17 laps to find out we were not going to win.
The start went well, although Castroneves took off about 900 feet to early, which spread the field out unnecessarily, and we moved up to 5th position on the first lap. Then moved up to 3rd during the first yellow and we ran there until we decided to pit. As soon as I turned into the pit box the engine died. It did not want to run in idle speed and with no idle speed it is very difficult to control the engine revs and with a high 1st gear you got to have pretty low revs when selecting the gear. Now of course the revs were much too high and in the second stop the gear broke. Thereafter we started in second gear but also this gear broke after a while and we had to change the gearbox. Normally we would not have continued running as we were several laps down but the rules gives points to the first 20 cars so we kept running, in hope to pick up a few positions. In the end we finished 16th and hopefully those points will buy us something in the end of the year. I do not know if we would have had the speed to win but at the halfway point we set the fastest lap of the race, which was good enough for 4th fastest overall so the car definitely was running good. But as always “the race is not always won by the swift but the one who keeps running”. So too this time, but the Penske cars were very fast so I suspect you had to be both swift and be able to keep on running.
Jimmy retired from the race with a blown gear box too.
Certainly it was very disappointing for the whole team to finish in such a way after otherwise such a successful month. What makes it worse I think is all the time you spend there working. Normally you spend 3 days at the racetrack and if you have a problem, well you get on with it and go to the next race. But at Indy you spend so much time and there’s so much anticipation and afterwards you feel absolutely drained. I guess that’s why it feels extra hard not to get a good result.
For me though I feel good about our team, it’s a dedicated bunch with a loot of fighting spirit so I am sure we’ll come back strong.
Apart of the racing there was a lot of other things that was a lot of fun during the month. I met Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top. Turned out he is a real car nut so we spent some time in the garage going over some technical stuff and since we did not run the next day we were invited to their concert that same evening. It was a lot of fun, I have only been to one other concert in my life and that was Rod Stewart in Stockholm 1989 where they had to carry two women out on stretchers after they fainted when he opened his shirt up.
I did not se any fainted women this time but nevertheless the show was very good and back stage I got a few guitar tips afterwards which I will work on for the future.
Turns out they are going to Sunne, Sweden in July. That’s only about 45 miles from where I grew up. I told him Sunne should fit well into their tour, which is called “Beerdrinkers & Hellraisers”, as there are plenty of those there!
My band “Kenny Brack and the Subwoofers” also played a concert, on Carb Day on the infield of the Indianapolis track. It was a lot of fun. The guys in the band are really fantastic to play with. It can be hard work to have a band but this just rolls on its own.
We opened up for another group called Cracker. We had an audience of about 10.000 which was more than the main act had and that’s a lot of people too, so we were kind of nervous at first.
I mean that’s a whole lot of rotten tomatoes should the crowd not like what they hear.
Luckily I think they did and the field almost turned into a new “snake pits” (where all the mischief went on before the speedway decided to clean it up a few years ago) for a while. Next concert we will play will be at the next race in 1,5 weeks in Texas.
After Indy I have been home in Columbus but only for 1 day and now I am in Cincinnati airport waiting for a delayed airplane to go to Richmond, Virginia for a test tomorrow. I am not completely recharged after Indy yet but luckily we have this coming weekend off so I will for sure be doing a lot of nothing.
Tuesday next week we are off to Texas. We are staining some of the floors of our house and we have to leave a little bit earlier so we are going to go to Houston to visit A.J. Foyt since we are close to there anyway. It’s always fun to see what he’s up to.
Then we go up to Forth worth on Wednesday where we race Saturday night. That will be some of the closest racing you’ll ever see in car racing. The track is a 1.5-mile track with 24 degrees of banking and speeds close to 225 mph. There will be two and three cars abreast in the corners all night long. It’s breathtaking, and not only for the spectators I can assure you.
I like the night races, they have a special feeling to them and hopefully we will have a good result there and keep our championship points going. We are in 5th position right now and it’s really close!
Talk to you soon,
Kenny
kennybrack.com
KB
| News Menu |
| « Press Releases |
| « Race Reports |
| « Pressreleaser |
| « Övriga artiklar |
| Multimedia |
| « Audio Files |
| « Video Files |
