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den 29 juli 2003
The Michigan Blues
Dear friends,
It is peculiar; some track just seems to get the better of you. During my career I would have to say that I’ve had good runs on most tracks but Phoenix International Raceway as well as Michigan Speedway are a totally different story.
I have raced there 5 times. 3 in single-seater cars like CART and IndyCars and two times in IROC. The highlight of all those races was a very hard fought third place in an IROC race in 2001.
The other times the results were quite different. Despite being very fast and leading a lot of laps, in three out of three open wheel races I have yet to make it to the checkered flag. Last Sunday was no exception. Still, I like the track, which is a little odd, but perhaps you have to be a bit odd to drive racing cars in the first place…
Michigan Speedway is fast and very challenging to race on as its got several lines you can drive through the corners, which makes for very good racing. Minimized drag and Maximum horsepower is the name of the game here.
For us the weekend started good, as we were second fast in the first practice session.
From there we concentrated mostly on race set up and the team did a good job improving the car quite a lot during Friday afternoon and Saturday morning. For qualifying our car was good and we got the most out of it with a speed of 220.9 mph. This was the fastest lap we set all weekend and it was good enough for and 8th place on the grid.
This result itself may not be anything to write home to mama about, but for us it was an indication that we have made some good progress with our car set up.
For the first time this year, we were the fastest of all the Honda/Dallara cars.
In the race we made a good start and got up to third place within a lap. However when we got up to speed we could not stay there since we did not have the speed the fastest cars had at that point in the race.
We settled in around 6th place together with Little Al and Scott Sharp.
In our first pit stop I got a major surprise when the car all of a sudden stepped sideways when I tried to slow down into the pit box. I managed to gather it up but at the time I was surprised that it happened, since the pit lane has quite a lot of grip at Michigan and we had not had any problems like that previously.
At the first yellow flag the bits started to fall into place why it happened because once again I had my hands full to slow the car down since I had no brakes.
After pumping the pedal a few times I got some braking power and managed to slow down.
Luckily, to drive fast you don’t need a lot of brakes in oval racing!
After having made another pit stop we went back to racing only for the next surprise to come along. When turning into turn 1 a mechanical failure happened on the right front and the car all of a sudden took off straight out towards the wall. I tried everything I knew to save it but I had no steering, nor could I slow it
down much, so it was like having a “fill in role” in someone else’s movie. The impact was hard and once again it was over at Michigan Speedway. I got lucky and got off with a few bruises and a sore neck.
The odds in racing are of course that you will have incidents during a season of hard racing and this represents the first non finish of the year for us so our record is still good, but its always tough when it happens.
Despite the result we still managed to stay in fifth place in the championship and although the distance to the leader increased somewhat. This is in no way out of reach if we can eliminate further hiccups and make the car better. That’s our challenges right now and we must focus on making the best of it because it would not be good if it were to get worse J.
This weekend we have off from racing but we are spending our time until the next race testing. Tomorrow we run at St. Louis and Monday we are at Kentucky Speedway again. We have found some good improvements in the car set up in recent races and we have a good test program lined out so hopefully we are able to further improve it.
Apart from racing, on Friday we are in the studio in Indianapolis laying down the last touch ups on our record that’s scheduled to be released in the middle of August.
Talk to you soon,
Kenny
kennybrack.com
KB
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