Hello again, good to be back. It's also good we didn't restart this column earlier in the year, otherwise I'd have had to talk about the disastrous Daytona 24 Hours run, or the Houston Champ Car test, which was my worst day at a track since I think Pole Day at Indy in 2002.
So now, we've done our seven days of testing of the new DP01, and I'd say at Laguna Seca things started to look pretty positive for Forsythe Championship Racing. On the first day we turned the quickest lap. We got off to a slow start on the second day because we cooked the diffs practising our standing starts at the end of the first day. So we lost some momentum. But the car feels really good.
We've got to be cautious about getting carried away here, though, because the test days have been shakedowns rather than tuning. All three of the venues that we've tested at - Sebring, MSR Houston and Laguna Seca - are pretty irrelevant to the tracks we go to with the exception of maybe Elkhart Lake and Edmonton.
Certainly Laguna doesn't have any relevance to our opening batch of three races at Las Vegas, Long Beach and Houston streets. At Laguna, it's all high-speed corners, whereas those openers are short, tight, point-squirt kinda tracks. But it's all we have, and at least we're learning about the car from the mechanical point of view, and what the issues are going to be, so from that standpoint we're going OK.