Indy 500: One-offs and rookies, part 7 – Kurt Busch, by race engineer Craig Hampson

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Something slightly different this time. Kurt Busch has been quoted endlessly throughout May (with good reason) and so we decided to go behind the scenes and ask his race engineer Craig Hampson for his and Andretti Autosport’s perception on how the 2004 NASCAR champion has adapted to life traveling 45mph quicker around Indianapolis Motor Speedway than he’s used to in the Brickyard 400.

Note: The majority of this interview with Hampson was carried out just a few hours before the No. 26 SureTone Andretti Autosport car hit the wall at Turn 2 during Monday practice, and so you’ll notice some of Craig’s answers read quite poignantly in retrospect. Carb Day, however, gave Kurt and Craig a final hour to try the “new” car and so we updated the interview at the end.

Incidentally, Busch’s demeanor throughout the Month of May has been exemplary, giving thoughtful answers to every question, be it intricate or inane. And on track, he could hardly have impressed more. Consequently, there are a lot of us who hope KuBu comes back for more next year, and also hope SureTone execs are reading this.

MONDAY, MAY 19, PRE-PRACTICE

RACER: At Newman/Haas in 2011, you got used to setting up a car at Indy for a rookie, James Hinchcliffe. How different was it to set one up for a driver whose previous experience wasn’t even in open-wheel?

Craig Hampson:  There’s two sides to that. As you say, no open-wheel experience to speak of so there’s a lot of things we do with the car and a lot of ways the car feels that are alien to him. On the other hand, he’s run a billion laps on ovals, so he’s hugely experienced from that perspective, so we took the same approach as we did with Carlos [Munoz] last year, starting out with a lot of downforce and a lot of understeer. Kurt really didn’t like the car with understeer and he’s been happier the closer we’ve got to a neutral balance.

The speed is something he’s already comfortable with; he actively processes every corner, acknowledges every indication the car gives to him, he’s happy in traffic, he’s listening to advice to make all the adjustments regarding anti-roll bar, weight jacker, fuel mixture and none of that has been a problem to him.

He’s willing to drive a fairly neutral car and I’m suspecting that’s because the NASCAR cars move around so much that he’s just not spooked by movement in this car. What he was very surprised by was how much dirty air affects this car. Although you get that effect in NASCAR, he says the Indy car is in 10 times more affected by the loss of grip and the amount of suck you get behind a pack of cars is 10 times what you get at Daytona or Talladega. So that’s something he’s going to have to get used to on Sunday in the race.

Do you think Kurt would have struggled more, or less, if he’d made this switch say in 2011, with the old car, the IR03? I mean, the whole nature of the racing has changed now – there’s a lot more tow now, but the car is also more affected by dirty air. I can’t decide if that has helped or hindered him so far, or whether it will be a positive or negative on Sunday in the race.

Hmm, these DW12s are a little easier to drive than the previous one in that if it steps out, you can get it back, whereas the old car if it stepped out, you were virtually certain to crash. And I also think the new car, because it does give the drivers more confidence, creates a better race. As we started with a couple of rookie tests, he started out lifting the throttle for the corners but he worked his way up to be flat out all the way around. Once he was used to that, we started taking the downforce off, and he got progressively more comfortable with it.

I’d say what’s made it harder for Kurt is that he’s been back and forth between Charlotte and here, driving the NASCAR car and the Indy car. They’re such different animals, they require such a different driving style, very different steering inputs. When he first came here, he was turning in really shallow, and you have to do that with the Cup car, because it handles like a battleship by comparison, you have to plan your turns long in advance of the apex. The Indy car is in a different league in terms of responsiveness and you have to build up to being able to take advantage of it. Then he flew off to drive the Cup car, and came back and said, “Wow, that thing really moves around!” and once he was out on track, he was turning in a little slow again, and honestly I think our Sunday qualifying suffered because of being in the Cup car the night before. I’m sure he’d be sharper if he’d just been focusing on this for two weeks, and I bet you his NASCAR crew chief says the same about how sharp he’d be if he wasn’t distracted by us! I think, to be honest, the media – and Kurt himself – has underplayed how big a challenge it is going back and forth between the two.  

