Alex Tagliani will be working for RACER.com this year, answering reader's questions with his new “Ask Tag” column (see the end of this story). However, RACER editor David Malsher thought he'd jump in and get the Canadian IndyCar veteran to give a review of his season so far – the first, since the one-year-old FAZZT Race Team got rescued by Sam Schmidt Motorsports.
Q: It's an interesting development for your team in 2011. There haven't been the same highs as in 2010, but there appears to have been more consistency across the board.
AT: You're right. I think because it's more competitive this year, we need to get our ducks in a row and get more of our stuff together. Unfortunately, in the first four races, there was always something that didn't go quite right exactly when we needed it. For example, we had a decent qualifying session in St. Pete and qualified 10th, and we were close but we were coming from far back. During Friday, we were really out to lunch, so we had this recovery at the last minute, we put the reds on and the car was better. So we noticed that our setup has some major issue on blacks compared with reds, and we were thinking maybe we needed to fix it with some adjustments and be prepared for it, but perhaps we weren't aggressive enough with the changes. I think we were 0.25sec from getting in the Fast Six, but we were pleased we'd made a good recovery.
Then in Barber, a place that had been a big problem for us last year, gave us the same problems this year…but the car was better. We qualified 12th, which was a huge improvement because last year we were far back. What puzzled us was that in the race, we had the opposite problem to St. Pete: we put the reds on and we struggled. I had made a good start, and although I was not blocking Helio [Castroneves], I was definitely in his way, and thankfully it's a tough track to pass. Anyway, I destroyed the front tires in a flash and basically the same thing that happened to Danica happened to us; we slipped to 1.5sec off the pace. We put the blacks on and the car was better balanced, but not as much speed.
So, two races and opposite problems happening to us on opposite types of track – one a bumpy street course, the second a smooth road course – but we applied what we'd learned when we reached Long Beach. That goes to show the quality of this Sam Schmidt Motorsports team. Right away, instead of being out to lunch like in St. Pete, we were a lot closer. We were between P4 and P7 the whole time.
Another problem was every time I put new tires on, I couldn't put a lap in. My times were better on scuffed tires with one outing, than on a fresh set of tires. You think, "OK, maybe we got the tire pressures wrong, or maybe I didn't put all segments together, or I hit traffic," and so on. You start second-guessing yourself. But, in reality, what was happening, I think, was that we again were missing a little something on the primary-tire setup. We over compensated with the alternate reds, so we just missed that Fast Six – by much less than in St. Pete.
Q: Yeah, you were actually less than 0.1sec from getting through which is pretty good considering you're up against three Penskes, four Ganassis, four Andretti Autosport cars, two Newman/Haas cars and Justin Wilson.
AT: Right. In Qualifying 1, I did a 1:09.5, in Q2, I did 1:09.6, and my earlier time would have transferred us.
So like you said, we have been a bit more consistent. Barber on race day was my mistake: I should have walked out of there with a top-eight finish and been pleased with the points, but we had a loose car, I got surprised with the balance on blacks and lost the car in Turn 16. Totally my fault. And, in Long Beach, I think we had a decent car – not the fastest one when we needed, but it was OK in the second segment on blacks when I was behind the two Ryans, Briscoe and Hunter-Reay. But when we put on the reds, we weren't as quick as Mike Conway, Hunter-Reay and Will Power.
Q: So, like a lot of teams, you've had quite a re-learning process this year.
AT: Yeah, we've learned a bit more on tires, a bit more on balance and the right stuff to have on the car at the right time to try and maximize every qualifying lap. Because the level of competition is higher, you cannot afford to second-guess yourself on setup – and that's especially important for us as a single-car team. The problem is, you look at Andretti, Penske, Ganassi and Newman/Haas – our main competition – and they have multiple entries. They don't second-guess and they never take risks. When Conway didn't like his car in Long Beach, he took Hunter-Reay's setup. And it's not just that he gets given a good setup: his own problems mean Mike and his engineer then also know what doesn't work, and so you've halved the work. Both drivers know that Conway's setup doesn't work and both know that Hunter-Reay's does. So when they're looking for direction in how to get a better balance, they've narrowed down the elements that take the car closer to what the driver needs. For us, it's different: 99.9 percent of the time, it's considered as a risk, because we don't have proof of what works and what doesn't. Every adjustment we try, we tried ourselves, by trial and error; that's the only way we'll know.
Q: And that's hard if you're in the top 10 in the championship so you don't get that extra practice session on Friday morning.
AT: Exactly! I can tell you how many changes you can make in just two practice sessions – not many! You do 12 laps, and you'll do one change. Then you go back to the trailer, and you prepare for the Friday afternoon session, when you maybe do three or four changes. Then you go back to the trailer and discuss it…but don't try and reinvent the wheel. You can't dare try something in the Saturday morning session in case it doesn't work, and then you haven't enough time to both fix it and also try setups for qualifying. No. Instead, that whole Saturday morning session needs to be dedicated to qualifying simulation and nothing else.
So you see why one car is at such a disadvantage to multi-car teams. That is exactly why Allen [McDonald, race engineer] always warns that there's only a 50/50 chance a change could work, especially when you make a change before qualifying and especially when you make changes for tires which we may not have tried before. Firestone provides us with great tires, but there are some differences between some compounds compared to last year and there is a bigger difference between blacks and reds this year. This is super-positive because it makes for great racing, but when the level of competition is so tight and 0.1sec can decide whether you are sixth or ninth, you don't have room for even the slightest error. Sometimes we're reluctant to make a change because it could swing either way: If we do 1:09.5 at Long Beach, a slight alteration could take a tenth off, which will put us into the Fast Six, or it can add a tenth and drop us three places on the grid!