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Coming Next Issue
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SEMA |
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Bimmer Roundup Coverage |
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Hot Lap: The Wheel Exchange |
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Review PowerBook G4 17 inch |
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Want Clean Glass? |
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A Weekend Behind Pit Wall:
Team Fernandez & Laguna Seca, continued. |
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"We continuously gather information from the car for use with our modeling and simulation software. We track and utilize information about fuel, tires, chassis set-up, ride height, aero packages, and so on," says Grabski as he clicks away on his laptop. After a few seconds, he looks up and says, "We can run lap after lap of simulation software, make a change here and there, and get pretty close to finding a decent set-up for qualifying and race day. The software is pretty good, but it can't model everything with total accuracy - it gets us close."
As we look around the pit stall, we notice another crewmember, Ken Szymanski ("Kenny") working on a stack of fresh Bridgestone racing slicks. It turns out that Kenny is somewhat of a legend- having been involved with racing since 1978, both in Formula One and CART. We picked Kenny's brain about tires, and in doing so learned that he has worked with racing greats like Mario Andretti and Ayrton Senna.
Kenny explains that the team uses dried air from Bridgestone rather than nitrogen to air-up the tires. Interestingly, he says the air that Bridgestone supplies is as reliable and consistent if not more so than the nitrogen (nitrogen has been used instead of compressed air in racing tires because compressed air is usually very moist, and the moisture is undesirable). "Roughly speaking, it takes about 3-4 laps for the tires to come up to temperature and pressure, so to account for that increase in pressure, I usually set the cold pressures about 2 or 3-psi lower than what we're looking for when the tires are hot."
We asked Kenny for information about how much a set of Bridgestone racing tires was worth, but he wouldn't comment on that. "The [tire] lease information is kept confidential - each team works out its own deal with Bridgestone, and we're assigned an engineer from Bridgestone to help us with the tires and set-up," he said.
Friday would bring us our first taste of on-track excitement - after an early morning press meeting, we received official photographer vests and armbands from CART and were ready to start photographing some racing action. We made our way to the famous corkscrew (turns 7 and 8) and staked our claim just at the bottom of the corkscrew. The sound of Ford Cosworth motors turning 11,000 rpm could be heard in the distance, so we readied the cameras.
Several cars scream up the hill that leads to the entry of the corkscrew and we catch our first glimpse of their noses as they negotiate the apex into turn 7. In what is at best two blinks of the eye, the cars are at full throttle again and racing through turn 9. I check my camera, hoping that I'll have poster quality images awaiting my review.
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