Race Report: Honda Indy Edmonton
EDMONTON, Canada July 25, 2010—When the going gets
tough, the tough get going. Vitor Meira and the ABC Supply
team did just that in the Honda Indy Edmonton Sunday
afternoon to bring the No. 14 home in 16th place and retain
their 12th place in the IZOD IndyCar Series standings.
From the outset, the team struggled to find the sweet spot
on the No. 14 car. A combination of a very rough, bumpy
track and several broken shocks kept the team scrambling as
the broken shocks weren’t figured out until after
qualifying. In the three preceding practice sessions, the
team made wholesale changes to the car with little effect on
the performance. Meira started 23rd in the 25-car field.
Frustration ran high but the team regrouped Saturday evening
and came up with a plan for race day.
In the morning warm-up, Meira said the car was a different
car-much better - but there was no time left to focus on the
one area that still needed work – the high-speed corners in
turns 9 and 13. Those corners proved to be the car’s
Achilles’ heel in the 95-lap race.
Starting on the black primary tires, Meira was running 22nd
in the early stages when he was asked how the car was
handling. Meira radioed back, “Very loose in the high-speed
corners.”
He made it to the first pit stop on lap 32, and the team put
on the red-rimmed alternate tires and took out two turns of
front wing to correct the loose condition in less than eight
seconds. By the time of his second stop on lap 47 during a
full course yellow, he was in 18th. Switching back to the
primary tires, they adjusted the front wing again.
Two more restarts were followed by two more full-course
yellows on laps 50 and 53 respectively. Meira went from 17th
to 14th in the lap 53 scramble going through turn 3. When
Marco Andretti passed him 10 laps later, he radioed in that
the car was still loose in turn 9. As teams started making
their final pit stops, Meira cycled up to 12th on lap 72. On
lap 73 he spun off the track in turn 2 and came back on in
turn 5, losing track position and five positions on the
scorecard.
When he radioed in “something was really wrong with the car”
on lap 74, the team told him to pit. They put on another set
of the red alternate tires and sent him out again in eight
seconds flat with Foyt telling him to feel it out. Soon
after, the team radioed him that they found his left rear
tire was flat.
“You had a tire going down which probably caused you to
spin,” Foyt said. “It should be fine now.”
Meira finished the final 20 laps of the 95-lap race without
incident.
“Every change we made in the race was in the right
direction,” Meira said afterwards. “But after qualifying, we
just had the morning warm-up to fix the car because it
changed completely after we found the damper problem. From
that point on, the weekend started all over. As competitive
as everybody is, it’s tough to come back and be as
competitive as we want with just half an hour of warm-up.
“It was a very hard weekend for the ABC/Foyt Racing team.
I’m glad we survived the race because it was definitely a
tough race, a lot of people had problems. There were a
select number of fast cars and definitely we have to study
what needs to be done here. Tough weekend, what can I say?”
Scott Dixon was given the checkered flag when Helio
Castroneves, who crossed the line first, was penalized for
blocking teammate Will Power on a lap 92 restart.
Castroneves ignored the black flag (and the radio command to
do a drive-through the pits) on the final three laps of the
race. Officials placed him 10th, the final car on the lead
lap. Second through fifth were Power, Dario Franchitti, Ryan
Briscoe and Ryan Hunter-Reay.
The series returns to action the weekend of August 8th at
Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course. The race will be televised by
Versus with the pre-race broadcast starting at 2:30pm ET.
Qualifying Report - Edmonton
EDMONTON, Canada July 24 — Vitor Meira will start
23rd in the ABC Supply Dallara/Honda Sunday afternoon as the
IZOD IndyCar Series wraps up its swing through Canada with
the Honda Indy Edmonton race. Will Power won the pole
position.
“It’s not a weekend we were expecting to be honest,” Meira
said immediately after the first round of qualifying. “We
came out of Toronto with a decent result, it wasn’t an
optimum weekend there but we learned a bunch of things. We
unloaded here and it wasn’t good, we have been chasing
--maybe even-- a moving target here. We don’t know where to
pinpoint where the problem is. We’re trying things, very
aggressive things. We’re going through every piece of
information we have, but so far, we have not figured out
what we can improve. We’re talking about a second here so
it’s not a small detail. Maybe it’s a lot of small things or
one big thing but we’ll keep our heads down and keep
working. We still have one practice left to get it right.”
As it turned out for qualifying, it was a big thing.
“We knew something went wrong in qualifying but weren’t sure
what,” said team owner A.J. Foyt. “We found out when we went
through the car and took everything apart, that one of the
new shocks that had been working well had blown a seal, so
for Vitor the car was running on just one rear shock instead
of two. It’s a rare thing to happen.”
The bumpy airport circuit took its toll on shocks and cars
-- several drivers found the tire barriers over the past two
days and nearly everyone had an off-track excursion at least
once.
The teams have a warm-up session Sunday morning to make
final tweaks to the race set-ups. The race will be run in
late afternoon with the green flag set to wave at 3:55 pm
local time. The pre-race broadcast begins on Versus at 5 pm
ET.
Notes & Quotes: Honda Indy Edmonton
• Vitor Meira returns to Edmonton after a one year
hiatus, and remembers: “The track is very bumpy. It’s a
track that you have to hustle at. The car is never going to
be perfect there because there’s so many different things
happening on the track. You have to make compromises in
order to make sure you have the car optimized in those areas
where you can make the most time. I think the back section
is key. There’s a second gear complex before that high speed
right-hander which comes right before the long straight,
getting through there and over those bumps is very
important. I also remember that it has a lot of marbles and
chews up tires so monitoring the tires will also be
critical.”
• Meira and his wife Adriana stayed in Toronto until
Wednesday: “We went to Niagara Falls on Tuesday. It was
only an hour and a half away. We saw the falls on the U.S.
side and it was really beautiful. We had lunch there and
then drove back to Toronto in the afternoon. That evening we
had dinner in the CN Tower. Adriana had to fly back to Miami
today [Wednesday] because she has to take some tests on
Thursday [studying for her MBA]. I’ll probably just work out
a lot in Edmonton.”
• On racing in Canada: “As a Brazilian, Canada felt a
lot like being in America—it didn’t feel much different. But
definitely there is a different crowd here—a lot of young
people which is a good thing for our future. They do know
their stuff about racing for sure.”
• At Toronto, Meira started 26th and finished 11th.
He was challenging for eighth with 10 laps to go when he
locked the brakes to avoid hitting Simona DeSilvestro who
slowed for a scramble ahead of her going into Turn 3 (but he
hit her anyway). They both continued but Meira’s tires were
blistered from the incident and he lost two spots in the
final six laps. He gained a position in the IZOD IndyCar
Series standings and is currently 12th.
• Past performance at Edmonton: In 2008, Meira
started 16th and finished 19th in the 4 car because he had a
mechanical problem with the steering that worsened as the
race went on. He finally pitted for repairs which took
several laps. Darren Manning started 18th and finished 10th
in the 14 car. In 2009, Ryan Hunter-Reay (subbing for Meira)
started 21st and by the final stint was challenging for 11th
when the rear stepped out and he did a quarter spin and
clipped the wall. The crew replaced the rear wing and he
rejoined the race, finishing 17th.
• The Honda Indy Edmonton will be broadcast live by
Versus this Sunday with the pre-race show starting at
5:00pm ET.
• For more information on the Foyt Racing program,
please check out: www.ajfoytracing.com . For information on
ABC Supply Co., go to: www.abcsupply.com.
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