Indy Pro Series: 2005 Indy Freedom 100

I’d known Taylor Fletcher, owner/driver of the Bullet Team Indy Pro Series (IPS) effort through former Indycar friends and co-workers. They’d always mentioned him as an extremely good guy, if not always scraping together his last few dollars to go racing. On an amateur racing level, saving loose change in a jar to go racing is nothing new; saving money to do Pro Racing by this method always leaves a lot to be desired.

With so many different hands and levels of skill running across the car in the one-off races he’d done since 2003, Taylor presented me with a car that was closer to a jalopy than an Indycar. A cracked gearbox, and engine oil filter that revealed portions of the oil pressure tension spring it tried to digest, numerous stripped or missing bolts, a dead battery, fuel that had been sitting in the tank for 9 months, and about 4 dozen other items on a “to do” list were documented for correction prior to running.

For the one day official test, running was meant to be held from 9am-12pm, and 1pm-5pm. With the massive list of deficiencies to overcome, and only one day prior to the test to accomplish all the preparation necessary, the car wasn’t finished until 3:15pm on the test day.

Set apart from a distinguished amateur career, Taylor had never run faster than 178mph at Indy and had never placed higher than 12th in any of the six IPS races he’d contested. In reality, Taylor was known amongst the Indy caring circles as a darned nice guy, but not someone to be overly concerned about on the track. It was my job to turn his team around and change that.

When we did make it out to pitlane, the fastest car had run a time of 47.3 seconds, or roughly 190mph. Because Taylor hadn’t driven for almost 9 months, and knowing how deadly and unforgiving Indy can be, I setup Taylor’s car to have A LOT of downforce to start. Impressive speed was of little interest for me to begin with; Taylor needed to drive a car that was easy and comfortable while reacquainting himself with an IPS car at Indy.

As I began to peel downforce off the car, and with Taylor’s newfound confidence, I sent him out to mimic the other cars and look for a respectable lap speed in a tow—the entire race would be a drafting battle, so this was our next logical step in testing.

Taylor’s 48.2 second lap, albeit produced with a mighty tow from Marco Andretti, was the fastest lap Taylor had ever done. Throughout our abbreviated test, he hadn’t blocked anybody, caused an accident, had anything fall off the car, or caused the least bit of embarrassment for anyone.

To Roger Bailey and Butch Meyer, the two main IPS officials, this seemed to be a minor miracle; they congratulated me repeatedly back in our garages as if I’d won a prize or something. Maybe earning the long missing respect for Taylor and his oft beleaguered IPS effort was indeed something to be prized.

With a positive and productive pre-event test behind us I spent the three weeks between the test and the start of the Freedom 100 reviewing the data from the car, and picked a few improvements to start with for opening practice. Our car was running flat out at the test, but we still needed to find 5+ mph. With the rules severely limiting aerodynamic changes, speed would have to be found by reducing downforce in any way possible, and by reducing friction between the tires and track.

The event started off with a bit of acrimony when our first practice session was cut short with preparation-related woes—we only had two modest practice sessions prior to Qualifying to make the most of the car, and these problems really hurt. While Indy is spread over three weeks, the Indy Pro Series event is compressed into two days. Not much time for delay or issues. With the first session a near-wash, it left the second practice as the only real opportunity to get Taylor up to speed.

Since qualifying is an exercise in testing the limits of a car, the session prior to qualifying is about simulating qualifying, and giving a driver an inkling of what to expect at the limit. We were forced to spend our second practice session working on what we should have been doing in the first session. Outright speed couldn’t be embraced, so we spent the session working on race setup.

Taylor managed to qualify 14th of 18 cars entered, and the general mood was not cheery back in our garage. It was a perfect opportunity for me to have the team dig into the car, and do a complete inspection of everything once again to prevent the issues of first practice to crop up in the race.

From his 14th starting place, I worked with Taylor to drive a solid and consistent race. Between Qualifying and the Race, I’d found some damper improvements and worked with his on board weight-jacker to improve the car. It resulted in a 0.4 second leap that catapulted him from 14th up into the main pack of cars fighting for a top finish.

