Rd.11 POCONO RACING REPORT BY MARCUS SIMMONS
There’s nothing more frustrating for a driver in the Verizon IndyCar Series than when a 500-mile race on a superspeedway ends after just 62.5 miles. And that’s exactly what happened to Takuma Sato at Pocono when electrical problems stopped his #14 AJ Foyt Racing Dallara-Honda with 25 of the 200 laps completed.
It was even more frustrating that he was running competitively, and had been throughout the meeting, from the beginning of free practice on Saturday morning.
“Pocono is one I was really looking forward to coming to even before the season,” said Sato. “It’s really challenging and I enjoy driving around it. The three corners are all very different, and you have the sensation of Turn 1, with high banking, and Turn 3, with flat banking, so the balance shift is a lot around the lap. We had a very good base car last year so, coming here one year later with more understanding, there was no reason why we wouldn’t be competitive again.”
Taku went fifth fastest in the opening free practice session and seventh in the second: “It was a very productive day. We had a very good run in practice one and in practice two we continued to develop the car. Thanks to the set-up philosophy we found in the Milwaukee test it seemed we had a good car. It was very encouraging.”
Even better than that, the #14 ABC Supply car nailed down fourth on the grid. “I thought we had everything together for qualifying,” said Sato. “It felt very comfortable. It was a little bit a shame though, because with 10 minutes to go we were sitting on pole, but I knew a couple of quick cars were coming and also the track conditions got better towards the end. It was still a great job from the team and it was a very satisfying two-lap run.
“The only thing we were not sure about was the race set-up, because we didn’t have a warm-up or any session after qualifying. So we didn’t get a run in traffic with full tank, but we knew we had a good car.”
Early on in the race Taku dropped to the bottom end of the top 10, but once the first few laps were done he began recovering, passing James Hinchcliffe, then Ryan Briscoe and then Helio Castroneves to move up to seventh, before Briscoe and Castroneves returned the favour to drop him back down to ninth.
“I had an overboost problem at the start,” he explained. “In IndyCar, if you have overboost you have a couple of seconds’ penalty of the engine losing power. At the same time it looks as though we were a little bit light on downforce. It was a lot warmer than on the qualifying day, a little bit windy, and we were optimistic with the air density, but it looks like the others went for more downforce.
“We had an adjustable rear wing, like we have at Indianapolis, so we were working out how we could develop the car. I started to pick up the pace and I was as fast as the leader, and it was good to pick up some places but then we sufferd with sudden power cut .”
Sato coasted into the pits after 25 laps and, despite a great effort from the Foyt boys, nothing could be done to get him back into the action: “We found it was an electrical problem – the engine itself was fine. We tried to get back into the race but couldn’t figure it out. We went back to the garage, the car was stripped but it just couldn’t be fired. Unfortunately our bad luck keeps continuing, but at least we showed we had speed.”
And, with the IndyCar action coming thick and fast at this time of year, it’s just a few days before the next oval event – on Iowa Speedway. This is a track where Taku has usually shone in the past.
“Iowa is another track I like a lot – one of my favourites,” he said. “We didn’t have a good race last year due to the failure but we’ve shown we have some good speed on ovals and hopefully we can turn that into a good result – at last!”
