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IndyCar
FRANCHITTI: Street Fights and Strange Bets
"I see my little Brazilian friend is talking trash about me in his SPEEDtv.com column. You sure want to make that bet, TK? You’ve heard it here first, I accept!"
Dario Franchitti  |  Posted April 11, 2009   St. Petersburg, FL
The bet is officially on. These hairstyles could be reversed in short order. (LAT)
We had good weekend at St. Pete -- I was definitely feeling good being back in the Series, and I was getting a lot of enjoyment out of driving the car. To be back in the series was, that was all kind of contributing to my feeling. But I think the biggest thing, and anybody that knows me or worked with me will tell you, we were running up front and like many of us, that influences our mood. Had I showed up and been outside the top 10 I think you might've seen a different me…

People have asked how I’m coming along with learning to work with a new tea, and I can’t say yet because I don't know how good it's going to be. But I can say it's going very, very well. We're getting to the point where we're making smaller adjustments to the car; more refined improvements, and that’s a great sign at this early point of our relationship.

Even with the limited laps we did on Friday, we went through some big changes and it was clear what worked and what didn't work. That’s the learning process between a driver and an engineer. My engineer Chris Simmons and I, were like, “Yeah, we tried that, that really didn't work,” or, “Damn, that was a lot better so let's keep going in that direction!”

Let me put it another way, I'm starting to become part of the machine, if you know what I mean. They've got a very good system in place and it's worked well, I'm just sort of starting to contribute to a bigger part of that.

We’ve also tried swapping our settings back and forth between my car and Dixie’s (Scott Dixon) and we’ve found that Scott and I need different setups to be comfortable.

If you imagine, there’s a base set up and Scott is slightly to one side of it and I'm slightly to another side of it. And I've seen that with other teammates, too, in the past, whether it’s TK (Tony Kanaan) or Paul Tracy, it's a common thing. You have that sort of thing that works as a base and then you go to your side of it depending on the balance you want.

Scott definitely tried some things that I liked in qualifying and it didn't work for him. With him and I we talk about the technique we use for getting through different corners as well, and there's some areas that I was doing a better job than him and there’s some areas he was doing a better job than me, and as we've talked about before, as we've seen with Barber, it's a good way to build forward, it is a good way for both cars to just push each other on and prod each other.

Qualifying was good, but certainly not great. After some observations in the second round qualifying we made a couple of changes for the Fast Six. We ran the Firestone red tires at the end of second round qualifying and we felt there was a couple of things that we could've made better. So we went in that direction. I can't get into the specifics, obviously, but we completely screwed up the car's handling. And on my first timed lap, I made a slight mistake into turn one but the rest of the lap was good.

Unfortunately, I lost time on that lap and after that, the car had just gone off already. We just weren’t as fast as we were in the earlier sessions. I really felt that we had the car for pole, but we were going to make it better, and it just didn't work out. That’s part of a learning process, isn’t it?

Let’s talk about the start of the race -- that was the most fun thing I’ve done in a racecar in some time!
Dario came away from St. Pete with good points, a warm reception from the fans, and a move that's surely 'Pass of the Year' material. (LAT)

I got the idea to take the inside line from you brother Marino -- he blew by the lot of them in the first corner in 2007 in first race in the Andretti Green Acura by going down the inside. I had my eyes closed at the time, and when I opened them, he showed up in P1 from way back! And I thought to myself, “Wow…I’ve got to tuck that one away and use it myself…”

In the morning I had gone out to practice with cold tires and said, “Okay, where do I have to brake here on the inside line?” So I knew exactly what my point was where I had to brake in order to make the corner. Pulling up to the start I got a good, really good run on Tony and I was drafting him. By the time I got to the start-finish I was contemplating pulling out. So I start pulling out on Tony and I think for whatever reason he was coming across, he moved over quite a lot; there was definitely something on his outside.

