Hello my friends. If you're regular readers of these diaries, you'll know that Fridays for Racing have always been a challenge, starting slow as we try to work out what the car needs.

Part of our problem comes from being able to do just a small amount of simulation, when there’s a lot of data we don’t have from last year at certain circuits because Conquest didn’t run there with the Dallara.

And we can’t rely on two-year-old data from the Panoz at places like Toronto and Long Beach, because the window where these Dallaras work at their best is pretty small, so we have to work hard to get it in that window by the time qualifying  comes around on Saturday.

But Conquest raced here last year, so why the problem today? Well, we had the rear ride-height out by a HUGE amount. My race engineer Brandon Fry told me after the session and it came as a big, big relief. We couldn’t work out how we could be 2.5sec off the pace!

This morning wasn’t good either. I made a mistake when I spun and didn’t press the clutch as I rolled backward. I thought I was okay because the engine was off, but apparently it still does damage, so we had to have an engine change. Then we had an oil leak in the gearbox.

And then of course fighting the issue with the rear of the car being so loose because we were jacked up in the air. We start off making changes by taking front wing out because the front is pinned down. Then we start to lower the rear, lower the rear, just by the normal incremental changes that you normally do. But they lowered it radically and sent me out, thinking I’d come back in and bitch about the bumps, complaining the car is bottoming too bad. And I come back in and the rear skid plate is clean. That’s what tipped off Brandon that there was something severely wrong. He said, “You should be sparking all over the place, and you’re actually still making marks on the front skid plate.”

So now we are far happier than we should be for being 17^th quickest! The negative, of course, is that we adjusted so many other things on the car to compensate for the looseness before we found the big problem, so there are a lot of changes we need to make to change it back. So yet again our Saturday morning is going to be getting back in the window, and fine-tuning when everyone else has fine tuned their cars already.

 I tell you, this really isn’t the sort of circuit where you want a car that’s really loose. It’s so fast, and so bumpy, you go spinning into the grass or hit the wall – but whichever one it is, it will happen so, so fast. I’m proud I’m in the Rexall Edmonton Indy car because it is such a unique track. The first corner is like Turn 1 at Toronto: you exit alongside a wall. Then Turns 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 are like a roadcourse because you have curves and grass. Then Turn 7 is again like a streetcourse corner up against the wall. And then you reach Turn 9 and you’re on a runway. Turn 11 and 12 are up by a wall and suddenly you’re back on a street course again.

 So street course, road course and airport course with high-speed corners like we have in Cleveland. But at the same time it’s bumpy, and I swear they are worse: they need to really grind down the bumps again. But hey, the same for everybody.

I wish our setup had been the same for everybody! But hey, we’ll get it sorted. We always do. And I think top five or top six should possible for tomorrow, I really do. InToronto, we were 17^th on Friday, and 5^th on Saturday and should have won on Sunday.

I’ll speak to you all tomorrow. And hopefully I’ll not just be relieved, like tonight, but I’ll be properly HAPPY!

 Alex

What is it about me? Now I have a new addition for the list of races that I’m leading legitimately, in control, and something completely out of our hands goes wrong. Other Toronto races, Vancouver, Elkhart Lake in 2000, Montreal in 2003.…

We have to be pretty happy with what we achieved with the No. 34 King Tut car. Brandon Fry, my engineer, told me that he’s pretty curious why there are cars – and drivers – out there that had a half a million dollars spent on them, and little Conquest Racing, with not enough money to do half the races, leaves them all behind! Brandon has been so supportive. He’s been saying nice, encouraging things about how well I’ve adapted to the Dallara’s handling, and how quickly I’ve learned to adapt to the Honda normally-aspirated engine in getting the best fuel mileage from it while still going quick enough to run well.

So why am I sitting here in my hotel room on Sunday night, talking about bad luck? Because like in Long Beach back in April we wer e TOO good at tire management, TOO good at saving fuel! How can this be? Because we ran longer than everyone and then the yellows flew…

Let me explain. We got a nice start to be second behind Dario, and were running fast enough to be just at the limit of those softer red-walled Firestones. So while Dario was pushing like mad early on, I was just letting him go, because I knew he couldn’t do that for the whole stint. And sure enough, when I saw him coming back at me fast, I knew his tires had turned to crap and then he had his problem in the pit.

The Conquest Racing team did a good job for me in the pits. So after my pitstop, we get up into the lead on black tires, and again the car was very good, with really good balance, and I could basically do what I wanted with it. The only problem I had on that stint was a piece of tar that got stuck on my tire. At Toronto there is this kind of gooey tar that they put in the cracks in the pavement, and a lump of it was coming up between Turns 5 and 6, and it gave me a vibration that made me feel like I had a flat tire, but when I realized what it was, I just turned the wheel extra hard for a few corners to scrub it off. That cost me three seconds of my six-second lead, but it was no big deal.

And then it all turned upside down for us. Maybe we need to think about strategy being dictated not just by people in front who you thought you were racing, but also those behind. Because just like in Long Beach, we did more with less – we completed more laps, we saved more fuel, we protected our tires better – so we didn’t need to come into the pits as soon as the others, okay? But when the full-course caution flies, the pits are closed, everyone bunches up together, and it’s only then that the pits are open, and we come back out having lost a ton of places to cars that have already stopped.

Okay, does it sound like I’m whining? I hope not, sincerely, because I know a lot of people can say, “Well, no one can predict when the full course caution is gonna fly: you just suffered bad luck.” I understand that sometimes it works for you, sometimes it doesn’t. But there definitely is a way to protect the unlucky ones from being punished so freakin’ hard!

The IndyCar Series should allow everyone that was ahead of the accident to pit. If it happened behind you – like in this case, because Rahal had hit the wall in Turn 3, I think – then we are past the danger zone where we might hit the crashed car or hurt a member of the Safety Team so we should be allowed to come into the pits. It can still be a full-course yellow but with the pits open, so the leaders – in this race it was myself and Scott Dixon – make our pitstop, we come out of the pits, it’s still a full course yellow, but the Pace Car picks us up.

Sure, the pitbox allocation might mean that Dixie still came out ahead of me. Because Conquest is part-time and low in the championship, we have our pitbox at the start of pitlane, so we can get fueled up, but the guys at the exit of pitlane can see you coming from a mile away, and they will send their driver out with just enough fuel to make sure he is in front of you. But at least you have a chance to pass him once the race restarts because the series insisted on the rule about not blocking – and that is something they got absolutely right. It’s a lot better than the pair of us coming out of the pits behind 11 or 12 cars who haven’t been doing anything like as good a job as us.

I just feel all mixed up with my emotions at the moment, because there are a lot of positives that we can take from the weekend. We can look back and say we did everything we could. And what we achieved was more than what many people expected of us. We had a winning package. We turned up, having not turned a wheel since Texas. We had a good car, although like I said in my Saturday article, we didn’t get a chance to show our potential on Friday. But then we had the team and expertise between us to make the car even better, and we showed it on Saturday. And then on Sunday morning warm-up, we tried some setups using the knowledge from qualifying, to find a setup that made our tires last longer. And again we got it right, and in the race we showed enough to be race-winners.

I guess what I’m saying is, we had everything except luck. It’s such a shame that it slipped between our fingers, because we did everything right and we were so basically good, that almost all the little ideas we tried were fine-tuning the car, making it that little bit better each time. It’s such a cool feeling – and the days when that happens, if you’re not Penske or Ganassi, are pretty rare and we need to take advantage of them.

I suppose I must mention the other incident with Scheckter. But he had squeezed me out to the marbles, despite the rules that were insisted on in the drivers briefing about not blocking. He acted like a clown afterward, and said some dumbass things, but I’m not interested at all. When I look back at this race in years to come, I won’t be remembering battling over seventh or eighth place or whatever. Our weekend was shot to hell by that point of the race, anyway.