Indy 500 one-offs and rookies part 1 – Alex Tagliani

Indy 500 one-offs and rookies, part 2 – JR Hildebrand

Indy 500 one-offs and rookies, part 3 – Jacques Villeneuve

Indy 500 one-offs and rookies, part 4 – Sage Karam

Indy 500 one-offs and rookies, part 5 – Martin Plowman

Indy 500 one-offs and rookies, part 6 – Pippa Mann

I admit I thought qualifying would catch your man out, in terms of trimming it out for a run. But he seemed entirely comfortable with removing a lot of the downforce. Is that because you have a hot setup that creates so much mechanical grip?

Well, there are a lot of factors there. This is a very experienced team; he has four experienced teammates providing a lot of information; we have had a good setup for the DW12 here at the Speedway, so we haven’t had to wander too far from there; and finally, he is a pro. He’s very good at what he does, and everyone I talk to down in NASCAR land says he’s one of the most talented drivers in terms of feel, car control and fast hands, so he’s just using his God-given skill here to do the same thing.

But actually – and I wouldn’t quite use your phrase that he was caught out – but if there was one moment where he and we were reminded that Kurt’s a rookie, was on Fast Friday when we first got the increased boost. We did have a problem with the car on that first run, but he was really unprepared for the increase in power – it’s 40-50hp – and how much faster the car went and how much better it pulled out of the turns. That first run got messed up…and then it rained! Not our good day. But here again was the evidence that he’s a pro: he slept on it, came back on Saturday morning ready for battle and did a fantastic job.

In terms of our preparation for qualifying, it was unfortunate that we didn’t get our full Fast Friday, but I feel bad for Kurt anyway because of how slammed we’ve been by the weather. You know, the strange thing is, he’s had poor conditions from the start. Even in the first rookie test, the wind was something like 27mph, terrifying for a driver in his first ever run in an IndyCar! We’ve also had really cold days that certainly aren’t representative of the conditions forecast for the race day, so they’re far less use than they should have been. And then the rain and sleet wiping days out altogether…

Don’t get me wrong, I’m really happy with how Kurt did in qualifying [12th] given the circumstances; I just know he’d have done that much better if we hadn’t lost around 40 percent of potential track time due to weather. Obviously, there’s nothing we can do about it – that’s just Mother Nature – but remember the last two years we didn’t lose a single day due to weather, so it’s too bad he picked the wrong year to make his Indy debut!

Some of the drivers I’ve talked to about aero and drafting and tows, etc. have said that once you’ve trimmed out the aero, the DW12 feels more affected by crosswinds than the old IR03. Is that something you have any numbers on?

I’m not in a position to say that the DW12 is more or less affected by crosswinds, but I do know that things have changed here at the Speedway in roughly the same time frame. They’ve removed some of the grandstands, the Speedway Motel is gone, things that were shielding the track from some of the wind have gone now. So you’ll be passing through the grandstands, and suddenly you reach a gap and a big blast of wind crosses the track. There are also easier and harder wind directions for a driver or engineer to deal with here. The entry to Turn 1 is always worse than the entry to Turn 3. The contours and undulation in Turn 1 is more challenging, so if you have a tailwind into T1 so you’re losing the downforce, it becomes pretty diabolical.

How have his pit stops been? When all the cars are flat out all the way around, in-laps, out-laps and entry and exit from pit boxes are where a lot of time can be made up

Yeah, those are a huge deal. The other thing is that not until today [Monday] have we been able to practice pitting as we will do for the race – as in, coming straight off Turn 4. Throughout the first week, the drivers use that long slow-down lane from Turn 3 all the way around. So I think we have to admit that pitstop-wise, we’re going to be learning and improving through the race. We’re the fifth car in the Andretti Autosport team, a put-together crew, so although all the guys are experienced and good, they’re not ones that do it week in, week out, and not together.

How’s Kurt dealing with cold tires on out laps?

Well the best we can do is to simply encourage him to be careful on cold tires; you can get yourself in trouble as Jack Hawksworth proved, and Mikhail Aleshin had that moment through the grass and somehow got away with it! We don’t want to be that guy. So compared to say, Marco [Andretti], who’s very confident on cold tires, Kurt’s been slower to get up to speed but I’m fine with that. We don’t have a spare car for him and so we’d like to make sure we still have it for Sunday.

