It's Blogtastic!: Mountains and valleys...

Ups and downs make up the racing life. We began on Wednesday flying out in the morning to setup, but ChampCar only allows 3 people per team into the track on ‘load-in’ day. They also limit the amount of work done. Usually on Wednesday, teams are only allowed to setup the awnings, kiwi tile and the equipment under the tent. The team has 3 total ‘truckies’, which filled one team’s worth of people to setup. Our crew chief picked 2 other mechanics, in addition to himself, to make up the other setup group. Unfortunately, he forgot they close the paddock at 5:00 pm. We arrived so late in the day, by the time that group got to the track it was too late to get anything done. The #14 side was able to get the awning up and the tile down before the track closed. For those of us who didn’t have to go to the track, this did allow for a nice evening! A few of us walked around the 16th Street Mall area, ate, and visited some of the stores.

Thursday was uneventful, and we left the track pre

tty early (around 3:00 pm). Having an early day, one of my fellow co-workers wanted to take a trip to Central City, which was near where he used to live. It was a beautiful drive winding through a canyon right through an area which used to boom with gold mining. The city now has been developed quite a bit by gambling outfits, which is a disappointment. We drove past all the commercialism to go see the old, original section of town. We parked as we entered town, and walked around the rest of the time.

Friday was a long one for both sides because the cars seemed ‘out to lunch’. Neither car did well in practice or qualifying. The day was especially long for the #4 team, as we had to do an engine change after the qualifying session. Miniscule hiccups would end up giving us quite a delay that evening!

Saturday was extremely busy because we changed the differential format completely after practice. The ‘Imagineers’ (as we sometimes call them!) decided to change to completely different differentials. The cars were a little faster, but definitely not setting the world on fire! After getting through qualification, we repeated ‘splitting’ the car as we had done the previous night, to do the final race prep. The ‘diff’ we ran requires more maintenance then the previous one, so we had to pull it out to check measurements and change the setup. The mechanics had done some pretty drastic setup changes both Friday and Saturday. The engineers finally ha

d gotten an idea of what worked, and the mechanics applied it to the race setup.

Sunday morning warmup went very well, and the cars’ performance seemed to have improved greatly! Both drivers continued to gain confidence in their cars, and were optimistic for the race. The start was pretty clean, except for an incident where Alex Tagliani spun Paul Tracy around in turn 1. During the first portion of the race, many of the cars were very ‘loose’ and Nelson was no exception! He pitted early and took on tires and fuel. He was happy to have gotten rid of the ‘reds’ - an alternate compound tire which is usually has better performance than the standard tire. They are termed ‘reds’ because they have a red stripe on the sidewall, as opposed to the standard tire (called ‘black-walls’ or ‘blacks’). After that pit he told us the car was much better and was persistent to not make any more changes.

Dan’s car was handling very well and his pit crew had great stops. The #4 car had a detrimental failure with a wheel gun during the 2nd pit stop, and that cost us some precious time and 2 spots on the track. Because of his early stop in the beginning, Nelson was tight on fuel at the end of the race and had to conserve during his second stint. A late crash between Paul Tracy and Sebastian Bourdais helped get Dan his first ChampCar podium finishing 3rd, and Nelson his sixth top five! This 5th place also moved Nelson from 9th up to (tie for) 4th in the championship points! We began the weekend with a couple of mediocre cars and turned it around to have a great finish!