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den 21 juni 2003
Catching up
Dear friends,
Pikes Peak was a low water mark for us. The track is certainly different from others in that it’s about 1 mile located at high altitude. This means that down force and track temperatures are quite different from other normal elevation tracks and for us, without any previous testing we failed to get a handle on the set up of the car. We finished 7th. Although the result was bad it could have been worse, as even some experienced teams and drivers failed worse that we did. Had this not happened we would not even have been in the top 10.
The result dropped us a little in the overall standings, although the closeness in the championship is extreme. Tony Kanaan is out front by 50 points over second place, which is equivalent to one victory. Then we are in 6th position, but only 6 points out of second place!
This year we have been lucky in that we have finished every race while others have had incidents. But unless some of the others keep “being incidents” it is clear that we need to pick up speed or else we cannot keep the championship hopes alive. The challenges we are facing are that we are going to, for the team, new tracks all the time, which we do not have any previous data points from.
That means we have to learn everything from scratch and very fast. Sometimes we manage to hit it good, like Japan, Texas and Indy, but sometimes we don’t.
To be really competitive we need to hit it every time. I am confident that we will get to where we need to be as we are learning every day about the car, but as always in racing, you have never enough time on your clock, except when measuring your lap time…
The season is very busy right now, with races nearly every weekend until end of August. In between we are testing as much as we can to try to improve ourselves.
This week we’ve been to Kansas City and Kentucky Speedway.
The team, nor I have been to any of those tracks before. The two are pretty similar except Kansas City is really smooth and Kentucky Speedway is one of the bumpiest tracks I’ve driven on so they require totally different set ups. They are 1.5 mile super speedways where we reach average speeds around 220 mph and I am sure there will be good racing on these tracks as they allow for side by side racing, similar to Texas Motorspeedway.
It was a very god tests for us and we collected a lot of data and made some good technical improvements.
The next race we are going to is in Richmond, Virginia next weekend. That’s quite a different track, only 0.75 mile long. I’ve never raced there, but I suspect the race will be very intense as the time you spend on the straights hardly is enough to even check the dashboard. For sure a track like that will require a lot from the car so I hope we will benefit from the test we did there earlier this year.
We are also going to do another big concert there. This time we are opening up for a band called “3 doors down”. They are a big rock band that has had a lot of hits and perhaps they are even slightly more popular than “Kenny Brack & the Subwoofers”. Well now, only just J.
Jokes aside, we are expecting about 10.000 people again so I think I will spend a couple of hours in my basement practicing my riffs not to make them disappointed.
This weekend we have off though and I am at home in Columbus trying to catch up on a lot of stuff.
Can’t help but think of Sweden right now and all my friends.
It’s mid-summer day in Sweden today and that means party! Tonight there will be partying going on in Glava at Hillringsbergs Folkpark. This is an outside arena where people go to dance and drink suspicious fluids and maybe do other things too, should they get an opportunity. Although the park is open a few weekends each year nothing compares to the midsummer party.
Talk to you soon folks!
Kenny
kennybrack.com
KB
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