No, what I will remember is the fact that we should have won. Conquest should have conquered. And I can only hope and pray that we show that form again in Edmonton – and that luck (and yellows) work for us, not against us.

Alex

For Tag's previous columns, [click here]

We’re fifth on the grid, we’re in Toronto – and boy, we’re happy! Sorry I couldn’t get back to you yesterday but it’s been a crazy couple of days with sponsor commitments and events I had to attend. And somewhere in there, I even managed to have a little sleep.

Yesterday the No. 34 King Tut car was decent but we went the day without getting a chance to put on a new set of tires. It disguised our potential. It was hard for us to say, “We had the car to do this. We should have done this,” because no one believes it until it is reality. Until it is 100 percent done, you’re left with question marks and work to do.

I knew, Brandon Fry my race engineer knew, the whole Conquest Racing team knew we left a lot of potential on the table yesterday, but of course until we got onto the track today to prove it, you have a little bit of anxiety. We haven’t been on a street course since Long Beach and you wonder how much other people are developing their cars. In St. Pete and Long Beach, we learned a lot but we knew we had more to come and it wasn’t until yesterday that we could evaluate the type of car we have. And when we did it was good.

So last night we made some changes and we went back on track this morning hoping to see whether those changes were improvements and it rained so hard that we still didn’t know! So then at the start of qualifying, after two laps we thought, okay, this is what we have and it’s pretty decent. From that moment, we knew we could compete and give our rivals a pretty good run.

Looking at the grid and seeing who we’re ahead of…am I surprised? Yes and no. Every time we come to a race, we have the desire to beat these guys. We showed some speed in St. Pete, where we outqualified Scott Dixon. In Long Beach we outqualified Ryan Briscoe and Tony Kanaan. And here, we’ve outqualified Dixon, Castroneves, Briscoe and Kanaan! So with the little amount of time we’re working on improving the setup, we are gaining knowledge but if you miss races, you lose momentum because you’re not constantly working on the car. Our rivals were at Watkins Glen and we weren’t, so we have more momentum to pick up than they do.

So we’re not surprised in one way, because it’s what we always expect and always want, but at the same time, I realize we should be very proud about what we have done to beat so many strong teams and strong drivers. Of course then you start thinking about what we might achieve if we were in the IndyCar Series full-time, and had a big budget… I know [Conquest team owner] Eric Bachelart love to capitalize on the fact that we have what it takes as a team and I have what it takes as a driver.

You’re not happy when you’re at the house watching the races on TV, but it means that when we come in and do what we did as a group, as a team, it makes people realize just what a strong unit we are. I was chatting with my old teammate Will Power about us both being on partial seasons. He was saying, “I’d rather have a partial season with Team Penske than a whole season with another team, because at least I know I’ll have the car to do the job – but I keep accumulating different color race suits!” I told him: “You’re lucky. The disadvantage for me is that I have one race suit but I keep needing to add patches at every race because that’s the money that gets us there. The racesuit is just getting heavier and heavier and I look like a freakin’ Christmas tree!”

Anyway, it feels so good to get here and surprise a lot of people and get in the mix. No matter what we have, no matter that it is a partial season, every time we accomplish something, it is a very big reward for everyone.

So let’s talk about the race tomorrow. All our sets of black tires are new, and we have some scrubbed reds, too. The pavement around Toronto seems very hard on the red tires; that was noticeable right away when we put them on, so we’re going to start on them, and see in the first part of the race how they cope, and then we’ll go to blacks for the next two runs. Then we’ll make a decision for our last run. I think the blacks will be good for us. Most of the rubber on the track was washed away from the rain this morning – and I’m talking thunderstorms and heavy, heavy rain. The more rubber that goes down after that, the more it helps the black tires to be more competitive and last longer and that may be the tire to go for. However, it is in the rules that we must run a set of red, so I think that’s the safest to start the race.

The crowd has been very receptive to me, and I’m very pleased. I’ve seen a lot of faces of friends I haven’t seen since 2007 and a lot of people have brought me gifts and got autographs and stuff like that. It’s very cool. And that has pleased my sponsors like Sears and Craftsman which is good. We hope to keep them on board for a long time. And tomorrow… we hope to give them something to really be happy about!

Wish me luck, friends.

Alex

For Alex's previous columns, [click here]

Friends, I’m back! But I’m sorry if this has to be a shorter blog than normal, because it is Honda Indy Toronto time and I am busy, busy, busy. But no problem – that’s good!

Since I last spoke to you after Texas, I’ve been working on sponsorship, and working on my fitness – I’m really training hard. I’ve traveled a lot, spent quite a lot of time in Montreal making presentations, to potential sponsors, not just for this year but also next year. Got to get started early! It’s work and it’s not as much fun as driving a single-seater at 200mph… but hey, without one, you don’t get the other.

I have a couple of new sponsors here – Sears and Craftsman Tools, and so thank you to my buddies who helped me out with that. We finalized something with King Tut again because of the exhibit happening here in Toronto on 15 November, so they wanted to do something with Sun Media and Canoe. And I’ve been working on the sponsors for Edmonton as well. And…and…. Like I say – busy!

It’s so good to be here in Toronto, and particularly to get back on a street course. You’d think that me and the Conquest Racing team would have four street course setups to go on now – Detroit and Surfers Paradise from last year, and then St Petersburg and Long Beach from this year. But Detroit was more about getting me comfortable in the car and with its handling (in just a couple of sessions, remember!) for my first ever race in a Dallara-Honda. And Surfers is a bit too unique for its setup to be useful in other street races.

So Brandon Fry (my engineer for the No. 34 King Tut/Conquest Racing car) and myself have already done our homework for this, looking at the past, and learning from those races, and working out what we think should work around this track. At Long Beach, the car was good in the race but could have been better for qualifying. We qualified ninth there, and we know we should have been higher. So we’re trying something different here this weekend, and hopefully it’s gonna work out well. If not, we have a couple of backup plans.

Friday is about testing as we try to come up with the best plan for qualifying. The thing is, by not competing at all the races, it is harder for us. As I said in Long Beach, if our car was as good at the start of Friday practice as we are by Sunday morning, then we could achieve great things. At St. Pete we were out to lunch on Friday, and by Saturday we were just 0.05sec from making it into the top six. And then in Long Beach we were start off all out to lunch also, but we end up qualifying ninth, just 0.2 from making it into the Firestone Fast Six. So like I said, it’s catch-up all the time.

But we never stop trying – that’s the great thing about Conquest. We all work as hard as possible, and we have the ability to come up with last-minute solutions if we have to. Even after Saturday qualifying, we make another step for the race. For example at Long Beach, we were doing really good, running in fourth saving massive amounts of fuel – we were going to go one lap longer than Scott Dixon in front of us, and he’s a pretty good guy at saving fuel. Well you can’t do that if the car’s bad because you’re having to drive it harder. So that shows how good the No. 34 car was on raceday… And then me, Dixie and the two Penskes got caught by that yellow and we dropped us to 14th, so I had to charge again.

Sorry, that still bugs me, but what my point is, is that we would love to be in a position where we have such a strong basic setup that everything we do for the rest of the weekend is fine-tuning it. But hey, life’s not like that, so let’s do the best with what we can.

I’m always very, very anxious but also excited about Fridays at race weekends, because that’s the day which kind of dictates what the weekend will be like. If we get out there and discover – boom! – the car is fast, then that means we’re gonna have a great weekend. This isn’t like St Pete: I come to this circuit with plenty of knowledge and so does Brandon. The circuit hasn’t changed…except the surface is maybe more rough.