At the conclusion of the Freedom 100, Taylor had moved up to 9th, his best-ever finishing position and having set his fastest-ever lap. As a team, everyone was proud to have salvaged a solid result from a tenuous start to the event. It’s amazing what a positive result and a new turn of speed can do for one’s demeanor!

It had been four years since I’d been to Indy, and the first time I’d been at Indy running anything other than an Indycar. The IPS series was very fun, and while I didn’t get the chance to bring the top 6 finish I’d wanted from this underdog effort, I seemed to be stopped by a number of friends and associates in the Indy/IPS world that recognized the minor miracle of helping Taylor to a top-ten finish.

My perfectionist’s mentality will always leave me trying to deal with the constraints of a small budget, small crew, or compromised effort, yet despite my high expectations for the 2005 Indy Pro Series Freedom 100, it was a welcome reward to have made a lot of out of very little, and to have gained recognition from my fellow competitors for my efforts.

IRL 2000: A Hard Year

I’m nothing if not straight forward about my experiences. As much as it might be tempting to paint a false coat of success and splendor on things, it doesn’t change reality.

For this little ditty, I can say that my time spent with TeamXtreme in the IRL was littered with the odd highlight, a bunch of lowlights, and left a bad enough taste in my mouth to consider quitting the game.

TeamXtreme, a Dallas-based effort, had shown great promise in its 1999 debut season. I also got to know a few of the crew during the season, and chatted frequently with my old friend Mark Wieda, the team’s engineer. I’d known Wieda for years since we were in Indy Lights, and he spoke highly of the team in the off season.

Plans for a two-car program were announced, with Indy Lights winner Airton Dare driving the second car. With the team on the move, my 1999 team without a program for 2000, and a young hotshoe in their fold, I accepted TeamXtreme’s offer to join as an engineer on the primary car belonging to John Hollansworth. The season started off with a two week stay in Orlando, finishing the cars and testing at the 1.0 mile Disneyland track. Initially, we only had one new GForce-Olds, and it looked like Dare would get the new car. I knew Airton was a better driver than Hollansworth, but this slight aimed at my side of the team seemed a bit iffy. Hollansworth, in his second year with the team, would be using the very old 1997-spec Dallara chassis, while Dare got the brand new 2000-spec GForce?

I’d quickly learn that shaky “behind the scenes” deals like this would become a daily routine. After applying a ton of pressure internally, a new GForce for John was delivered and underway to be prepared for testing. For reasons sill unclear, John was ditched after the first race for IRL veteran Davey Hamilton. That’s not a slam against Davey, but rather, another murky decision no one was told about.

Team owner shiftiness aside, the next season-long pleasure made itself known: relentless racism. Oh joy.

My father, a product of the Deep South, emerged with the ability to think for himself, and even tolerate the existence of non-white people. I’d (errantly) assumed working for a Texas-based team wouldn’t be too much of a tolerance or racism risk. Clearly, I forgot the “ass-u-me” rule I’d learned watching Benny Hill as a kid when selecting my choice of IRL teams for 2000.

Working in such a cloud of ignorance will also cloud the competitive environment; with so much time spent railing against every minority seen or imagined, large portions of the team failed to give a properly focused effort. With such a “good ole’ boy” culture within the team a Northern Californian like myself stood out like a fart in church. To complicate matters even more, my girlfriend at the time had the unfortunate distinction of being black.

Talk about a showstopper when she came to see me at the track for the first time.

It’s hard to forget that episode: she walked up to our garage stall and gave me a big kiss. One of the team owners, an ape at best, saw the impending kiss, and reached for the camera he had around his neck. I only noticed his actions as I opened my eyes after the kiss, saw him quickly snapping away at the two of us, and when I eyed him aggressively, he fumbled some bullsh*t answer like “oh, I, uh, just wanted to…..takeapictureofthehappycouple.” With him thinking I was satisfied with his hasty, hurried answer, he didn’t notice that I kept my eye on him as I walked away. When he mouthed to his fellow good ole’ boy next to him “can you imagine kissing a n*gger?” I wandered off to have a little heart to heart with the one non Cro-Magnon team owner (there were about six of them in total, I think, but only one that understood more than grunts.)

