Rd.2 LONG BEACH RACING REPORT BY MARCUS SIMMONS
A Californian jinx struck Takuma Sato and his three Andretti Autosport team-mates in the second round of the 2017 Verizon IndyCar Series on the streets of Long Beach, as all four of the team’s cars failed before the chequered flag. For Sato, a sudden loss of power with seven laps remaining foiled a potential top-10 finish to follow up his fifth position in the opening round at St Petersburg.
The encouragement of St Pete was carried forward through subsequent tests at Barber Motorsports Park, Sebring and Sonoma, with Taku and his team working hard on the #26 Dallara-Honda and making encouraging progress. “It’s unusual for IndyCar to have that much timespace between the first and second race – almost a month,” he explained. “It was busy, busy weeks. The pre-season testing I had was probably the least I’ve had for a long time, but after the season started we’ve worked a lot. Barber and the manufacturer test at Sonoma were road-course tests but Sebring [with all its bumps] was really for street courses. They were good, productive tests and we were quite up for Long Beach.”
Not only that, but Sato was busy becoming a wine impresario! “We launched TS Wine when we got to Long Beach,” he said. “The first concept started one and a half years ago, and it took a lot of process. I wanted to celebrate my first win in IndyCar at Long Beach in 2013, so this is a Long Beach edition and Randy’s [noted motorsport artist Randy Owens] drawing of my car is on the label.
“It’s a cabernet sauvignon – great high-quality wine. Meadowcroft Wines produce Foyt Wine and, havingseen AJ [Foyt] have his own special wine when I was driving for his team, I wanted something similar. It uses grapes produced by Meadowcroft in 2013 – the year of my win – so this is kind of cool. We did a lot of tasting and it was such a fun process. I’m very pleased with the outcome. It’s great when you drink it now, but will be even better if you open it in 10 to 15 years. It’s collectors’-wine spec!”
It definitely is. Just 600 bottles were produced and will be available at the Foyt Wine Vault in Indianapolis during the speedway’s Month of May.
Then it was down to the business of racing – or, more precisely, free practice. This went well. “The first session was quite good,” said Taku. “The lap time was not reflecting well but we were doing something quite different with the car. In the second session we were fourth quickest. I was happy and already we were clocking very similar lap times to qualifying last year, so definitely the cars are improving. It was the first time I was able to finally try the red [softer] tyre in free practice – the rules this year say you can do this, but I couldn’t in St Pete because of my accident.
“Saturday practice also went really well. It was back to the black tyre, and I was fifth quickest but there were only five hundredths covering the top five. Really tight! We knew the characteristics for the red tyre so I had big hopes for qualifying.”
But qualifying was tough, and this really consigned Sato to a difficult race. He was ninth quickest in his group, this translating to 18th on the grid. “The balance wasn’t quite there,” he said. “It was hotter temperatures and windy, but conditions are of course the same for everyone. You warm up on the black tyres and then switch to the reds, and then you have two hot laps available. On my first hot lap I had a strange moment at Turn 5 where you use the kerb – maybe I approached it in a slightly different way, but the car launched in the wrong direction and I had to abort the lap. The next lap was my only chance but again at Turn 5, I lost balance and lost time again. I tried to gain it back, but that was impossible. That was a shame – a combination of things and also my mistake.”
Taku went to work with engineer Garrett Motherseadand the #26 car showed what might have been with second quickest in the race morning warm-up. “Some were on the red tyres but I was on the blacks,” he said. “I was wishing that was qualifying! It had been an up-and-down weekend but we knew we could compete successfully.”
In order to do that from a lowly grid position, it would be almost inevitable that this would have to come from going onto an alternate strategy as early as possible, because Long Beach is a very difficult track to pass on. This Sato did, pitting on lap two after a first-lap clash between Will Power and Charlie Kimball caused a caution. Another stop came on lap 12.
“This year the race was five laps longer,” Takuexplained. “So now you would have to do 15 per cent fuel saving to make a two-stop strategy. With confidence that our car was performing well, we tried a three-stop base strategy but wanted to be flexible. Also I was quite tyre-rich – because we went out in the first segment of qualifying we had an extra set of reds. So I could attack all the way through.
“But as the temperature went up – and this is something we have to review – I wasn’t as quick as I thought I would be. I didn’t have the grip I expected. It was kind of a struggle. I did some overtaking, but got stuck behind some others.”
Indeed, into the second quarter of the race, Sato had passed JR Hildebrand but was stuck behind Ed Jones, who went on to finish sixth. At his next stop, pit-stop issues that affected him the whole race – losing time each stop – lost him ground to Jones and Hildebrand. Now on a four-stop strategy, he pitted for the last time with 26 laps remaining. Shortly after this the second and final caution of the race was called due to team-mate Alexander Rossi stopping out on track, and when the green flag flew with 16 laps to go Taku was into 13thplace.
At last his race came alive. He passed Tony Kanaan for 12th, Mikhail Aleshin for 11th, and was looking extremely threatening for the top 10 when the car failed and he trickled into pit lane. “We were on the same strategy as other guys who finished well inside the top six or seven,” he said. “But again we lost time at the last stop, and that was a very critical thing. I fed back onto the track, but without momentum and the cars on hot tyres were able to pass me. Everything was just against us.
“Then the yellow came, I was on red tyres – others were too – and at the restart I was able to charge quite aggressively. Everything was reset and everything became a big group of racing. It was good fun going side by side with TK, and I did some fun overtaking into Turn 1!
“It looked like we were coming into the top 10, but I had a sudden power loss and there was nothing we could do, and sadly I had to stop the car with seven laps to go. It was a very tough day for Andretti Autosport.The Long Beach track has been kind to me in the past, so it was a shame not to repeat a good result, but there you go. It’s a long season and we’ll definitely be fighting strongly for the next one.”
That is at Barber Motorsports Park in Alabama: “After the positive test there and at Sonoma we have made good steps forward, so hopefully it will be a good race.”