So let me get back to you tomorrow after our first voyage of discovery! For now, all these PR commitments are at least helping me keep my mind off the tension of tomorrow…

Alex

For Alex's previous columns, [click here]

Conquest Racing’s Alex Tagliani won the Indy 500 Rookie of the Year, but the team had to miss last weekend’s IndyCar Series race in Milwaukee. This weekend, the little team with the big heart was back on the championship trail, and Tag reports to RACER.com after the race at Texas Motor Speedway.

Well that was just a weird race for us. Where did our speed from qualifying go? [See Friday's Tagliani diary]. I wish I knew. All of us at Conquest Racing wish we knew. Sometimes things don’t work out the way you expected them, but at least you can find the reason. This time, we just couldn’t.

At the end, we lost a position because we decided to stay out during the yellow and make up a lap, but then we needed to pit for a splash of fuel before the end. This doesn’t bother me; we tried something, we slipped from 13th to 14th, but so what, you know? What is confusing is that we were only in 13th before that!

We’re kind of feeling bummed. The No.34 Rexall Edmonton Indy car was so good right away in practice, and then in qualifying we got even quicker. So we are closing the gap with the big boys: we were just six tenths of a second behind Dario who was on pole. That’s very decent. But last night, all of a sudden, my car was too slow on the straights. I was flat all the way round. We felt like we were losing a tiny bit of horsepower from not having our throttle totally optimized, but it was pretty negligible. It’s just a bummer that we lost so much speed.

The car was good handling – as good as Indy, if not better. I could go anywhere on the track, and I was trying to draft as many people as I could. But then, when you’re drafting people into the corner as close as you can, you pick up a lot of push, and you destroy the front tires, and then the car slides more and more in turbulence.

At the start of the race, in the turbulence of following a big pack of cars, we picked up some positions right away, we felt we could run competitively. But then slowly but surely, the car just felt slower and slower on the straights. In practice, before the engine problem, I was doing 211mph on my own, even with full fuel. Doing race setup practice, and in someone’s draft we could do 212.5mph. In qualifying, we did a 213.1 average.

And in the race, I had a hard time to do a 207! On my own, I’d just be doing 207, 207, 207, and then I’d hook a draft and do a 209. So strange. It wasn’t aero, we know that, because we hardly changed that on the car at all. We altered the gurney a little bit at the front for when we were running in dirty air, but that was it. Mechanically, we didn’t do much either. Why would we? We were happy with how it had been, so why reinvent the wheel?

As bad as we felt after the race, a bit empty, hungry for more, other than the straightline speed we had no complaints. It was very stable. We could fight with guys in turbulence, but the problem is, I can only follow when they’re chopping the air. But I could not go on the inside or the outside, and when there’s less draft and I’m just going mano a mano with them, slowly they’re pulling away.

I’m not the type of guy who will say, “Oh it’s this one thing,” when I’m not really sure. You have to wonder if it was a combination of a lot of small things. The throttle being not optimized, the gear maybe was off by a tiny bit. But we’re talking 40rpm, not 150 here.
It’s such a shame, because 1.5-mile ovals were hard for Conquest last year, and this year the team improved by 2.5mph in qualifying.

Early in the race, I was battling with Ed Carpenter, and I passed him on two restarts. But then when he re-passed, I tried to stay with him and I couldn’t. And he finished ninth. At one point during the race, Brandon Fry, my engineer, gets on the radio and says, “Your throttle percentage is not at the optimum so keep pushing on the throttle as hard as you can,” so I did but it didn’t change anything. I just had a freakin’ sore leg at the end from trying to make the throttle open more. Just 1.5mph extra straightline speed would have been another world for us. That’s how good and consistent the car was; it kept the tires in really good shape.

I don’t know what the plan is for the next few races. That’s a question for the team. Obviously Toronto and Edmonton, for sure. And I want to do Watkins Glen, Mid-Ohio and Sonoma. Of course, road and street courses are where we’re best. But look, we’re getting this car up to speed on ovals too. I’d love to do Richmond, for example, and people tell me good things about Iowa… We can compete well on short ovals, in particular. If we can only afford to do a part-schedule, we need to choose our circuits wisely, where we can show good speed, and get the sponsors in. The team is really working hard on the marketing side.

I’ll keep you posted through Twitter and Facebook. I’ve finally learned how to do that through my phone. So check it out. I’ll be keeping you up to date with what I’m doing and we’ll be doing competitions and that sort of thing with Sennheiser and Gatorz, and I’ll be able to let you know each time I do a new diary article for Racer.com.

So stay in touch!

Alex

Conquest Racing's Alex Tagliani won the Indy 500 Rookie of the Year, but the team had to miss last weekend's IndyCar Series race in Milwaukee. Now the little team with the big heart is back on the championship trail, and Tag reports to RACER.com direct from Texas Motor Speedway.

Hello everyone! Good to speak with you all again. This evening we qualified 13th for the Bombardier Learjet 550k and this is very encouraging form for the race tomorrow night – I’ll explain why in a minute – and big progress for the team since last year.

Despite what people have said or written, this isn’t my first time at Texas Motor Speedway. I was here the year the CART cars were too quick for the banking, and lots of drivers felt dizzy or sick. We were doing 235mph. We’re 20mph less than that now and it’s just a different world: It doesn’t sound like a major difference, but it is. And that’s great, because this is a great, great facility. I love it here.

The problem is, in qualifying, it’s so hard for a driver to make the difference. You need to be smart, and have yourself a good car for traffic in the race, but throughout qualifying, you’re running on the low line because that’s the fastest way. There’s no point in climbing up the banking because that is longer and it scrubs off speed. You just use the grip that fresh tires give you and hug the bottom line. I think I was flat all the way round on only my second flying lap yesterday!

Unfortunately in practice, the engine in the No. 34 Rexall Edmonton Indy car let go, so after 25 laps, we were just watching everyone else go round. But today in qualifying, I ended up 13th, just behind an Andretti Green car and a Newman/Haas/Lanigan car, so I think that we should be really proud. My average for the four-lap run was just 0.005sec off Graham Rahal. And I’m three places ahead of Tony Kanaan! Considering we missed Kansas and Milwaukee, we’ve done no oval testing, and the only other oval race is Indy which is so, so different, I think 13th is a truly incredible effort by Conquest Racing in a 24-car field. Now we just have to behave ourselves in the race, don’t get blocked in when we’re running in traffic, get good restarts, do good in and out laps and have good pitstops. The usual things! And I think we can do a decent job and have a good race. If we get a Top 10 finish, I think we can say that was a success.

So what are the key things to getting that kind of result? Well, the banking is so steep here, that you don’t actually have so much of a difference between qualifying setup and race setup. Running behind another car disturbs the airflow, like at any track, but the angle of the banking is so high that your car is still staying stuck down quite well. It means in the race, the cars can get really close. The thing you have to watch out for at Texas is the bumpiness of the surface. It’s very important to have your spring and damper setup correct.

Although the cars can get really close, it’s actually then really hard to pass because the fastest line is down the bottom. So even if you have a good solid car the whole run, if the person you’re chasing has the bottom line all the way round, as soon as you go up the banking to pass, you are going to lose time unless your car is a lot better than your rival’s car. We did a couple of laps at the bottom, and a couple of laps in the middle, and it was a big difference.

So the plan is to tuck in behind other cars whenever we can’t pass, and save fuel that way, so any pit stops under full-course yellows, we have to put less fuel in and gain positions like that. And then I must make good restarts. Those two things worked for us in Indy. In fact they worked really well, because I got Rookie of the Year!