Have you had a chance to work on fuel mileage? Or is that what today [Monday] is about.

One of the things we’ve done is focus on race running more than qualifying running and that’s important for him – to drive in front, behind and in the middle of his teammates. Initially, when we were pack running, he started out the fifth car in line and stayed fifth but as we improved the car and improved his confidence,  he started to make some passes. Today isn’t graduation but more like final exams before going into the race, so I have warned him that today he’s going to encounter a bumble-bee pack of 18 cars going around the track.

But hopefully today we get a good five hours of practice, so we can make three or four good changes to make it even better for him.

Do you think he’s encouraged by his experience so far, that he might wish to make this more than a one-time only deal, and come back on a regular basis?

Well, let’s say that I had two goals this month: one was to win Rookie of the Year which I feel like we’re halfway toward achieving; Kurt hasn’t put a foot wrong, he’s been consistently near the top of the speed charts through practice, and he was fastest rookie in qualifying. Now we have to follow through with a good solid race. The other goal was to ensure he had enough fun, enough satisfaction to do it again. He’s had a lot of challenges in his career, a lot of them self-induced – outbursts that lead to bad press. But I can only speak about how we’ve found him and all I can say is that here in our garage or out driving our car around Indianapolis Motor Speedway, he’s seemed really happy and been very team-oriented, and I think that’s great. Really great.

CARB DAY

So what was the root cause of the crash on Monday, from what you saw on the team data? From outside, it looked like Kurt overcorrected a slide, it gripped again just as the front wheels were pointing at the wall, and he just managed to turn left again to prevent it being a head-on…

Well sure, he overcorrected but from a car that stepped out, it was too neutral. So…[shrugs]. After one of these situations, you beat yourself up as a race engineer and think about it and look back at a lot of things and, like anything else, it occurs because you have four problems together as opposed to one problem…

[Sigh] I guess, I’d stopped thinking about Kurt as a rookie, because he’d been doing such an excellent job, so I didn’t do a good enough job of protecting him from himself. Shame on me. He got comfortable and confident and made an adjustment in the car, and for as neutral as the car was that day, in dirty air, it was too much and so it stepped out on turn in. That’s the most traffic he’d run in and that was the most neutral he’d had the car. The positive is that until he stepped over the edge, he wasn’t going to know where the edge was. The negatives are that it cost the team a lot of money and cost the crew a huge amount of work.

The car is fixable but was not fixable in two days, so we are racing Marco’s backup car and even to get that ready from a road course spec – it was going to be his Detroit car – to an oval spec required a huge amount of effort on the crew’s part. They’re the ones I feel worse for.

How close is this new car in terms of handling? I assume that even with identical setups, it must feel a little different to Kurt, which must be confusing because it must be hard for him to tell what’s because it’s a different car, and what’s caused by just completely different track conditions.

It’s pretty different, yeah. It’s back in the ballpark, but not within the infield, so we’ll have to keep working on it in the race. That’s the way it goes: it’s as well that this happened on Monday when we had time to repair, rather than say today, Carb Day, with only 48 hours to go. I’d rather it had happened say, Tuesday last week.

Did he have any confidence issues after it? Publicly, he appears to have handled it quite well.

Oh, from that point of view he’s absolutely fine, yes. As he says, he’s crashed plenty of racecars. A real rookie would have been messed up and mentally he would not be back in the right place. But Kurt’s fine, which is good. He knows why he crashed, he’s over it, he’s taken onboard what he needs to do to avoid it again. He’s just cool. In fact, he’s over it better than I am.

Did he get decent time in traffic today?

Not as much as we’d have liked but decent, yeah. Enough for him to be complaining about the return of understeer! We’ll make one small change for the race because…we’re race engineers and we can’t leave well enough alone. It’ll be hotter on race day, but from here on, we’ll be chasing the track conditions.

Does that mean your ambitions have changed, maybe been adjusted a little lower?

No, still going for Rookie of the Year.