IndyCar Returns To Road America For Practice Day
- Updated: September 22, 2015
Scott Dixon exits turn six at Road America during a practice day for the IndyCar Series. [John Wiedemann Photo]
Sunny skies and a surprisingly large week-day crowd greeted five Verizon IndyCar Series teams (10 cars) as IndyCar held a test at Road America in preparation for next June’s return of the series to America’s National Park of Speed.
In a nutshell, here are some notes and comments gathered during the lunch break after the first four hours of practice.
• Observers thought that perhaps a thousand open-wheel fans paid to have paddock access and roam the winding, four-mile RA circuit to watch teams from: Rahal Letterman Lanigan (Graham Rahal); AJ Foyt (Takuma Sato); Carpenter Fischer Hartman(Josef Newgarden); Chip Ganassi (Dixon, Kanaan, Kimball) and Penske (Montoya, Pagenaud, Castroneves, Power). Sato, Kimball and Newgarden haven’t raced here before.
• The track record for Indy cars here is 1min: 39.86 set by Dario Franchitti in 2000 at a CART race. Sebastien Bourdais ran a lap at 1min: 41.535 in the last Indy car/Champ Car race here in 2007.
• Ganassi managing Director Mike Hull on testing at Road America: “Today’s test will put us in good stead for when we come back in June. It’s a long way around 14 corners, so we can gather a lot of info and get it done in a short period of time. The track is pretty high in grip level even with your harsh Wisconsin winters. It’s a good day for all of us to be back.”
• Tony Kanaan comparing 2002 with 2015: “The first lap today was fun. A lot of good memories came back from the last time I was here in 2002. My speed came up quick, but I forgot how long the carousel curve is and the strain it puts on your neck. I had to put a pad next to my head to keep it up under the g-force. We’re quicker through the corners with this car but slower on the straights than the old car. Overall we’re a couple of seconds slower than 2002 this morning.
• Scott Dixon on getting around a somewhat familiar circuit: “The track has changed a bit over time. The hard part on a long track like this is putting together a whole lap. This car requires a lot of momentum, so if you miss one corner, it affects your whole lap. The carousel is almost flat-out already; corner speeds are up. I think the record is a .39 and we’re about a .43 or.44, so we’ve got a ways to go.”
• Helio Castroneves on speeds here: “Our straightaway speeds back in 2001 were 10-15 mph faster back then when we had almost a 1,000 horsepower, but the corners are faster now.”
• Simon Pagenaud on using the test for preparation: “Since we don’t have much, if any, testing anymore, we have a whole long list of things we’re going to address today. I’ve been here in a sports car quite a bit and you can really play with the car here and challenge it in the corners. You can extract a lot of information out of the cars here. It’s a good place to understand the package that you have in the car.”
• Graham Rahal on how his car reacted in the morning test: “I was impressed today with how the car pulled on the top end. Top speeds were down a little compared to our 2007 Champ Cars-but just a bit. But if Dixon is almost flat out in the Carousel, he’s way ahead of me. I’m nowhere near flat there. Maybe the balance of my car isn’t good enough.”
Paul Gohde heard the sound of race cars early in his life.
Growing up in suburban Milwaukee, just north of Wisconsin State Fair Park in the 1950’s, Paul had no idea what “that noise” was all about that he heard several times a year. Finally, through prodding by friends of his parents, he was taken to several Thursday night modified stock car races on the old quarter-mile dirt track that was in the infield of the one-mile oval -and he was hooked.
The first Milwaukee Mile event that he attended was the 1959 Rex Mays Classic won by Johnny Thomson in the pink Racing Associates lay-down Offy built by the legendary Lujie Lesovsky. After the 100-miler Gohde got the winner’s autograph in the pits, something he couldn’t do when he saw Hank Aaron hit a home run at County Stadium, and, again, he was hooked.
Paul began attending the Indianapolis 500 in 1961, and saw A. J. Foyt’s first Indy win. He began covering races in 1965 for Racing Wheels newspaper in Vancouver, WA as a reporter/photographer and his first credentialed race was Jim Clark’s historic Indy win.Paul has also done reporting, columns and photography for Midwest Racing News since the mid-sixties, with the 1967 Hoosier 100 being his first big race to report for them.
He is a retired middle-grade teacher, an avid collector of vintage racing memorabilia, and a tour guide at Miller Park. Paul loves to explore abandoned race tracks both here and in Europe, with the Brooklands track in Weybridge England being his favorite. Married to Paula, they have three adult children and two cats.
Paul loves the diversity of all types of racing, “a factor that got me hooked in the first place.”