I am still very happy with that result. The most important thing was that it was a great, great team effort. Throughout the Month of May, we had so much to learn. We’re a good road course and street course team, when you look at our qualifying and our race pace in our first few races together, even if the results weren’t always there. We proved we can stay around the top teams. But when you get to the big ovals, it’s a totally different story. The teams who have been in IndyCar longer are of course going to have setups that are more refined…what am I trying to say here…They have more sophisticated setups, just through experience, not because they are smarter than us. The experience, the length of time they’ve had with the car, all the little refinements for the car that someone like Penske has – it’s not something you can buy. You have to make your own experience!

This year, we have had just one other oval race, and that was the Indy 500. The first thing I should say is that the whole month’s work, all that month of making the car fast, how to make it good to drive, and just working and working on it, it all really paid off on race day. I think we had a really solid car.

We had a good car on Carburetion Day, but we only ran conservative pace: we definitely had more time to come from the car. For the race itself, I’d say the car mechanically speaking was absolutely at its best; I could go flat out the whole run, and guys that sprinted away at the start of a stint were coming back to us like there was no tomorrow because they were hurting their tires. We weren’t. We were super super consistent, and that meant I had a lot of fun in the race, actually because I could really do things with the car – I could follow people, I could make passes and it wasn’t risky. The car was very, very stable. That meant the only thing I had to concentrate on while going flat-out was also saving fuel, so I cranked the fuel mixture down. A lot of guys were running rich mixture just to keep their positions, forget about overtaking. That’s how good we were.

So on a full course yellow, we would come into the pits, and we’re all stacked up but because we have more fuel in the tank than some cars, because we’d saved so much, it meant that our stop was shorter. If you wait for fuel, that’s fine because it’s part of the strategy; what you don’t want to do is wait for tires. Well this Conquest team was so good, so perfect actually at changing the tires, so we were able to take advantage of our fuel saving. As soon as the tires were fitted, I could drop the clutch and go, and so we passed people in the pits. We also had cool restarts.

The only thing we left on the table is something we can’t do anything about. I don’t know if you remember my last column when I was telling you about a wing-adjuster, which you can only use if you’ve built it yourself. There’s not a standard one. You can’t buy one. This adjuster is so you can make really quick adjustments to the aero during pit stops. The big teams have it, and we don’t.
So in the last 50 miles of Indy, when Dan Wheldon and Danica were able to drop their wings because they were trying to get to the front and were taking off drag, we couldn’t do the same thing. On that last restart, I overtook Danica and Dario who had fallen back because of his bad pit stop. And I stayed in ninth for about a lap and a half, but because they had taken out wing, Danica could come back past me and about eight laps later, Dario got a good run, too. There’s nothing you can do: you can’t block.

So overall we were really happy as a team that our 11th place meant we did everything we could with the car we had. The car was so good, I’d say that the wing-adjuster could have put us in the top 10. Hideki Mutoh and I were fighting for about 40 laps, but after that last pitstop he had the speed on the straights to just take him away from me.

But I now have a mention in Indy 500 history! I’m very proud. You can only be a rookie there once in your career, that’s what I was, and thanks to this team, we maximized it and beat Robert Doornbos and Raphael Matos. It’s a privilege to be Indy 500 Rookie of the Year, and it’s something I will treasure forever. Because of the strange circumstances on Bump Day – everything that happened and the way it happened [see previous columns], I will have those memories forever, too.

Anyway, that wing-adjustment device isn’t used here at Texas, so that’s an issue we won’t have to think about!

Okay, friends, I am going to get some sleep, and I hope you tune in to Versus tomorrow, watch the race, cheer for me, and I’ll get back to you on Sunday!

Alex

In his own words and inimitable style, Alex Tagliani of Conquest Racing gives his version of this year's high drama on Bump Day at Indy.

I feel like a crazy man at the moment. The unbelievable way we fell out and then got back into Indy in 33rd on the grid has attracted more publicity than if we’d just gotten our 26th slot on the Saturday before.

Last time I spoke with you, it was just after the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach and I promised I’d write after each race we did for the rest of this year. But I wanted to do one after qualifying at Indianapolis, too, and the boys at RACER said they’d like that. I might have said, “Sorry, I can’t talk about it,” if we had stayed bumped out of the race. But a miracle happened, and here I am. I think by now you will know the basics of the story, so I thought I’d give you the inside view.

I guess the great thing is, nobody has said to me anything like, “Bruno Junqueira should be in the car, you failed to qualify,” or anything like that. I think everyone appreciates the freak circumstances that bumped me out, and genuinely everyone seems pleased that I got back in. When I first showed up in the plane to go to IndyCar’s New York publicity trip, I was nervous of the perspective of the other drivers, but everyone was unbelievably nice.

I was really grateful that Tony Kanaan, Dario Franchitti and people like that said some supportive things about us. Even Ryan Hunter-Reay, who put us out, was funny. He said something like, “Thank you for not going out earlier, otherwise I wouldn’t be here! I wouldn’t have beaten John Andretti’s time.” And the other drivers… Well, they just wanted to know why on earth we didn’t go out and set a new time and whose decision it was. I just said, “It was all of our decisions,” because I’m not going to pinpoint anyone. Conquest Racing is a team, and they have given me this chance.

HOW IT HAPPENED
Like Brian Barnhart told me afterward, Bump Day is normally between 30th and 33rd. Those three or four cars are just constantly bumping each other out. But me and Tomas Scheckter, 26th and 27th, we’d spent all Sunday working together, running around in each other’s drafts, doing race setups. Then all of a sudden, both of us are running into the garage changing our setups back to qualifying. It wasn’t a case of that we had been worried about not doing better: the track was much faster on Sunday and there was no wind compared to the previous day. We just didn’t think we’d need to. But then Conway took the risk of re-qualifying – he was behind us but still well in the field. He didn’t need to protect his time. But he did it, and then John Andretti found a whole 1mph, and Ryan Hunter-Reay and Milka Duno couldn’t find speed but they all had to try again.

We could have done a 222.5mph four-lap average in qualifying setup, but the team said, “Look, you’re plenty fast enough to be in the field, let’s wait.” And I still think maybe it was the right call to make. But when everyone starts pulling their time out, it’s no longer a Bump Day. In effect, it becomes a new qualifying day, and that’s what we had. Your time is no longer safe, not when the track has made everyone so much quicker.

So when we’re all sitting in line waiting to go out, you have to pull out of line if someone like John Andretti is behind you, because you’re in and he’s not. You have to give him the opportunity. He goes out, he doesn’t do it, but then he’s back in, and behind you, so you have to pull out, let him go again. Then all of a sudden, he does do it. So now you’re just one car from not being in! So Ryan Hunter-Reay goes out with three minutes to go, and you’re left in a position that you couldn’t predict even if you’re a strategist, you know?

Then Brian Barnhart came to me and said, “There is no time to go out: Ryan’s just completed two laps, he has two to go, you just have to wait. You can get out of the car, because whatever happens, you have no more time.” But I wanted to stay on the radio with the team, who told me: “He’s still down on your time. He’s close, but he’s down.” Coming out of Turn 4 on lap four, Ryan was still down, and he didn’t know if it was a gust of wind, but he managed to cross the line 0.04sec up on me. A couple of days ago, he said to me, “Alex, I don’t know what happened, because we really didn’t have the car to do that.”



THE AFTERMATH

I was devastated. The hardest day in my career. Way worse than losing wins at Elkhart Lake, Vancouver, Toronto, Portland, Homestead, Montreal.... I thought until last Sunday that those were the worst moments of my career, and once upon a time they were, but now I just think of them as tough to digest, you know. The two hours before I knew of Eric’s decision to put me into car No. 36 beats them all by a mile. By a mile, I swear to God. I wouldn’t wish that feeling on anybody.