My discussion with him was pretty simple, but also foreshadowed a conversation I’d have with no less than three other team members that weekend. The message was simple: “I can’t change someone’s mind, but I sure as h*ll can change their ability to walk or continue breathing if they want to spout anymore of this inbred crap around me, my girlfriend, or anyone else of color.”

To my surprise, everyone I had that little exchange with seemed not only embarrassed, but wanted to repair whatever damage they’d done. One guy, who now, and to my mild displeasure, has won countless races as a member of the Ganassi IRL crew, lasted about two days of going cold turkey from his favorite vice of telling “n*gger jokes.” After he fell off his racist wagon, he just looked at me and said “hey man, I grew up with this, and I guess it ain’t going away. Don’t know what to tell you.” One of the other crew guys told me that that guy’s dad was a hall of fame racist, and made his son look like a failure in the sport of Negro hatred. I still feel sorry for the guy, and even more upset that his father, or any father, would ruin the spirit and soul of a young child with such venomous indoctrination.

OK, so the score so far is (I)R(L)acists 5, Marshall 1, but things would get better still. One of the crew guys on my car, an Ohio native, sheepishly told me that my girlfriend (whom he liked a lot, and though was very polite, apparently) was the first black person he’d ever had a conversation with. I told him he had to be lying. As he recounted, his high school was all white, and while he’d mumbled a few words to a black convenience store clerk or similar from time to time, he’d never truly conversed with a black person.

Wow.

I asked him how one gets to be 23 years old like him with never holding a discussion with someone that looks different than you. His only answer was “Try growing up on a farm in Ohio.”

Good point. I didn’t have a response for that one.

Indycar social experiment gone wrong aside, the rest of the season was marked with more underhanded ownership dealings, crew changes, and mixed fortunes. with the air so thick with B.S, I’d informed the team that I’d be working non-competing weekends with the first class Hylton Toyota Atlantic team, engineering one of their cars for fun. That endeavor managed to balance some of the IRL silliness, but barely so.

Indy was a tough event; the team had bought a third chassis and then rented it out to help fill the bank, so we ended up running all month with an extra degree of caution in mind. No spare car and no extra money will limit a team’s aggressiveness…

Davey had been running well in the race when alternator issues cropped up. We called him in and changed batteries, but after we’d killed our 3rd and final battery in a car that refused to charge, our race was seemingly over—we were 50+ laps down. We did cross the finish line, but our race ended long before the race was complete. If there was one moment during the month that stood out to me as cool, it was getting to meet and hang with Juan Montoya when he came by to chat with Airton. Very warm, funny, affable guy–I was an instant fan after watching him decimate the CART ranks. Other than meeting Montoya, the main thing I remember from the long month was that it seemed every time I walked onto pit lane, Nelly Furtado’s “I’m Like a Bird” song would come over the public address system. It was cute the first dozen times, but after a while, I was convinced someone up in a tower somewhere was messing with me.

Still hate that song today…

Like that song, though, the season did then fly by maintaining a high level of frustration, but a level I’d learned to cope with. I’ll save this for another story, but TeamXtreme’s owners had chosen to go with the unproven EFI data system, and we figured that these systems alone cost us numerous races, tests, and lost untold thousand in prize money from all the failures. The team sued EFI at the end of the season, and while I was on the receiving end of a lot of the problems caused by EFI’s products, I had to snicker at TeamXtreme’s valuing of saving a few bucks up front on an unproven system that would end up costing multiples of what the standard Pi system would have cost.

Airton Dare went on to win the rookie of the year in 2000, and to drive for A.J. Foyt, winning at Kentucky in 2002. Davey Hamilton would be a surprising late addition to my 2001 IRL team.

Airton, like every other Brazilian I’ve worked with, was really funny, a little twisted, and bloody fast. Speed, humor, and good natured ribbing were always welcomed from him. Most of the depraved videos clips his fellow Brazilian drivers Rubens Barichello and Tony Kanaan would email to Dare should be (or possibly are) banned in most countries. Dare, unconcerned about these bestial videos, had no problems playing them in airport lounges or crowded areas.

Pretty crazy.

Epilogue:

TeamXtreme folded after the 2001 season, and although it might come as a shock, I wasn’t the least bit upset.