In his latest column for Motorsport.com, the four-time IndyCar champ discusses pleasures and frustrations on both sides of the Atlantic.
My last column was between Grand Prix of Indy and the Indy 500 and a lot has happened since then. It’s been a crazily busy six weeks. But I got my first experience at Le Mans, we got a good result, and although we’ve had some hurdles thrown in our path, we’ve still got strong hopes for the IndyCar championship.
In the Indy 500, we were never quite frontrunners through practice and qualifying and in the race it was pretty much the same. I don’t think we had the straight-up pace to compete at the front. We hovered all day in the sixth through 10th area, although definitely the situation wasn’t helped by me smacking the wall pretty hard. But in terms of speed and mileage, I don’t think we would have had enough for the top three. We’d have had to make another splash of fuel like Carlos Munoz and Josef Newgarden and as we saw, that wasn’t how to win the race this year.
From there we had the double-header at Detroit, and in a way that was more frustrating because the Target car was strong all weekend but we left there with one fifth place from two races.
In Race 1 we proved our pace and had we not had the fire, I would have been fighting with Bourdais for the win, I’m pretty certain. Race 2 was a chance to get one back but instead we got sideswiped by Helio [Castroneves], it damaged the car, and so I spent the day fighting strange handling.
I was pissed at Helio afterwards because he said, “I didn’t know anyone was there.” I’m like, “Dude, it’s a two-by-two formation, where did you think I was going to be? It’s common sense.” He gave my car a good hard whack which bent the front right suspension so I felt he should have gotten a penalty which he didn’t and then I think Montoya should have also been issued a penalty when he ran into me later in the race and punctured my tire. I don’t know how I could have made any more room for him at the corner he was trying to pass. And he actually hit me after the corner.
The bent suspension affects your handling, your braking your tire wear and therefore your ability to save fuel – just a massive knock-on effect. Fifth was OK in the circumstances but before the damage, we’d had a car capable of winning.
Perplexed by Texas
At Texas Motor Speedway, we missed on balance by quite a lot, but by the time we pitted for the first time, we’d managed to make it up to third. I’d moved the weightjacker around and tuned the car better for the conditions, so I think we were going to be OK.
There’s nothing the track organizers could really do about Mother Nature. It had been so rainy even before race weekend that it wasn’t going to take much to create weepers; the water table was so high.
But I still don’t understand why we’re going back with 70 laps in the book. I think we should be starting again. To spend all that money to go for what’s gonna be just a little more than an hour-long race seems strange. In unusual situations like that, I think we should be helping the promoter’s chance of success by putting on a full race. Build it up, give the fans a whole race to watch – especially considering the last 30 laps of what they’ve seen already were run under yellow because of the big shunt.
On that subject, Josef Newgarden’s accident at Texas has put some focus on safety because his rollhoop broke. But to be honest, I thought the car held up pretty damn good considering the strange angle it went in, and I’m honestly not sure what kind of device could have held up in those circumstances.
But I haven’t seen anything from IndyCar recently on how things are progressing with overhead cockpit protection, and what might be added to the cars or when. I see Formula 1 making progress with this Halo device – the Ferrari has been on track with the new version of the Halo and the debate over halos and aeroscreens has kept that subject in the spotlight, over in Europe. I’m not sure if IndyCar is in contact with the FIA about it but we should be considering it. As well as the damage to Josef’s car, if you at how much debris myself, Tony [Kanaan] and a couple of others ran into, it was pretty crazy, so there’s that danger.
Le Mans magic
From a rainy Texas, we headed to a rainy Le Mans – my first time there – to race in one of Chip’s four Ford GTs. It was a great honor to be competing 50 years after my fellow New Zealanders Chris Amon and Bruce McLaren won there in the Ford GT40.
And I can tell you that Le Mans is so spectacular, I very quickly understood what everyone talks about. It’s got the same awesome feel as the Indy 500, the atmosphere, the way the crowd turns it into an unforgettable event… The parade was crazy – I’ve never witnessed anything like that in terms of the amount of people. A lot of them were fairly intoxicated I think, which added a new dimension to it. Absolutely nuts.
In terms of the race, to my eyes it’s more of a manufacturer battle than a team-to-team battle, and so there’s always discussion about the Balance of Performance calculations. That’s something I’d seen a bit before in IMSA, but over there, with a new program like the Ford GT, that side of things is magnified.
But anyway that was out of my control. I had to focus on my job. Everything was new to me – the track, things like practice starting at 5pm and running to midnight, three qualifying sessions, the longest track I’ve ever raced on and learning how it can change so much. As you’d guess,
I didn’t want to be the person hurting the program by being the Le Mans rookie, so my biggest focus was to hit the ground running and learn everything as soon as possible, and help give my teammates and full-time Ford drivers Ryan Briscoe and Richard Westbrook the best shot of winning. In that new situation for me, it was especially good to have one major thing on my side, which was familiarity with the Ganassi team. A lot of those guys on the Le Mans team I’ve worked with over the past 15 years, either in IndyCar or the sportscar programs.