The Indy 500 is the biggest race, I’ve never been in it before, we worked so hard and you know money is tight, so we had that feeling of just being appreciative that we were there – as a team, as a group, as a band of brothers and sisters. All the efforts from the crew, Eric [Bachelart, team owner] putting all his efforts and money in, the sponsor putting their faith in this little team and all our associated family and friends – and in one freakin’ second you’re not in. I don’t have the words to describe it. I don’t speak good enough English to tell you what devastation I felt.

Right afterward, Brian Barnhart came to me and said: “I’m crushed. That was the hardest day of my life: I had the fastest car of the day sitting in front of me and I had to look the driver in the eyes and tell him I can’t let him go set a qualifying time because the gun’s gone off.”

It’s funny though, because later, Brian was also the first to sort of suggest that it wasn’t all over. He and [Conquest’s commercial director from Rubicon] Jim Freudenberg came into the garage where I was sitting feeling like the world had ended, and he said, “You did an amazing job all month, you’re a professional, this was your first time, you learned the track, helped the team to set the car up. They qualified at 219 last year and you were flirting with 222.5, this is an amazing improvement,” and so on. And then he said, “I respect the team’s decision about what they’re going to do.”

I’m thinking, “What are they gonna do? What’s going on?” Then Jim says the same thing, but I still don’t know what’s up. After they left, that’s when Eric came and found me, and told me the plan to pull Bruno out and replace him with me.

I tell you, I don’t know if I was more soft-legged and weak when I heard the news from Eric, than when Brian had told me I’d run out of time to qualify. It was just too short a time to change emotions: I think I was so far down that Eric’s news didn’t immediately pick me up. I was just stunned. I felt like, “Hit me left, hit me right, hit me forward, hit me backward – I’m going to pass out here pretty soon!” Thankfully my wife Bronte was in the garage with me, and her kind words and wisdom helped. She’s a smart lady.

Later on, it was nice when people said they were happy for me. Tony Kanaan came up to me and said “Man, you had no business not being on this grid, and if you hadn’t have had that crash the previous Saturday, you would have been 18th, or something like that.” Dario, Raphael Matos, they all said something similar – they couldn’t believe that they had been watching one of the quicker cars about to be sent home. Unreal. Even Paul [Tracy] came up to me and said, “F***, why didn't you do another qualifying run?! You had such a quick car today.”

Yeah, people will see me as just taking the place of another driver for the race, and if I’d been slow and taken the place of a quicker driver, then that would be different. I spoke to Bruno and I said, “I really thank you for understanding,” and he said, “Alex, you were quicker than me today. It looks stupid if you’ve been preparing the car all month, you give me the same settings, I get in the race, and you don’t have the chance to show what you can do. You did a great job, first time at Indy, to get the car up to speed. You deserve this chance.” Bruno was completely understanding and I just appreciate that so much. It made me feel better. Even though he must be very disappointed, he still said words like a true gentleman.

It was strange, because for once I had the benefit of the status of being No. 1 driver in the team. I’m part of Conquest’s program for the future, their sponsorship work, and so on. Eric told me, “You deserve this chance at every level. We screwed up the strategy, we’re really sorry for you, and it’s not fair if you don’t participate at Indy when you have done so much work for us.”

I already had huge emotions coming to this track. I’ve been racing at the top of the U.S. open-wheel tree since 2000, and yet this is the first time I competed at The Brickyard, because I didn’t have a seat in the merged series until last August. I’m not going to regret the time I had in Champ Car: I count myself as lucky, because a lot of good drivers didn’t get in. But being on that side of the fence did mean I didn’t get to race the Indy 500.

And you don’t realize what you’ve missed until you get to Indy. Oh man, thank God I had the chance to do it. Now I want to do it more and more. I’ve just accumulated so much knowledge, about the track, about the conditions and so many other little things. I swear that if I come back next year with Conquest, we could be a real factor all month. That’s what we need to do. I’ll be happy with this team and their hard work, but please – no more Bump Day drama. I don’t think my heart or brain can take that again.

AMBITIONS FOR THIS WEEKEND
For Sunday, our ambitions are simply to make the best of what we have. We’ve slowly but surely got the car pretty competitive. On Sunday (when I should have been laying down a qualifying time!) I did at least discover our car is pretty comfortable to drive, and settled in traffic. I certainly didn’t run with as many cars as I’m going to have to run with at the start of the race, but hey, we’re just going to have to get it as up to speed as possible, and react to what’s happening.

It’s a long race, a lot of things happening, and there will be between eight and ten pitstops, and every pit stop is really important. If you lose three seconds every pit stop, you are going to end up 30sec behind, which is almost a lap, so that’s very, very crucial to get right. And we need to have quick reaction timing to the flow of the race. Depending on which end of the field you’re at, you have the choice of either dictating the strategy or reacting to it, so it’s very possible we could do an alternate strategy and it could play into our hands later in the race, but you might not want an alternate strategy if you have been creeping toward the front with good pit stops.

Talking to my rivals, they say it’s really difficult to pass, because everyone will be running around the same lap times in race trim. But I have one fairly big worry. The big teams have the possibility of changing their downforce in the pit stops; they have an adjuster. We don’t have that, so the car feels really good with a high level of downforce, but if you start like that, you’re committed to that, and when cars start peeling off or crashing out in the race, and the field goes from 33 to 25 to 22 or if there’s a long period of green flag running and everyone gets spread out, you suddenly want a little less downforce so you can go fast on your own. So we’ll have to figure out the best compromise, because we’ll be stuck with it the whole race. We might look really good early on, and then be too pinned to the track and slower if we are out of the draft.

Just to give you an example, when we were in the draft last Sunday, with more downforce, we were lapping at 221mph, and with less downforce we were doing 220. Why? Because without that extra bit of downforce, I can’t get as close to other cars. But when I’m on my own with high downforce, I was doing 217.8mph, when I have lower downforce, I do 218.5. So then you have to make a call as to how often I will be in a draft, how often will I be running solo. Well that then depends on how often there are yellows and the field gets bunched up for restarts. If you have, say, 10 laps of green running on your own at 217.8, and there’s a pack of cars behind running 221s because they’re drafting each other, you’re gonna get caught very quickly. So you can see it’s hard to make the choice.

Then another factor is the tires. Last year the team told me that with the downforce they had on, when everyone pitted for new tires, their cars were being left behind, but as soon as the tires got old, the Conquest cars were catching other people.

Realistically, then, what are our prospects? Well I think Rookie of the Year has to be possible: it’s between myself, Doornbos, Mike Conway and Nelson Philippe. Overall, we would consider a Top-15 finish would be great. But we can’t afford to damage our car, because we want to use this one in Milwaukee next week.

We’re really looking forward to Milwaukee. My engineer Brandon Fry is very excited. Last year the team qualified eighth, and even then they felt they left something on the table. It’s a track I like anyway, and I think we need to continue to show we’re capable of doing good on ovals. We’ve shown well on street courses – though as you’ll have read in my previous articles here on RACER.com, we could show even better. But ovals are half of the IndyCar schedule, so we must be strong there, too.

Anyway, enough of Milwaukee. I’ll tell you all about that next time. For now I have to get my head straight for the 93rd Indianapolis 500, say thank you to all the people who supported me, thank you to Conquest for the decision they made, and go out and do the best for everyone involved. Wish me luck.

Alex

Alex Tagliani, the hardest-working driver in U.S. motorsport, has managed to cram something else into his days: writing exclusively for RACER.com to bring you his diary from the 35th Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach.

SUNDAY

I don’t want to sound like “Oh, I’m the unluckiest guy in racing,” but really, what the hell do we have to do to catch a break, man? Remember yesterday when I said I wanted to be fighting for the podium? Well trust me, that’s exactly what we should have been doing, could have been doing, but what I’d say was a strange call in Race Control ruined it for Conquest Racing – and others, as well.

