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den 17 maj 2004
Indy qualifications
Dear friends,
I just got back from spending a week in the racing capital of the world, Indianapolis.
The 2004 Indy 500 has started with all preparations and it has been going very well for Rahal Letterman Racing. The team has three cars competing at Indy. The Pioneer/Argent car is on the Pole with driver Buddy Rice. The second car is 7th with Vitor Meira as the pilot and the third car qualified 12th with Roger Yasukawa driving and my “old” engineer Don Halliday doing the set up. I am very happy that everything has gone so well for the team and the drivers.
Although Indy is always a challenge no matter what, running three cars instead of one is a good advantage as drivers can split up the testing so that one is doing qualification runs while others do race set up and other stuff. You get a lot more stuff done in the same time frame that way. The other thing that I think we have going for us is that the Honda engine is absolutely great. I think the result speaks for itself: 7 Honda powered cars in the seven first spots of the grid! Not only did Honda dominate the race in Japan last month that they so many years have tried to win, they also managed, at the same time, to develop the new configuration engine for the rest of the season, going from 3.5 liter to 3 liter cylinder volume.
Our chassis, G-Force, have also been great. As some of you may know not only the engine size have been reduced to 3 liter from 3.5 but there are also new aero rules beginning with Indy. The middle underbody of the car is “rounded” longitudinally, kind of like an upside down airplane wing, to prevent the cars from lifting off the ground if they get sideways at high speeds. This also means that the ride height is a lot higher than before to accommodate room for this rounded underbody shape but the G-force chassis seems to work well with this new addition.
The team is trying to use all recourses they have and since I’ve been racing at Indy many times and won it, my role during this month have been to try to help the drivers and engineers with whatever information I can.
The most important thing is, I think, the relationship between the driver and the engineer so it’s very important not to alter this in any way. Therefore I have been trying to enhance that by adding additional information, perhaps you could say from another “point of view”. I’ve been out on the track to compare us to others, weather related issues, helped the drivers sort out the most important things to focus on, added some confidence to a particular set up changes etc. All our drivers are very good so I am sure they could have done just about the same job but it’s worked very well for everybody.
There are a lot of circumstances to be able to get the Pole here, not only technically speaking, but also weather related aspects such as wind, temperature etc. In short you have to have everything working in your favor. From a driver’s perspective, to balance the car during those four laps at extreme speeds is probably the most difficult task a driver ever will take on. Buddy Rice and Rahal Letterman Racing had all components this year and they made the most out of them. Job well done!
Next week we start race preparations.
Personally I am trying to sort out everything so that I will be ready to test after Indy. We have an “internal” plan for this but there are still some components that will have to be sorted out. For example making a seat to the car, going through the driver physical test, and also of course the team needs to have some equipment left after the Indy 500 in the end of May so I hope the race goes as well as the qualifications!
Apart from this I am also focusing on the concert we are doing in Indianapolis the 27th of May when we are opening up for Blues Traveler. We rehearse every Tuesday and it’s coming together nicely. This year we are also adding a couple of our own songs that we wrote during the winter to the cover stuff we are doing. I was also hoping to have Bryan Herta sing with us but I am not sure how this is going to pan out now since he crashed pretty heavily during qualifications. He seems to be OK from the incident but perhaps it put them behind in some ways that will make it difficult for him.
Speaking of music, yesterday I met, at the track, the rock group REO Speedwagon. They were sort of “childhood heroes” when I grew up in Sweden, with many world-wide hits to their record. They still are touring, 34 years straight!
Karma has also been introduced to racing, and what better race to attend to as the first race than The Indy 500! She did not like the first car travel between Columbus and Indy but now she’s already gotten used to it.
Talk to you soon,
Kenny Brack
kennybrack.com
KB
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