We all did a good job on the #66 car, the car really had no faults and it was just strategy and the three-pacecar system that saw us get split from our teammates’ Ford in the middle of the night which cost us about 90sec. Then when we did the brake change that cost us another minute more than it should have.
But we had good pace and without those hold-ups, should have had a good race with our teammates in #68 who ended up winning. Even when we broke a front rollbar after the first three hours, once we got the front tires pumped up enough to stop the car getting even more loose, the speed came back up and we had good laptimes. So we got third place, and our teammates won. A great result for Ford, for Chip and the whole team. Given the history of why the Ford GT40 was created, it seemed appropriate that we spent the whole race battling Ferrari…
New experiences
Looking back on it, apart from the parade, there are a few things that you really notice as a rookie at Le Mans, things that I guess the experienced guys are used to. For example, you can get yourselves into really awkward moments over your stint because as a GTE Pro class, your car is just a little bit faster than GTE Am, but you’re about the same top speed as the LMP2s and you can even brake as late as a lot of them. The P1s are fine, because they’re so much faster everywhere so they’re never holding you up. But the other classes can get you tangled up and hurt your lap times. So you have to be strategic about where you go for passing maneuvers if you don’t want to lose time to your rivals in GTE Pro.
Another thing that amazed me was the P1 cars’ lights are bright though: when they flash that they want to come through, you can’t see anything much because of the white light in the cockpit reflecting off everything.
It’s also weird that even with 55 cars out there, because it’s such a long lap and not lit at all, there are times when you can feel like you’re all alone out there. Daytona is a completely different thing because it’s only three-and-a-half miles and 70 cars so it’s a complete mess the whole time; you’re alwayslapping someone. But at Le Mans you can be on the two-mile Mulsanne straight (divided by two chicanes) and you don’t see anybody – no lights, nothing. So you feel like you’re traveling 170mph up some country road in the middle of nowhere. Coming from IndyCar, it feels strange to have those eerily quiet moments in the middle of a race.
Anyway, I think you can tell I loved it and I want to do it again. I think I’m doing Petit Le Mans again this year at Road Atlanta; that’ll be my next time back in the Ford, and then next year I’d like to hope it’ll be Daytona, Sebring, Le Mans and Petit. Doing sportscar racing is a great “extra” to your regular job when you’re on Chip’s team. It’s a lot of fun but with a deadly serious purpose.
Road America frustration
Back we came to America and the day after passing the checkered flag at Le Mans, we were testing at Watkins Glen. It was fantastic, and I think it will be a great race, but let’s save that for the next column.
Road America was frustrating, no question about it. We blew the exhaust manifold on raceday but I don’t know what was the culprit. It was the Chevy engine that had done Detroit, Texas and the Glen test so it was nowhere near the end of its life.
In qualifying segment 1, Group 2 got lucky as they were on their out lap when the red flag came out so no one had to use their second set of red tires. Will [Power] used his for Q3, and I don’t know why others didn’t. And then I messed up the last two corners on my first flying lap which turned out to be our only flying lap.
On the second run, my teammate TK had an electrical issue, which backed up Pagenaud into me, and backed me up into Will. So our first flyer had to stand, but that still gave us second on the grid. But it’s so stupid considering how big that lap is at Road America, and how there’s only six of us in that final segment of qualifying, and yet we still end up fighting for the same piece of real estate, so close together that we all trip each other up! We all need to learn from that, I think.
Will’s pace in the race wasn’t all that spectacular, although whether he was doing just enough for the win, I don’t know. Later on, both Tony and Simon Pagenaud were faster. So do I regard the race as one that got away for the #9 team? Well, when you retire just a few laps into the race, it’s easy to say, ‘Oh yeah, we would have won that.’ That’s not really our style within the team. All I can say is that we do feel we had the speed where we would have been fighting for the win.
Championship hopes still alive
We may have slipped to fourth in the championship, 90 points from the lead with seven races to go, but the mood in the team is that this is still very much open. And we’ve come from 90 behind to win the championship before [2013], although that was with nine races to go. How things go for us is somewhat defined by what the competition does. It’s going to be tough but we’ve all come to expect that.
This weekend at Iowa, I think we will be quick. We’ve had pretty good baseline setups there in the past and the #10 Ganassi team has had wins. Our #9 team hasn’t yet done that but that’s because we’ve had weird things going on – steering column seizes, engines blow, a broken CV joint, loose seatbelts… I think if we can just finish the race, we’ll finish well.
We didn’t test there this past week along with everyone else, but we tested there a couple of months earlier. But it sounds like the track changed in time for this last test and then I think the organizers are working on it again in the run-up to the race. So I don’t know what we’ll find.
But our team is strong at getting our heads around things over the course of a race weekend.
Whatever, we’ll bring our A game. These next couple of races are defining, I think, in terms of whether we can really gun for our fifth championship.
Hope to see you all soon, and thanks for reading.
Scott Dixon
