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den 12 juli 2003
Gifts from above
Dear friends,
Some talk about bad luck when they are not winning but its also possible viewing it for a different perspective.
In the last two events we’ve been blessed with good luck, although this has not meant winning for us. In Richmond we picked up a puncture and would have had to do an unscheduled pit stop and lost many positions, had it not been for the fact that the skies opened up and the race ended under yellow.
The last race in Kansas City proved to be another lucky race for us. After being the slowest car on track for most of the race we used a very smart pit strategy and to help us further we got the car to run decent enough in the last stint not to lose track position. But had anybody said to me that we were going to get 5th when we tried to hold on in the beginning of the race, I probably would have escorted him or her to the “loony”-house. That result was truly a “gift from above”. So my point is we have been very lucky lately. Now I only hope our luck does not run out until we get a hold on what we need to do to get real competitive on track!
What’s positive is that we are still in 5th position in the championship but it’s no secret we have been struggling to find speed at quite a few of the tracks we’ve been to. This “full throttle, no difficulty racing” as many used to refer to when talking about IndyCar has proven to be quite the opposite for us. It is exactly the opposite, extremely difficult and so far proven to be one of the most difficult things we’ve ever done. The difference between hero and zero is for the most part a few hundreds of a second away since it is so many cars that are competitive.
A few hundreds of a second is nothing in the real world we are all living in, but step inside the racetrack and I guarantee you, it takes on a whole different meaning! Frustrating might be an understatement….
However one thing that is good about Team Rahal is that we are all doing what we need to do, keeping our mind in the game, focusing on the challenges and pushing forward as a team to solve them.
I am convinced that we will get to the bottom of the secret how to be competitive even in this series, I only hope it will be sooner rather than later (!) because we still have a chance to win the championship
I am sure you wonder why it is so hard and what it depends on. Well, so do we, otherwise we would have fixed it.
Part of the reason is that we as a group are completely new to the formula. We do not have any personnel that have been doing IndyCar in the past in our team. This in turn means that we have no previous track or car set up data from any of the tracks we go to. We collect this as we test and race.
Another reason is that we are a one-car team and compared to a multi car team we have no way of collecting the data needed as fast. In a two or three car team they need to do one run with their cars whereas we need two or three runs to get the same data.
I am not going to use this as excuses though, because I consider our team one of the most capable still, which the championship standings back up, only four cars are in front of us and all are from multi car teams.
We’ve done the obvious things right and have maximized our results and nobody, including ourselves, have yet seen our best stuff.
Next race is Nashville the 19th of July and we just finished a full day of testing there.
The Nashville track is a 1.3 mile track with speeds over 200 mph (320 kmh) and is made out of concrete. Concrete surface means it’s a little bit rougher than an asphalt track but with the positive effect that grip level stays pretty much consistent, no matter temperature. The race will start at 8 p.m. Eastern time, which means it’s a night race.
As the track is only 6 hours away by car I drove there. After we got done testing at 9 p.m. I drove back to Columbus and I went through one of the worst thunderstorms I’ve seen. For about 4 hours straight there was lightning so severe that it looked like something out of a horror movie. The whole landscape lit up in the middle of the night. It was like being in the middle of a stroboscope light show, like they have in discos when you only see part of the peoples movement because of fast pulsing light. That’s how the windscreen wipers when they went back and forth on the windscreen looked like.
I had more aquaplaning than I’ve had in a long time!
Yesterday, I went to Indy for band rehearsal. We are putting a couple of new songs to our repertoire for our next show in Nashville. This show will be the basis of our recording, which in August will be released on a CD for charity. I am very exited about this as it will be my first recording. We also are going to have the first celebrity musician of the year sit in with us on a couple of songs.
It’s Ed King, formerly guitarist for rock and roll icons “Lynerd Skynerd”. Ed is also famous for writing the song “Sweet Home Alabama” which I am sure many of you have heard. I am very much looking forward to this too.
But most of all I hope we will be competitive on the Nashville Superspeedway!
Now I am off to a weekend off, the first in a long time. I will spend it doing some yard work since the thunderstorms ripped off several branches of our trees. The biggest one landed in the swimming pool.
It’s such a hassle when you have to use a chain saw to be able to make your exercise laps J
Talk to you soon,
Kenny
kennybrack.com
KB
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