Okay, let’s start from the top. Today, we did some good work in the morning warm-up, and my engineer Brandon Fry and I went into the race pretty confident. The balance was better, it was turning in better too, and power-down was okay. The rest comes down to race-craft and strategy from us as a team. Well, at least that’s what I thought.

At the start, I got past Helio Castroneves into eighth, but down at the hairpin coming onto the pitstraight, I put the power down too early, got a bunch of wheelspin, and got it sideways. I think the Penskes were running a little bit less downforce so he got a good run on me into Turn 1 and I had to let him go.

But we were saving fuel and our strategy looked pretty strong. In fact, we were very happy with our pace considering the mileage we were getting, and together with good work by the team, we beat a couple of guys. So after the first stops, we were running seventh, and I’m thinking, okay, we’re looking good here. I was running with Dixie [reigning IndyCar champ Scott Dixon], and when I saw Will Power go in the pits just ahead of us, I realized he was struggling to make fuel mileage, so was Dario Franchitti, and Tony Kanaan behind me. They had pitted, and so it was Castroneves, Ryan [Briscoe], Dixie and me who had made our fuel last, and were running top four.

We were just half a lap from coming in and then a full course yellow comes out and the pits are closed. The four of us were nailed from that moment, because that allows everyone who had pitted to pack up behind us before we could come into the pits. It’s like we had been penalized for doing well. Jeez… On top of that, I got a little bit confused with the release from the pit stall, and left the pits with the fuel hose still on, so that was a penalty. But by then our race was screwed anyhow.

Brandon was reminding me that in Champ Car, on a close call like that, our race director Tony Cotman wouldn’t let the top four guys get screwed like that – he’d delay throwing the full-course yellow, and so leave the pits open a little bit longer. That was the sensible thing to do. Mario Moraes today came out a lap or two down, knowing he can’t do anything in the results, but with a set of soft tires and go and try and get fastest lap, and he stuck it in the wall. Well, why should that dumbass driving kill the chances of the leaders? I just think it’s not justice. Now we have this example, maybe the four of us need to go speak to [IndyCar race director] Brian Barnhardt.

With the penalty, we got dropped further, so we had to fight our way past a bunch of cars. I had good battles with Darren Manning, and Graham Rahal who both did a good job and were very fair. And I know on TV they showed my last-lap pass on Ryan Hunter-Reay, but you should have seen the one on Vitor Meira: That was really sweet, as he’s the guy that ruined our race in St. Pete. Today we showed him it’s possible to make a clean pass, instead of just driving into someone and puncturing his tire!

The positive to take from Long Beach is that we did a good job as a team: it was bad luck that robbed us. We recovered from a tough first day, we had a lot of electrical problems, it was certainly not a clean weekend – there were a lot of little issues we had to fight. But we worked super-hard, we fixed them all, we had a reliable car on raceday, and again we had the pace to put us on the podium.

But… you know, with Eric [Bachelart, team-owner], Brandon, and the whole Conquest Racing team, I could say those positive things every weekend, about overcoming bad sessions or bad days. The team has proved it in the past, I have proved it in the past, and together…Well, we keep proving that we can come from a bad situation and show really good form.

But people who just look at the results of a race won’t see that from Long Beach or St. Pete. So we want to give the world real hard evidence on paper. That’s what we’re here for. We just need to catch a break. Look at third, fourth and sixth place finishers today – Tony Kanaan, Danica Patrick and Marco Andretti. They were there because they got insanely lucky with the yellows: they didn’t have the speed or the fuel mileage to pass me on the track, as everyone could see today. So you see why I think we could have been fighting for the podium.

Okay, let’s think positive thoughts, and think that it must turn around for us soon. We’re not going to Kansas next weekend, because we’re going to focus on the Indy 500, the biggest race in the world. I’m going to be bringing you RACER.com readers updates after each race I do this year, but maybe we can sling in one after qualifying at Indy, too.
So – back with you soon, friends!

Alex
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SATURDAY

People, I’m happy again, not so much because we put the No.34 Hard Rock Hotel & Casino / The Joint car into P9. We all know we could have gone better if the weekend had gone smoothly. But from where we were at yesterday to now, we should be dancing in the streets of Long Beach, because this is a real tribute to this Conquest Racing team, and I really want my engineer Brandon Fry to get some good visibility from this diary. We’ve split the Penskes – just behind Helio, just ahead of Ryan – and we’re ahead of all the Andretti Green cars. Now that is what I call progress!

You know it’s a real tribute to the IRL what they have done since the merger. Because look at us – Conquest Racing, HVM, Dale Coyne Racing – these are all teams on a low, low budget, some of us just clinging on by our fingernails, and look at the big-budget cars we can still beat through being innovative, or smart, and analytical. Look at us, yesterday: our car was bad and we were 17th, and we were only 1.025sec off quickest time. This is strong, exciting, close, close racing.

Anyway, today, let’s do something different: here’s a transcript of when RACER came to ask the questions, and Brandon and I tell the story.

RACER Okay, so after such a horrible day yesterday, when did you guys leave the track last night?


Brandon About 9 o’clock, and we were still texting until, what, 11? The last text I sent him was about dampers, and he didn’t respond, and I thought “Uh-oh, he’s pissed at me” so I went to bed!


Alex Brother, I was sitting up in bed but I couldn’t keep my eyes open, and Bronte [my wife] was already asleep. I had to shut the phone off. So when I got to the track this morning, Brandon said “Are you okay?” and I said “Yeah, yeah, but I had to sleep.”


RACER Alex, are you saying you ever actually sleep?

Brandon No, I reckon he just plugs in and recharges.

Anyway, we made some changes to go back to our Detroit ’08 race car. That’s when Alex joined us, last August. But I was also just trying to simplify things; we didn’t want to do anything trick. We just tried to keep it simple, knowing at the end of the day that Alex is going to drive the wheels off the thing, so there’s no point in outsmarting ourselves.


Alex Here in Long Beach we’ve been fighting a lot of electrical issues, downshift issues, which didn’t make our life easy. But other than that, the weekend is similar to St. Pete situation. But what I think is happening here is that we go after the car and the track and find something that is decent, and make the best of it. But if we went back to St. Pete now, we’d get in the Firestone Fast Six and be fighting for the pole. We’re limited with the amount of experience we have with the car, and the amount of testing, and seven-post rig work.

So yesterday we were fighting with lack of grip, lack of this, lack of that, but today we have more grip than we’ve had all weekend, but the tendency is that we’re not just fighting understeer all the way through, or oversteer all the way through. It varies from corner to corner as to whether it’s understeer or oversteer. The balance is not right, and because like I wrote in the diary on Thursday, this circuit is so much about flow that if you don’t have a balanced car, then it makes it really, really tough to get a good lap.
So consider all that, and then see that we are just a tenth of a second from getting in the Fast Six shoot-out, with the car we have. I mean, we’re so close to being in that shoot-out, and yet we still have so much potential, so much more to get out of the car. That’s really encouraging. If I had been sitting here saying “That’s the best car I had ever driven in my life,” then you’d think, okay, it’s going to be tough to get in the Fast Six. But you know, it’s just one little thing that will click to get more balance (not more grip, we now have that) and then the car would be more consistent so I could be more aggressive. Then suddenly we would have that tenth of a second.


Brandon The thing is, Alex came on board with us in the middle of Detroit race weekend last year – two races before the end of the championship. And from that point, it was really a fresh slate. The reason I say that is, at one point we were struggling at St. Pete, and so we put on the setup that Franck Perera used in 2008, and we were crap. I don’t know if it’s in the differences in the driving styles or because the series as a whole progressed in the middle of last year, and we didn’t have Alex in the car with his feedback. The result is that at each circuit we come to, we’re still a step behind. As a transition team from Champ Car, last year we didn’t really learn anything about the Dallara until he got in the car at Detroit. It is amazing how different we run the car this year compared to last year, and if we try anything that we used in the bulk of 2008, we get nowhere.


