Embarrassing. That is the only word (well, the only word fit for print) to describe my team’s performance in the ABC Supply/AJ Foyt 225 Indy car race at the Milwaukee Mile this weekend. Making things worse is that the race is named in honor of me and sponsored by our team sponsor who brought in over 600 guests to cheer us on.
We hired Paul Tracy to fill in for our driver Vitor Meira, who was hurt at Indy. Paul has won four times at Milwaukee so he knows how to get around that race track, a flat one-mile oval that can be very tricky. We knew it was a tough position for any driver to step into so we hired the best guy available. But not even the best driver can get around a track when the car is handling as bad as our car was this past weekend.
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With the short amount of track time you get (two hours, in our case) the car better be in the ballpark set-up wise. Our car wasn’t and we fuddled around with it for two practice sessions. For qualifying we went in a totally different direction. Hey, I figured we couldn’t get any worse and we might find something. We did because Paul ran his four quickest laps in qualifying with a set-up he hadn’t tried until that qualifying run.
We made a few more changes to the car for the race but you no longer get a race warm-up after qualifying so we really didn’t know how it would handle on long runs. When he went from 16th to 12th on the start, I thought it might turn out to be a happy ending for our ABC Supply team after all.
We found out pretty quick the No. 14 didn’t handle worth a damn after a few laps. Paul’s lap speeds dropped as quick as he dropped from 12th to last. He radioed in that it was too loose which meant that the back end wiggled so much that he felt like it was going to snap around on him any second. He had to tiptoe it into and around the turns.
Don’t get me wrong, Paul Tracy did a helluva job keeping it off the fence. I’m just really disappointed for him and our sponsor ABC Supply that we didn’t give him the car he deserved. It’s my team and I take full blame.
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