Rd.9 TEXAS RACING REPORT BY MARCUS SIMMONS
Just a few days after all the drama of Detroit Belle Isle, where Takuma Sato took a superb second place in the Verizon IndyCar Series, came Texas Motor Speedway. Down south, the #14 AJ Foyt Racing Dallara-Honda simply lacked speed, and Sato could only take a 16th-place finish in a race that featured just one caution period, for debris.
“A lot more calm, yes,” he agreed, “but it was very busy in the cockpit! I wish we’d had a little bit more yellows, since we weren’t very competitive.”
Things had looked much more promising in the opening practice session, where Sato was third fastest and the leading Honda runner. “It looked OK,” he agreed, “but on oval tracks the times can be artificial in practice because you get tows. We had only one practice before qualifying and the aero configuration had been changed since the Indy 500 – the last oval track we raced on – to go back to the 2014 Dallara main plane on the rear wing. There were some other aero modifications to stop the cars flipping over, so we had a lot to test and it was quite unknown how much downforce we could take off for qualifying.
“There was quite a lot of freedom, and we didn't have to run the same aero configuration in qualifying as we used in the race, so you could add the extra winglets if you wanted them in the race. So there were many different configurations you could choose! In qualifying you want to reduce drag, which is how we ran in free practice, so of course I was optimistic, so we thought let’s go a little bit further for qualifying, but things didn’t go as planned.”
Qualifying certainly wasn’t a disaster, but Taku would line up a disappointed 13th on the grid. “We were thinking of trimming the car to go faster on the straight, but you lose traction as well if you do that,” he continued. “That sounds like something you only need coming out of a hairpin, but you also need it at over 200mph. If not enough downforce, scrubbing the front tyre, and all four tyres slide, so although you have low drag you’re not gaining speed. It’s very related to ambient temperature; if it’s a cold day you get rid of drag so fast, but Texas was over 90 degrees ambient temperature and over 120 track temperature. So, although I was able to clock a very similar speed to practice, everyone else went faster and I was 13th.”
Fastest Honda runner was Carlos Munoz, in fourth, and Sato revealed: “He had a speedway winglet, which in theory is a couple of mph slower, but you could go more aggressive on the centre of pressure with extra downforce to try to reduce the slides and go faster. And I know because Garrett Mothersead, his engineer, was my old engineer from KV Racing Technology and we used to do that. Very impressive run!”
Then came a post-qualifying practice, on Friday evening, to try to get the cars right in the conditions that would be present for the Saturday evening race. The team was happy with the data, but now came the conundrum of setting up the car for a race that would begin in sunlight and go into the dark.
“IndyCar have set a maximum rear wing angle of minus six degrees, but you could put a lot of road-course stuff on too for winglets. My team-mate Jack Hawksworth tried heavier downforce, which makes it easier to control the car. We studied a couple of other cars and decided to go for medium downforce, and were confident that after a few stints when we were past sunset the cooler conditions would mean we were OK, but no they didn’t.”
Straight away there were problems, and Taku settled into a hard race. “We had big understeer at the beginning of the race,” he said. “Every pit stop we were winding up the front wing, and also we couldn’t even do a full stint on fuel. After 30 laps the tyre degradation was massive and costing us more than 10mph average speed, so we were short-fuelling to try to go faster on tyres.”
Whatever was tried, the handling wouldn’t hit the sweet spot: “We went from one extreme to the other on the anti-roll bar, from setting 1 at the softest to 6 at the stiffest, and on the weightjacker from -10 to +10, which accounts for more than 70 pounds of crossweight. You can imagine how dramatically the balance was shifting and when I protect front then rear gave up and I protect rear then front gave up. I was struggling for grip big time.”
Even strategy calls, which paid off so well in the Indy 500, didn’t work this time as at the only caution Sato lost even more time. “We got a wave-by after the leading runners had pitted and did our pit stop,” he said, “and as I and other two teams came out of the pits the pace car came past. It was by less than a second, but we were penalised and given a stop-go in the pits, which in green-flag conditions cost me almost two laps.”
Eventually, it became a case of plugging away to the finish and gaining the points. “I tried hard, but whatever we did it was not possible to get a good result,” he said. “Everyone did their best but the car simply wasn’t fast enough.”
With the IndyCar season in full swing, there’s now just a few days for the crews to reassemble north of the border for the annual round in Toronto. “Detroit and Toronto have some similarities – very bumpy with a lot of surface changes,” said Taku. “So I hope we’ll be competitive there – let’s see what happens!”
