It was very nice to be coming off of a weekend off and heading to a track that had been good to us in the past - so I will go straight into the weekend. 

The tire wear was unbelievable this weekend.  Indianapolis has always been hard on tires during the beginning stages of practice, but as the track took on rubber from everyone wearing tires, the tires would last longer because the surface was not so rough.  That was not the case this weekend.  The track never took any rubber!  The rubber coming off the car was like a fine dust instead of small “chunks” like normal.  When the tires wore the rubber “dust” was too fine to embed into the track like everywhere else.  We were only able to get about five laps on our first three sets of tires before the right rear was completely into the cords.  The car was not too bad it is just very hard to determine what to change on the set-up to improve the car with the wear like this.  It was not just our car…it was everyone in the entire field.

The tire is the same compound as last year but the cars are different.  Last year we ran the car of old.  That car had way more down force and allowed the track to rubber up because the force of the car was pushing the rubber into the fine grooves in the track.  With this CoT car, the car literally slides across the track because there is much less down force and the car is much more top heavy.

The race began excellent.  Juan passed many cars and made his way to fifth position before the first “competition” caution.  The entire race was run in 10 lap segments in fear of having tires blow out.  On the second run of the day early in the race that very thing happened to us.  On lap eight of the run we blew out a right rear tire, and it completely destroyed the right rear body of the car.  Juan kept going and stayed on the lead lap even passing people with the damage that we had, but the damage was to severe and was letting exhaust fumes and excessive heat into the car.  We had to come to the garage area for repairs.  The guys tried to fix it on pit road but the guys needed more time to repair the car.

It was a shame because the car was very good and fast even after repair.  It was a very poor race because of the tire issue.  There was trouble all day long with tires and people could barely make it to the next competition caution.  Hopefully things will be better at Pocono.  Talk to you next week.

-Tab