Paul Tracy Q&A

"It's been a pretty big struggle for our team. We really didn't understand the IRL cars that well and the way you run them in different conditions. The cars, the engines, the rev limiters, all of those things were very new and foreign to us and we had to learn it all in the first week. A lot of the things you do to this car to make it go around here fast compared to a CART car didn't make a lot of sense. So for the first week we went around and around in circles on the wrong type of program. It wasn't until we had a couple days off, Monday and Tuesday, that we figured out what we had to do and put together a game plan. Wednesday we came out with an organised plan and we were able to pick our speed up and increase it every day. We made the car more comfortable to drive in pretty bad conditions this week. So we put it all together by Thursday and Friday and made a good qualifying run."



"It was definitely frustrating. But Barry Green committed to me that we didn't want to give up, that we didn't want to throw in the towel. So it was a good commitment from the team to continue on because there were a lot of question marks. It's good to be in the race, and now that we're in we have as good a shot as anybody of winning it."



"We ran the car pretty heavy most of the time during practice because we don't want to have to go back to the tank all the time to fill it up. So we've always been running about 25 gallons of fuel and doing 8-10 lap runs. I put together a couple of 20-lap runs last week that were pretty good. I think we understand the car much better now. We have the basic package of the car - springs, the bars, the ride heights - all set as a race set-up, so it's just a matter of figuring out what downforce level we want on it. Our race set-up will generally be what we qualified with more downforce."



"Yes and no. These cars are so different compared to what we're used to working with, especially the motor. You run these motors on the rev limiter basically all the way down the straightaway. With a CART motor, if you rev it on the rev limiter, it'll blow up on you. It's something we never think about doing, and until we figured out what other teams were doing and how they play with the fuel management system and the spark cut to make it run on the limiter so you're fast through the corners and the short chutes, that was completely different to how we would go about setting up a CART car. So we spent the first week with the wrong gears in the car and it really wasn't helping us. This week we figured that out and really started to find the speed."



"For sure it's big because they're doing it all the time. They understand these cars and they work with them every week whereas we came in and knew nothing. We didn't even know how to put them together when we got the things a couple months ago. So it was a lot of work for us."