Dario Franchitti Q&A

"People have been saying that we found the speed, but that's not the case. We practiced at 228.7mph last week before qualifying on my own with no tows and the car was well balanced. We knew we weren't going to contend for the pole, but we thought we were looking good. Then we went to qualify and it was 226.5, so we waved it off and thought, 'Where did the speed go?' We pushed our engine pretty hard and think it went sick before qualifying and that's where our speed went. We came back this week with the same car and ran the speed we thought we were capable of. So it was a long and frustrating week. It was tough not to have done it last week, particularly with the CART testing."



"Sure, I think Tony Kanaan (at Mo Nunn Racing) and Chip Ganassi's drivers had an advantage. We have enough on our plate right now to preclude Team Green from doing that, but I think it certainly did help those guys with the experience. These cars are very, very different from a CART car. There is a lot less horsepower and a completely different aero package. Because the engines are normally aspirated, they're more sensitive to weather. It's just a completely different way of going racing. In the CART championship, the engine is Honda's thing. Here you're doing everything, really, so it was a learning curve."



"I think we have 19 2002-spec cars in the shop. The distracting thing was the transition from Reynard to Lola, which was something we didn't think we'd ever have to do. When we agreed to come over and do the Indy 500, that was never an issue. We were running Reynards and that was quite good, but when Reynard went out of business, things changed rapidly. We've gone from having cars prepared to all of a sudden having these cars we've never run before that we have to prepare. That's been a lot of work for the guys. If you watch how hard guys like Kyle Moyer are working, it's amazing. It seems he's everywhere. I've been lucky because I have my CART guys, with my crew chief George Klotz. And my IRL crew chief Dave Popielarz has worked with us before, so I have two basic teams, but there are a few guys on the team who are doing everything. Tomorrow we head to Mid-Ohio for a two-day engine test with Honda. It's almost like a 9-to-5 at the moment."



"We used this week to work on race set-up and we had done some work last week as well. So I think we're in pretty good shape. You can always hope for another day to run to perfect this or that, but we have what we've got and we're pretty happy. But I don't know what to expect. I've never driven an IRL car in a race, or raced at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. From that point of view, I'm going in blind to a certain degree. In a CART car, I have an idea how much understeer I should dial into the car, or how it's going to react through a race. Here I'm winging it, so it's certainly going to be exciting."



"Those guys have serious accomplishments, when you look at Jimmy Clark winning the event and Jackie Stewart doing very well. Those are big footsteps to be treading in and come race time I hope I can do a decent job. They were pretty awesome here, as they were everywhere. I talked with Jackie in December about running on ovals and he shared some of his experiences from here. To be able to talk to Jimmy Clark and ask him would be amazing, but obviously that's not possible. But he and Jackie were my heroes."