KANAAN: A Wild Weekend in St. Pete

IndyCar

KANAAN: A Wild Weekend in St. Pete

2004 IndyCar champ Tony Kanaan shares his thoughts on the St. Pete IRL opener last weekend in his exclusive SPEEDtv.com column. Prepare to laugh!

Tony Kanaan | http://www.TonyKanaan.com.br | Posted April 08, 2009 Miami, FL

Depending on who wins first, the hair situation in front of you could change drastically if Dario accepts Tony's challenge. (LAT)

I think the best way to describe the St. Petersburg IndyCar race last weekend is to say that it showed us it's going to be a very tough championship; it's more competitive than ever.

That's the reality of the season right there.

Who would bet that Ryan Hunter-Reay with no testing and Justin Wilson with Dale Coyne would finish in the top three? If you had asked that question before, nobody would have considered that, and that's how competitive the series is right now.

So before we get going too far, let’s talk about the unfortunate situation at the beginning of the race where I touched Graham Rahal…I was kind of scared to come back to the pits and have the police arrest me for reckless driving from the start…

In all seriousness, I saw Graham after the race and he obviously wasn't very happy with me. I explained to him what happened – it was a chain of reaction. I tried to give him a hug and a kiss but he didn't want it! Dario dive bombed me and him and Graham tried to avoid the collision with Dario and then he slowed down and I was already picking up on the inside line.

If I was trying to pass him and then hit him he could be really mad at me, but I was just trying to hang in there and pull myself back in behind a couple of cars that I had lost position to. It's not like, “Oh man, I made a huge mistake because I tried to decide the race on the first corner,” so he understood. I texted him later on that night, as well. He's a good kid and we’re friends. I feel bad but it happens. It's racing. Its happened to me many times before.

Let me say, the first race of the years is always….different.

I've been doing this for quite a while but it takes a little bit of time to adjust when you get to the track. You spend six months out of the spotlight and then you get there and you no longer belong to yourself.

Between Wednesday and Sunday I probably did 50 interviews. Signed probably 2,500 autographs. Had four dinners. Seven appearances on track. And I had to drive the race car for five sessions. So it is kind of busy! None of it is negative – it’s just a big culture shock.

The best description, I would say, is that it's like a guy that’s used to living in the hills comes to New York to spend four days. You’re used to waking up in the morning and hear the birds and see horses and grass, all calm, and then you wake up the next morning and then there's horns, cars, traffic, people bumping into you. You can get kind of lost in the first two days of each new IndyCar season, for sure.

St. Petersburg started off for me on Wednesday, having to go to do all my appearances and such, but as far as the race car, Friday it rained in the morning and the track was pretty wet. In the first session, it lasted until the final five minutes. The track got kind of dry and I decided not to go out because I wanted to save my tires. I knew I had a good car because it is the same car as last year, that car started on the pole. So I was pretty confident in what we had. So we decided to start out on the second session and it worked out pretty good for us because we had an extra set of tires for the race.

I wasn’t extremely happy with the car, but qualifying was really fun. I barely made it between Q1 and Q2, which made me nervous. But I was so excited because it's nice when the competition is at that level because once you get into Q1, you really accomplished something. It was still really hard, very physically and mentally demanding and it was very stressful in that manner.

The competition I mentioned is just incredible this year. First, Dario’s back. There is some shuffling of the drivers and teams, but the teams that joined us last year from CART that had no experience, they now have one good year behind them and are ready to fight.

Then you have Justin Wilson joining Dale Coyne’s team that showed on the street and road courses last year that they are very capable with Bruno Junqueira and Mario Moraes. Then you have Ryan Hunter-Reay whose always been good, joining Tony George’s team. Briscoe has a year under his belt at Penske, Will Power is now at Penske…

So basically there was four or five guys last year, this year it’s like eight or nine. Dan Wheldon is at Panther and he feels better out there, he feels more welcome. Some of the cars we had between third and eighth in qualifying were separated by less than half a second. I mean, half a second, you make a mistake in one corner and it’s 2/10ths…and we had 13 corners to deal with.

Working with the new Firestone tires was interesting – the ‘Reds’ as they call them. It’s a softer tire so it has more overall grip but also wears quicker. Depending on what kind of setup you have, it will suit some people better or worse.

For some it’s a half a second improvement, for some, like me, it was only 2/10ths because my car was really close on setup with both tires. For us it wasn't a huge change from reds to regular tires, but it was a new thing to get used to -- we had never done it before. We only had two sets and saved them for qualifying. We didn't use the first set as well as we should because we made a change and the car wasn't good enough, but they were definitely better.

TK's 5th place at St. Petersburg came with a few bumps and bruises...he tried to kiss and make up but was refused! (LAT)

They were definitely not lasting as long as the blacks but that's the beauty of it all, and I think that's what the IRL is trying to do.

With the tire options, there’s going to be more strategy required, and I like that. It takes a lot of thinking and takes a lot of driving because I know you can put on the reds and you have a decent car but you can also make a difference yourself as a driver by saving the reds a little bit in the beginning or stretching them until the end like Ryan Hunter-Reay did and still manage drive the piss out of it.

It’s more complicated for us, but this sport isn’t meant to be simple. It’s complex and that’s a good thing.

I’d hoped to be fastest all weekend and to win the race going away from the other guys; that’s every driver’s goal, but it was not to be. I wasn't very happy with the car the whole time, but the way I approach the week is this: you put the car out in the session, you try to improve it and as the weekend goes on you know exactly what you have in your hands and you know exactly how much you can make up the difference with your driving.

I evaluated the car I had, I wasn't extremely happy because we drivers, we’re never happy. You’re never going to see a guy that says, “We had a great car but I could have had this or that better.” The car is never perfect, so we’re always finding way to make it perform better. But sometimes when it isn’t fast enough, you have to ‘make it’ go faster.

Basically, I knew in qualifying that I had a top-five car and then I qualified third because I knew that I had a couple extra tenths in my pocket to give.

So, as a driver you can make a difference – a lot more in the street courses than in the oval. When I say I wasn't extremely happy, I mean I was a 1/10th away to be on the pole. The car was 3/10th away, and Tony Kanaan only had 2/10ths extra to make up for the car. I should have had 3/10ths. What could I have done to gain that one extra 1/10th on my car?

Maybe I need espresso and Red Bull in my drink bottle! Maybe to hold my breath for a little longer because on that lap, I didn't breathe at all! A guy like me that has such a big nose is used to having a lot of airflow into my lungs…it wasn't a fun thing to do, trust me.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tony Kanaan

TonyKanaan.com.br

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