New Blog Post
Well the last four races have been interesting for us with the Target Team. There have definitely been a lot of highs and lows but we’re entering the second half of the season third in points and only 43 out of the championship lead. We always seem to have a trend each season of starting slow and gaining momentum late in the season to make a run at the title, so it’s a nice change to be near the front at this point of the year.
May had its ups and downs for sure. We got taken out of the first lap of the Grand Prix of Indianapolis after starting on the front row, but rallied back on the oval to take our second pole in the Indianapolis 500. I think the whole race went fairly well, but we had a few little issues with pulling my tear-offs off, and my head pad came loose – and when your head pad comes loose at Indy it puts massive loads on your neck with nothing to hold your head up. That makes things quite challenging to say the least! All in all I think the Target car had some pretty good speed. I don’t think I asked for the right changes on the last stop and we had some understeer. So when we got back behind a few cars at the end we couldn’t quite keep the momentum going. The real deal breaker though was the engine overheating due to the water radiator being blocked by debris, and we lost significant power. I guess that’s the challenge of winning the 500. You have to get every single thing right to win it.
Detroit was literally a washout and we managed to get fifth in the first dual which wasn’t bad. The majority of the weekend was run in the wet and even one of the races was cut short from the weather, but we managed to survive. The good news was that we were on the right strategy to win the race. Unfortunately we had an accident with our teammate taking us out of the race. In those conditions and the style of racing you only have a 50/50 shot of finishing, which makes it tough on everyone.
Texas was next and it turned out to be a perfect place to rebound for our second win of the season. It was a great team effort and I felt our car was literally on rails out there. Texas is such a challenging race and there are so many different configurations you can run now in terms of the aero kits, so to get it right and win was very rewarding for both myself and the team. It marked the fourth time we’ve won in the Energizer paint scheme so that continues to bring luck to the team. I wonder if they’ll let me run that livery the rest of the season…
Onto Toronto this weekend where we seem to have had some good success the last few years. It took me forever to win there and we finally broke through two years ago sweeping the weekend so I’m ready to go again this weekend. My mum will be in town from New Zealand and we have a really cool paint scheme with Jurassic World – the fourth installment of the Jurassic Park series which opens this weekend. After that we’re heading to a weekend off with the family at the beach so hopefully we’ll have some reason to celebrate.
….until then…
SD
