Dario Franchitti shares the happenings in his world during a busy August, including his win at Sonoma and the silly string fight that broke out in victory circle.
In honor of the kids at Target House, Dario's victory circle celebrations in Sonoma were interrupted by a massive Silly String fight -- big enough to cover much of his Target IndyCar. (LAT)
Well Sonoma was about as good as it gets!
I really think qualifying was the key -- getting those laps done in qualifying and placing our Target car up front. It just allowed us to control the whole race from there, and after making good fuel mileage in the first stint, that was it. I wish all the races were that straightforward!
It started for us Saturday morning; it was a two-day event, so practice time was very limited, especially with the incident involving Will and Nelson, (get well soon, boys). By the end of practice, we were P1 so we got the car doing kind of what we wanted to do and it seemed fairly quick. But the key was definitely in qualifying there. There’s Q1 -- we were okay there, we just did what we had to do to get through. In Q2, I think we did the quickest lap of the weekend and it was then we knew the pace was in the car. That set the stage for the Firestone Fast Six.
As soon as I did that fast lap in Q2 they told me: straight in the pit, pit, pit, pit, come in. They didn't want to abuse the tires at all so we had the best chance in the Fast Six. It's kind of weird; the car has so much grip on those Firestone Reds when they’re new. For those that watched qualifying -- the problem we had and the reason I went off -- we were braking so late and the braking zones were so short, it caused a small issue with the gearbox. The bloody thing wouldn't downshift fast enough!
I drove up the hill on a flyer, went into turn 2, attempted to go down the box, I went from 6th to 5th and every subsequent time I pulled on the downshift lever, all that happened was it blipped the throttle and it didn't downshift…so I ended up accelerating into the corner faster!
It made us end up on the gravel like we did. But it was fine, within three corners the tires felt good again and it was just a case of regrouping and going forward. It wasn’t the first time I’d visited the dirt in turn 2…I spun there in 2005. We had that single lap qualifying and I went up there -- we’d been quickest in practice -- I pressed the brakes and I didn't heat them up properly on the warm-up lap and the thing just swapped ends. That was the end of our weekend really, so I guess this year was pretty much the opposite of that.
Having watched the race the day after from home, I didn't realize how action-packed the start was. I was already focused on turn 3 and clear of the field – I couldn’t see what developed behind me. Until I watched the race and I saw obviously some piece of carbon on the track when I came round on the yellow but I had no idea how crazy it'd been. I saw all the madness behind and I thought, “Wow,” it was all going on. I mean, literally from the first lap to the last lap there was some crazy stuff going on. And it seemed that Scott, unfortunately, was the guy that was getting the bad end of things…whether he was being taken out at the first corner or taken out at the last corner, he was involved and it was just madness.
I managed to make a good start; I kind of turned the tables on Briscoe. I did to him what Will Power had done to me at Long Beach. And I was able to get a really good start and pull quite a good lead and then the yellow came out. From there, our car was definitely better on cold tires than Ryan’s, so we pulled out a bit.
Ryan came up to me after the race and said, “Man, I got a real good look at your rear wing the whole day.” It was one of those deals though I knew he was going to struggle to pass me because of the nature of the track, so didn’t really try to gap him that much. We just saved fuel and controlled things without pushing unnecessarily hard.
I kept a good pace, I managed to save fuel, and I think the key there was right at the end of the first stint. I turned right at the final hairpin and I heard Ryan go past, still up-shifting, headed for the pits and I thought, “Yes, I got you by one more lap.” I had a clear in-lap that time and I was able to do a good out-lap on cold tires. We managed to pull a good gap and then I just set a pace that I was comfortable with. Ryan caught back up and we were able to go a lap longer again on the second stop. We could've gone further I think but there was really no benefit to doing that. And we put used Red tires on because they were so much better over the race than the Blacks were.
The pace was different and actually they were more consistent, which was bizarre, but everybody seemed happier on Reds. And you can see that by the way Helio caught us when we were on Blacks in his second stint, he was catching us like a second a lap. But then the last stint actually created the biggest problem for me because we came across the #23 car, just cruising. We talked about that at the drivers meeting and there was supposed to be a 107% rule or something because it's quite dangerous.
And I had actually brought up the question, “What would happen if that car wasn't up to speed?” And they said it would be parked but it seemed to be whenever we came up to lap that car they’d pull up the pits but, unfortunately, near the end there I came out of turn 7 through the esses and I could see the car, and I don’t know what speed it was doing but...
It was unbelievable and I thought, “Oh, man, this is a problem because Ryan is going to get a run here.” Briscoe and I were talking about it afterwards. “I used my sportscar experience there, Ryan.” I just backed him up, backed him up…until I could make a run for it up through the last part of turn 8, through the esses there but, unfortunately, it nearly cost us the race and it's disappointing that that kind of stuff is allowed. The Indycar series isn’t a training ground....