Alex We finished the weekend at St. Pete encouraged with how fast the car was at the end of the race, and if we go back there, we’d be a real step up. Well, it’s the same thing here. I wish we could go back 24 hours and start where we are right now, because then can you imagine what we could do in qualifying? Oh man…. So that’s a little bit frustrating and encouraging at the same time!


RACER And that undulating problem that you had yesterday: is that solved now?


Alex Yeah, pretty much. Today, on the last run we had some downshift paddle issues, where the gas would stay on and push the nose out in the corner, so that’s not helping the situation. And I was also getting my foot off the brake real quick so we don’t flat-spot tires and stuff like that. So we didn’t really have it easy today.


Brandon Yeah, St. Pete went smoother as far as solving issues was concerned.


RACER So what do you think you can do tomorrow?


Brandon Well it’s now time to go through the data and see what the car’s now doing, and what are the next logical steps.


RACER Isn’t that a high-risk game because…


Alex No because the worst we can do is go back to what we have now.


RACER I meant in terms of not having a lot of time before the race starts to try the new changes.


Brandon Yeah, well we’ve got a half-hour practice, so we’re now close enough that it’s small things to correct. We’re not going to go out on a limb majorly like we have a couple of times this weekend.


Alex With a 70.1sec lap, we’re within three or four tenths of where we need to be, so at least we’re in the window where an adjustment or two can be made to get us right there. Last night we made so many changes because we were lacking a lot. Now we’ve at least brought the car to a point where it’s much more competitive , and we’ve reduced the issues down to the fact that it’s unbalanced: that’s our biggest issue right now. We have to make it consistent all the way through the corner. My fight right now, is that you turn in, you have what I’d call a 2 out of 5 amount of push, and then you get to the apex, it snap oversteers, and when you should be getting back on the throttle, you’re spending a few tenths correcting and then getting back on the throttle. So obviously that’s losing me time.


RACER So you’ve narrowed the field of what needs to be changed compared to yesterday?


Brandon Yeah, definitely.


Alex Yeah, it’s small stuff now. Probably something with dampers. Sometimes it can be just a better damper combination. Maybe a different front to what we’re running in the rear, or the other way round. It might be one of those situations where the problem is at the rear, but in fact it’s being caused by what’s going on at the front.


RACER So just to clear up, what was it made you miss 20 minutes in this morning’s practice? Did the gearbox break?


Brandon Not mechanically, no: we had a wire break.


Alex Yeah, it was not sending a signal to the compressor pump to downshift so I got stuck in gear. Nothing mechanical.


Brandon And that was a shame, because…


Alex What we found out now, in qualifying, we could have found out this morning, and then we could have made the change ready for the start of qualifying.


Brandon Absolutely. Because we got one run on old tires in the morning practice, and Alex said, “Hmmm, I’m not so sure about this.” And yet when we went back and looked at the data, he was quicker on almost every turn except Turn 2, so we thought “Okay, maybe we finally found something, let’s work on it a little bit more,” and then the wiring issue stopped us.


Alex Right, and so we didn’t really get to evaluate and evolve our idea until qualifying. Yeah, you’re right: that was probably very costly.


RACER One other thing you mentioned Thursday was that you had to change the steering arm so the car could get round the hairpin… What was that about?


Brandon Well yeah, we thought we might have to, but it turns out we didn’t.


Alex But the front suspension had to get changed.


Brandon Oh yeah, Dallara had to give everyone new suspension because these cars wouldn’t have turned through that hairpin. In fact, the reason the two-seater car hasn’t been out this weekend is because it couldn’t get through the hairpin! For the race cars, though, Dallara had to come up with new steering arms, new wishbones. To be fair to them, they did a good job.


Alex Just as well they thought about it! Who brought it up?


Brandon Oh, the old Champ Car teams told the Dallara rep about it. I still warned Alex while we were on the track walk on Thursday.


Alex Yeah, on Friday morning Brandon said, “First lap out there, be careful and just see if you can make it – don’t come flying in there thinking you can get round!”

***

As I hope you can see from this conversation, me and Brandon were way happier about the car today. Like I said, if we could only start the weekend in the situation that we find ourselves in by qualifying, we’d have time to make those last little tweaks and be in the Fast Six every time. That’s how good this team is, and I am just so, so desperate to reward them with a podium tomorrow.

So wish us luck. Eric Bachelart, Brandon and our sponsors really deserve it.

Alex

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FRIDAY

Hey, supporters. Thank you for tuning in again. But I have to apologize too, if you were hoping for some wild and positive update from our Friday practice sessions. Check out the times: we’re only 17th!

Don’t worry, it’s not quite as bad as all that. The track was probably slightly quicker at the end of the afternoon session, and we had put new tires on the No. 34 Conquest Racing car about halfway through, while others had waited. So our tires weren’t as fresh as theirs when the track was quickest.

But I have to admit that we’re really puzzled. I mean, we are way out of the ball park, and the weird thing is, other people who were quick in St. Petersburg two weeks ago, like Justin Wilson and Graham Rahal, are also way down. I mean, how can it be that we had strong cars for one street circuit – okay, an airport one – but we suck so bad at another? It doesn’t make sense.

For us at Conquest, I can say that there are lots of things wrong. I can’t brake deep, I can’t put the power down at the exit of the hairpin onto the pitstraight and it doesn’t seem to have any grip in the low-speed corners. The grip problem is so bad that in the high-speed corners, I need to under-drive it. If I drove Turn 1 like I want to drive it, I’d hit the fence.

Turns 9 and 10 – they’re normally “my” corners, the key places where I gain time on everyone. But I’m having to go bah-bah-bah on the throttle, applying the power and then coming off it to allow the car to grip again. It’s just so weird. It’s not that the rear is moving too much; I just don’t have the grip. I’ve tried following the fast cars, but, pah – forget about it. We’re not even close. Yeah , yeah, I know the field is seriously close so we’re only a second slower than Will Power who was quickest today. But man, I outqualified that guy here last year! So I expected to be a front-runner today in practice.

This is when it becomes very, very important that we focus as a team and go through the problems methodically. It’s good that we have another practice session tomorrow morning, but we need to make sure that we use it well. There is a lot of work to do tomorrow. My engineer Brandon Fry seems to have some possible solutions. We spent 20 minutes in the pits this afternoon making a change with the dampers and it did help a little bit, but because some of our other problems have made us so far out we don’t yet know how good that damper change might be. (I hope that makes sense to you).

So I guess we have to hope it’s like Saturday at St. Pete, where we sucked in practice, we then made a change, we got it right, and all of a sudden the car came alive and we were fast. The weird thing is, how can it be that we’re at a track where both myself and the Conquest team have gotten so much experience, and we’re so way off? Maybe we’ve gone too ambitious on setup, tried to reinvent the wheel, and we need to go back to basics. Maybe the steering rack change that I mentioned yesterday has got something to do with it. That’s the crazy thing: it seems like anything is possible at this time.

I feel sorry for [team owner] Eric Bachelart, because here we are, knowing we’re not going to be racing again until Indy, so we’re trying to make as good an impression as we can, and we’re getting beaten by people who this team and this driver should never in a 100 years get beaten by.

It’s not like I am 0.3sec off and I have one problem that we need to fix to find that. We have a big problem spread over a wide range of areas, and that bothers me. For example, the hairpin is a slow corner, where there is nothing really a driver can do to make the difference. So say you’re entering it at 38mph, there’s nothing a driver can do to make it 40 or 42mph. But we’re not doing that. I’m having to go 35, which is too slow. If I did try 38, it wouldn’t make the turn.

