When Takuma Sato’s grandchildren begin asking him about his racing career in the 2040s or 2050s, the event he’ll probably be least likely to bring to mind is the 2012 Sonoma IZOD IndyCar Series race. In fact, so forgettable was it that he may not even remember it next Sunday evening, when the teams are packing up after the upcoming round on the streets of Baltimore.

Sato hardly had time to break sweat in Northern California before his engine was failing, and had scarcely had an opportunity to make progress from his 26th position on the grid – that was the legacy of a penalty, but he’d only qualified 24th anyway.

So once again it was a tough weekend on a road course – the natural habitat for Sato – for the #15 Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing Dallara-Honda, despite having had a test on the twisty hillside track.

“After the last round at Mid-Ohio we changed the engine because of mileage and had a test here,” he said. “And we already had issues with this engine from that test day. Honda were working on it, but it didn’t cure and we had small problems continuing over the race weekend, although I don’t know whether those issues were related.

“At the test we tried to find some speed – unfortunately we are struggling on road courses this year. The way things are, we are pretty good on the street-course construction of tyres, but on road tracks we seem to be uncompetitive. We went through a number of test items to find a good balance and mechanical grip, and we made some progress – but then so did everybody else! So it looked like we were closing the gap, but never by enough to make a good jump. I was hovering at the bottom of the timesheets and that was quite painful.”

Free practice over race weekend turned into a series of big changes on the car: “We tried quite a few philosophies for set-up, and because of that we never had enough time for tuning, because so much was being changed each time. Then of course, we also had a 10-place grid penalty for using our sixth engine of the season, so qualifying became a case of just finding out how quick we were on the alternate ‘red’ tyres. Instead of pushing, I just did three timed laps to save the red tyres for the race.

So Taku was 12th in his qualifying group, some distance from the top six who would progress to the second round. That put him 24th overall, 26th in the 27-car field with the penalty. “We tried some things we hadn’t done before in the race morning warm-up,” he said, “and it was a positive morning. Our times were near the bottom but a number of the others were on the red tyres. It was good to see some progress, with the car more stable and giving more grip.

“We planned an aggressive strategy for the race, but already there was a problem at the start and on lap two at Turn 7 the engine failed…”

Worse still, the replacement engine for this one will mean another 10-place grid penalty for Baltimore this weekend. “It’s very disappointing, especially as the boys worked so hard last night. They had to make so many changes to the car and they did a great job – it’s such a shame it didn’t pay off. Sonoma is the kind of circuit I always enjoy, but it seems to dislike me!

“We have a good record on street circuits, so I feel we will be competitive at Baltimore. It’s a great venue and I enjoyed it last year, and it seems to be a good track for overtaking too – there are changes to the track but I think they will be OK. We just have to work really hard to go well in qualifying, minimise the effect of our penalty, and hope for a good final street-course race of the season.”

TAKUMA SATO
“It was a difficult weekend. The team worked so hard to find a good balance under speed. We made some good progress over the weekend but it was never fast enough to be what we wanted and in the end, unfortunately, we had engine failure so it was a very short race. It was a shame because we made some setup changes after the morning warm-up that I felt were positive changes. I’m looking forward to returning to Baltimore. We should be competitive as we were in other street course races this year.”

TOM ANDERSON, Managing Director Motorsport Operations
“Unfortunately it was a very disappointing weekend. We had a difficult test here and were unable to put a finger on the handling characteristics needed here to match the new 2012 car and Firestone tires and were a bit off all weekend. Unfortunately when things are running downhill they run way downhill. This is going to compound our problem here with load-in being Wednesday at noon in Baltimore so there is a little extra work for the guys tonight to finish up with an engine change so we can get this engine back to Honda and we can investigate an uncharastic problem here on this motor. This engine change is going to cost us a 10-grid penalty in Baltimore. We have been extremely strong on street courses this season and are looking forward to Baltimore and hope that we can qualify extremely well to overcome that 10-grid penalty and be a factor in the race.”

TAKUMA SATO
“It was another tough day. We really struggled in terms of finding the balance and speed, and finding the grip. We tried a lot of different things and changed philosophies on the set-up overnight and are working really hard to find a solution. We made progress and certainly closed the gap to the top but the gains we made are small steps and are just not enough. Now we have tried two practice and one qualifying sessions with quite different setups. We need to go through all of the data and make the best out of it. Hopefully we find a more comfortable balance and more speed in tomorrow’s warm-up and have a good race in the afternoon. (On 10-spot grid penalty:) Unfortunately it did not make a big difference on our starting our position.”

GERRY HUGHES, Race Engineer for Sato
“In qualifying this afternoon, while running the option tire Takuma managed to close the gap to the pole sitter and certainly close the gap to sixth place. We know we still have work to do to understand what to do with the car to improve the balance in ever changing conditions. Obviously tomorrow’s warm-up is going to be in much cooler conditions than the race. If the wind conditions are the same tomorrow as they were in qualifying today, we will see a reasonably different balance between morning and afternoon. We have done a lot of work since Mid-Ohio to understand the differences between how we set the car up for a road course and street course and I think we are still finding our feet. Clearly we are not going to give up. We will keep analyzing the data to understand what we need to do to ensure we give Takuma the best car we can for tomorrow’s race.”

TAKUMA SATO
“It was a difficult day for us. The session went well in terms of being able to go through the items we carried over from the test last week that we weren’t able to try. Overall we need to improve the balance and grip; I wasn’t particularly happy with that. Performance wise, we need to find more speed. We ran out of time in the end. We wanted to do a little bit more but hopefully tomorrow the weather will give us another consistent session and we can improve.”