Notebook: Another day, another face

When Ray joined Team Menard in 1999, he brought long-time team manager and engineer Thomas Knapp with him and the combination delivered the Indy Racing League championship that same season. But after getting off to a slow start in 2000, team owner John Menard fired Knapp midway through the campaign and replaced him with Mitch Davis, who had worked with Jeff Ward at Pagan Racing.

Davis left Menard at the beginning of this season to help form Heritage Motorsports, which is co-owned by Jim Rathmann Jr and John Mecom III. So Ray began this season with Darrell Soppe as the engineer at Menard.

But, after another poor start to the season, Menard fired Soppe earlier this week. Dallara engineer Maurizio Nardon will serve as a consultant for Team Menard on Sunday.

"I don't think there is a deal, I think the biggest issue we have had is lack of continuity," Ray said. "I worked with Tom Knapp from 1992 until the middle of last season. There were some personal issues there, certainly not a performance issue, so they brought in a new engineer and things didn't work out there. So they brought in somebody else and that didn't work so now they have brought in somebody else.

"I think the biggest issue if you take a step back and look at it is that Team Menard has always been one of the most competitive teams. There are teams that spend more money in some areas than we do, but we are not hurting for the things we think we want or need to make the car go faster. John Menard supplies us with great resources to give us the foundation to get the job done. When you bring in a new engineer to a team that has such a heritage, they want to add to what we have."

Ray said that during that span, the IRL chassis has changed along with the tyre compound used by Firestone, while the baseline set-up at Team Menard has remained the same.

"I even had to question myself," Ray said. "I feel like, I'm in the prime of my life. I'm in the best shape of my life and I work harder mentally and physically than I ever have. My desire is huge. I want to win, but you still question yourself. If you don't, you are naïve - you are a fool. But it's the whole package that has to come together because this series has become so competitive, if you aren't hitting it right; you are going to go backwards. We kind of fell out of tune."

Ray said he relishes the time he spent with Knapp, but he had to adapt when new people were brought in to run the organisation.

"There were issues John Menard had personally, so those people decided to do something else," Ray said. "Our last engineer, Darrell Soppe, he didn't know he was going to be working for us until four days before the first race. A lot of the things didn't have the long-term look and we had to do something. But the people we brought in were put in a very tough situation.

"It hasn't been fair to anybody, it was just circumstances. Darrell is a great friend and one of the smartest people on the planet. We had a good rapport."

Ray said a major issue in Soppe's dismissal is that Menard began to look ahead to next year and lay the foundation for a run at the championship in 2002. Menard also wants the engineer to live in Indianapolis and be in the shop between races. Soppe lives in Phoenix, Arizona, and commuted to the races.

"The chemistry wasn't working between Darrell and Greg, so we thought we would try something else for this weekend and see how it goes," Menard said. "We haven't been in the championship or winning races, so we have to look for a change. We are working on next year and haven't made up our minds for next year.

"It seems we don't know how to do the racing, but we know how to win poles (four this year). We need to find out how to do better in the races. After Larry Curry left as team manager, we won the title in 1999 when he won it with Tony Stewart in 1997. I'll have to pay more attention to the team to help turn this around."



Johnny Herbert, a three-time winner in Formula One, will test for Heritage Motorsports on Monday. The team will run with an Infiniti engine.

"I have one major challenge left to accomplish in motorsports - winning the Indianapolis 500," said the former Le Mans 24 Hour winner. "Racing at Indy has been a goal of mine since I was 10 years old. It is the greatest race in the world, and I'm taking every opportunity I can to get to Indy."



Robbie Buhl will start fourth in Sunday's Belterra Casino Indy 300 and hopes to give the Infiniti engine its third IRL win.

Eddie Cheever broke through for Infiniti's first win last year at Pikes Peak International Raceway and won again this year at Kansas Superspeedway on July 8. Buhl has been competitive this season, but has had bad luck in some of the races.

"If you look at our year, our black and white results are downright horrible," Buhl said. "It has no reflection on the capable team we have. I'm happy where we qualified, but I want to be happy on Sunday, too. We tested here a couple of weeks ago and I was very happy what we did on full tanks. I wasn't for 12 degrees of rear wing, but I understand what Brian Barnhart was trying to do. I think the racing may be a little bit better and tighter because of it."



Al Unser Jr. has struggled this season in both qualifying and the races in the Indy Racing League. He qualified ninth on Saturday for Sunday's race and applauded IRL officials and track
officials for making changes to what was once a bumpy race track.

"If we stayed at 6 degrees of rear wing, all we would do is run 5-7mph quicker and that's it," Unser said. "The draft is going to be just as important, whether it is 6 or 12 degrees. Brian Barnhart (the IRL's vice president of operations) and the IRL have taken a little bit of speed out of the cars and that will make everything that much safer.

"The corners are very even from entering to exit. What they were finding here in testing, I really want to thank the whole Kentucky Speedway staff for working hard to make the track as good as possible."

Unser enjoyed a long career in CART before coming to the IRL in 2000 and said he likes how the IRL runs its series in regards to making quick decisions to overcome potential problems.

"That's what's good about the IRL," Unser said. "There is no committee you have to go through, no board of directors you have to talk to. When the IRL has any kind of problem, they are quick to react because of the way it is set up.

"It could have been a major problem, but Kentucky Motor Speedway listened to our needs and reacted to them. The track is a beautiful race track and we want to keep coming and coming and
coming."



Heritage Motorsports announced this weekend that John Mellencamp's "Take a Ride with Us" campaign would sponsor Jeff Ward's car for the rest of this season.

The team had Aerosmith as its sponsor in the Indianapolis 500 and several races after Indy. Now, it has Bloomington, Indiana, rocker Mellencamp has joined forces with his summer tour sponsoring the car.

The colour scheme of the car will feature Mellencamp's latest song, Peaceful World, which is part of the Cuttin' Heads album.