At that point Graham braked when I was alongside of Tony and I was looking over and I could see the brake marker boards on the outside and I wasn’t anywhere near the point I knew I had to brake yet, so I just waited…and waited…and waited…I was already alongside Graham and Graham saw me there and gave me room. It worked perfectly -- I didn’t lock a brake and pulled the pass off just as I’d hoped.

I touched the inside curb but that was about it. It was all fairly sort of calm and relaxed. But I heard TK describe it as a dive bomb, which wasn't really true. There was no desperation there; it was planned and worked perfectly.

We were on the standard black tires at the start, there was a point between the laps 3 and I guess 10 or something and I was catching Justin Wilson really quickly and I thought I was going to have a good chance at passing him and then he started to pull a little bit of a gap. And then from that point I had a problem with the car, it was the one problem I really had all day, which was using the tires up really quickly. And for the last 10 or 15 laps of the stint were really spent managing the tires instead of continuing to push, so that really hurt me in the first stint. And then the yellow came just when we didn't need it. I think Briscoe had just pitted before that.

That changed the race for us and many others. There were some people ahead who jumped up the ranks who didn't pit or who pitted much earlier. I don't think they were probably as quick as Justin and myself, but we worked through a couple of them and a couple took care of themselves…

We ran on the reds in the second stint and the car was pretty good. I had the same problem of killing the tires and I think we know what we did wrong with that; we've got a really good idea what we did with the set up to cause that. So we won't be doing that again! The third stint we ran the reds again and those stints were really fast, but unfortunately, we were stuck in traffic. TK passed me, after some guys went off on turn one. One guy went wide and then came back on and pushed me wide too and that got me on the marbles, which I was lucky not to stick it in the wall, and then Tony passed us both. I managed to get back past Tony and that put us back in fourth.

If I could have gotten a clear track, I feel we had the car to go after a win. The car was good between the laps between 4 and 15 in a stint, and so if we’d had gotten a 4 to 15 lap run it would've been good, but for those of you that saw the race, you know the runs were a little shorter because of all the yellows. That made it difficult, but it wasn’t a bad result for us at all. It wasn't a win but we earned some decent points, and I said to the guys afterwards, “We finished fourth and we've a long list of things we think we have to fix and can improve, so it's not a bad first weekend.”

As for my teammate…Scott had a nightmare weekend, really. In qualifying…things just didn't go his way…and the race…it was just one thing after another. That was it. I watched some of the race after and I was just like, damn, nothing went right for him. I was sitting in my pit box for a stop, and watched Will Power overshoot his pit box, killing Scott’s stop…I watched the comedy of Power’s team trying to pull the car away so Scott could pit. Poor guy. I thought we were unlucky with our pit strategy, but I’ve got nothing to complain about compared to what Scott went through.
The Franchitti brothers got the opportunity to share the weekend as Marino (L) drove his Lola-Mazda for team boss Rob Dyson (R) in the ALMS while Dario drove his Air Wick IndyCar for Chip Ganassi. (LAT)

I can’t tell you how nice it was to be back in the IndyCar Series, though. I got a lot of “Glad you’re back, Dario” comments throughout the paddock and from the fans. It was nice to be back for that reason as well but I think to see the difference in the unified series, both on the track and off, from the fans to the teams to the on track product, I was very impressed with it.

It was a “feel good” event for a couple of good guys in the Series, for sure. My mate Justin Wilson did everything that was asked of him in 2008. When the Newman Haas guys had to let him go it was nothing to do with Justin, it was just a financial decision. I think everybody knows that. I remember seeing him at the Rolex 24 in January walking around looking for a ride.

I don’t know if a lot of people know his nickname is “Bad Ass,” but I said, “Hey, Bad Ass, do you have anything yet?” He said, “No,” in a pretty dejected way. There was just nothing happening for him. I was starting to get a bit worried for him, but then he got the deal with Dale Coyne. I told Justin, “You made the absolute most of it, Mate.” That was definitely the best story of the weekend and I expect more of the same from him. It was really cool to see that.

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Dario Franchitti

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