Another example: under braking for Turn 1, I’m already not at my limit or the track’s limit, but I try and brake just five feet deeper and I end up in the run-off. I suppose to put it another way, the car’s limit is just too easily reached. I ended up in the run-off areas three times, just from braking five feet deeper: the car just starts undulating, the tires lock up and I’m gone. In St. Pete, by comparison, I didn’t lock one tire the whole weekend.

I didn’t want this to turn into an angry diary entry, but our brains are just exploding trying to figure this one out. If nothing else works, Brandon better get his magic stick out and hit the car. But now I have told you what’s going down, it’s time to get back with the team and work out how to go up. We’ll be working late…

Alex
____________________________________________________________________

THURSDAY

Race fans: Welcome to my diary from Long Beach! If you can’t be here at the track, I hope to give you some flavor of what we go through at Conquest Racing this weekend, as a team and a driver, working together to truly fulfill the potential that we know we have, and which the racing world saw a piece of at our last two races – at Surfers Paradise last autumn, and at St Petersburg two weeks ago.

Here on Thursday, after we announced that ODW Logistics and TorcUP of Canada were supporting us this weekend (thank you so much, guys), it became just a setup day, no track action, so I was able to work with the team on the front suspension and steering rack – I’ll tell you more about that tomorrow. Now, sitting here in the Conquest transporter as the evening starts to fall, I can think about the great times we’ve had here, and which I think we can have again this weekend.

One of the reasons why I’m so positive is the way we went at round one. I was maybe just a little bit surprised by how quick we were at St. Petersburg; I think [team owner] Eric Bachelart was more surprised than me. There’s always a little bit of anxiety for a driver just showing up at a track when all his rivals have tested recently whereas he hasn’t been in the car since last October. But I was so surprised because after just three laps I felt ready to push.

I was very happy the way the team worked; we had only known on Tuesday that we were going racing, and in those situations, you can find a million excuses why you’re not quick. But we were quick. I hadn’t been to the circuit for six years, but it wasn’t as difficult to learn that as it is to get used to the car. Remember, I’ve only had four races in these Dallara-Hondas.

The Dallara is a flat-bottomed car – no downforce tunnels like the Panoz Champ Car – so there is a different method to balancing the car, and of course with a normally-aspirated engine, the torque characteristics are way, way different from the turbo Cosworth. So at St. Pete, it was about getting the maximum out of the car rather than learning the track. That was the big thing: progressing with how the car wants to be driven, to get the best from it.

Well, I think we did pretty well. In group 1, we set the second quickest lap of the whole weekend, a 62.3, so in group 2, we left the car alone. But the track was changing, so I couldn’t quite reproduce that and got a 62.6. The Penskes set 62.6 too, a few hundredths quicker. So that’s how we dropped to seventh.

But hey we still outqualified the champion, Scott Dixon, who’s racing for Ganassi and I think that really made a statement. In a race, all kinds of crap can happen – as we saw, unfortunately! – but in qualifying, in terms of speed, we were with the fast boys and I think that is a tribute to my race engineer Brandon Fry and this whole Conquest team. At Surfers, when we qualified seventh and finished fourth, people might have said “Oh well, he knew the track from Champ Car, and the IndyCar boys didn’t.” Well, St Pete was the opposite and there we were, still mixing it with the fast ones.

Looking at what I’ve just written, I suppose actually Long Beach is a pleasure and pain thing for me: I love the circuit, I love that I’m quick here, but it’s a real shame that I’ve only had one podium to add to that win in Atlantics. I am really desperate to change that this weekend.

So the biggest question is, can we? Well, I think Conquest has a good car for street courses, but Long Beach for some reason is the type of track where you need everything – and I mean everything to be perfect to get the race win. It is also a track where a lot of the corners are flowing, so if you get one wrong, you can’t make it up at the next three corners, it will affect you all the way through. A lot of street circuits are stop and go, stop and go, where if you screw up one corner, it doesn’t affect your apex speed at the next one. But Long Beach is a circuit where the corners are so free-flowing that if, for example, your tire pressures are slightly wrong, it will lose you 0.6sec in just the first five corners.

I think we have the potential to be up front, but to actually nail that win, everything has to be right – the pitstops, the in-laps, the out-laps, when you hit traffic, and so on.

The passing opportunities are at Turns 1, 6 and 9, although of course we had push-to-pass boost in Champ Car. It will be interesting to see how the aero package on the Dallara works round here, how close we can run to each other and so on: I hope it’s good, because that’s what we need in order to have the same passing places in this car.

To be really, really honest with you though, I hope that won’t matter to me. In my mind, I’m thinking, “I’m going to be on pole.” I just don’t want to be caught up in the sort of crap we saw at St. Pete. I want to get away into the lead and do what I’ve got to do.

For me, qualifying on Saturday is gonna be balls to the wall – that’s a promise to you, to the team and to myself. Between now and then, though, Friday practice will tell us a lot about how realistic it is to expect pole position. I’ll be back to you Friday evening.

Alex

Championship leader Scott Dixon has been confirmed as the pole position holder for the Kentucky IndyCar race after weepers, the product of more than five inches of rain the previous day, cost the series its qualifying session on Friday evening.

Series and track officials continued to attempt to stop water from seeping through the track surface, and still plan to hold a practice session late on Friday if the weepers subside.

Cars will be lined up for the start of Saturday night's race by entrant points, meaning Scott Dixon will start on the inside of the front row, with his Chip Ganassi Racing team-mate Dario Franchitti alongside and Penske duo Ryan Briscoe and Helio Castroneves behind them.

"I'll take it anyway I can get it," Dixon said. "It's a fantastic result for the team, but not exactly the way we wanted to get it. It was a tough day not being able to get on the track."

The wasted hours under bright sunshine were particularly frustrating because of the implementation of push-to-pass technology for Saturday's race and the newly ground surface at Kentucky's 1.5-mile oval.

"It's not their fault that they had torrential rain here," Franchitti said. "They can only do so much to fix it. Hopefully we'll see the water go away when the sun comes down."

The loss of qualifying sees Edmonton winner Will Power back in 20th on the grid as his #12 car has only entered a handful of races. Other quirks include Milka Duno taking 15th in the line-up as she is in the #23 Dreyer & Reinbold entry that Tomas Scheckter has run strongly in, while Scheckter himself starts last in the #43 car.

With three Dreyer & Reinbold and three Penske entries, plus the return of owner/driver Sarah Fisher, a 23-car field has been maintained for Kentucky despite the absence of Paul Tracy and Alex Tagliani after the end of the series' Canadian swing. The other change in the entry is the return of Jaques Lazier to the 3G car occupied by Richard Antinucci for the past three road courses.

Pos  Driver             Team
 1.  Scott Dixon        Ganassi
 2.  Dario Franchitti   Ganassi
 3.  Ryan Briscoe       Penske
 4.  Helio Castroneves  Penske
 5.  Danica Patrick     Andretti Green
 6.  Marco Andretti     Andretti Green
 7.  Dan Wheldon        Panther
 8.  Justin Wilson      Dale Coyne
 9.  Tony Kanaan        Andretti Green
10.  Graham Rahal       Newman/Haas/Lanigan
11.  Hideki Mutoh       Andretti Green
12.  Robert Doornbos    Newman/Haas/Lanigan
13.  Raphael Matos      Luczo Dragon
14.  Ed Carpenter       Vision
15.  Milka Duno         Dreyer & Reinbold
16.  Mario Moraes       KV
17.  Ryan Hunter-Reay   Foyt
18.  EJ Viso            HVM
19.  Mike Conway        Dreyer & Reinbold
20.  Will Power         Penske
21.  Jaques Lazier      3G
22.  Sarah Fisher       Sarah Fisher
23.  Tomas Scheckter    Dreyer & Reinbold