Zach Veach’s column: Home sweet home

For every driver, engineer and mechanic that get to have one, his home race is always one of the most important ones on the schedule. I'm lucky enough to have Mid-Ohio! The past two times I've raced there weren't exactly great results for us, but the nice thing about that is there's only one place to go, and that's hopefully up. In 2011 we got a pair of top-10 finishes in USF2000 and last year, fifth in Indy Lights. Our goal was simple this time around: try to win and keep fighting for the championship.

The promoter test day on Thursday gave us two 45-minute sessions to really start dialing the car into the fine-tuning stage. Overall we ended up P5, but I was really happy with the car. The following day we topped the charts of Friday practice with a 0.2sec advantage on old tires... Next up was qualifying on Saturday morning for Race 1 and 2.

We were feeling pretty confident going into the session; we had three sets of tires and three opportunities to shoot for the pole! The one thing that threw us off was the cool track temps. The tires were taking a lot longer to come in, and after our first two five-lap runs, we were P7 just lacking overall grip. As we bolted on the last new set of tires, we made adjustments and went out for the last eight minutes. As I started my second to last lap, the pressures must have come up and my RePLAY XD machine came to life; I pushed as much as I could to bump up to P3 right on my checkered lap.

Going into Race 1, of course it wouldn't be a normal weekend if rain didn't cause a little havoc. Like Toronto, we had rain sometime before our race, but we decided to start on slicks (Cooper Tire primaries) at the last moment and wait for the track to dry. As we got the green flag, we had an awesome start: P3 to side-by-side of P1 trying to outbrake jack Harvey on the outside of Turn 4. It was a great idea until I hit puddles and thought, 'Here goes my race...' After the craziest save I've ever had, I fell back to third, fourth, then fifth fighting the car with its wet setup on as the track dried. Luckily enough, we were able to take home a fourth at the end of the 30-lap race.

For Sunday's race we had a little more work to do starting from fifth, especially with our eyes set on, at the very least, a top-three finish. This time it was dry, but the start was definitely more interesting.

Halfway down the straight, beside and in front of me, Gabby Chaves made contact with Luiz Razia, which turned Razia slightly into my teammate Matt Brabham, puncturing Matt's left-rear tire. At the time, none of us knew that, so we kept charging into the first corner. Once Matt braked he found the problem; he couldn't stop the car and slid right into Razia. Luckily for me, I was able to just miss them by inches and take over the second spot.

Once we went back to green, I tried to attack Harvey as much as I could in the first 15 laps, but he was hooked up! After fighting off the pressure from Gabby, I pulled a comfortable gap and just tried to run clean consistent laps until the end to take home second place.

It was my first podium at my home track and great points for the championship, but with only three races to go, my Andretti Autosport crew and I will be leaving nothing on the table with the RePLAY XD car from here on out!

Thank you all for reading, and the never-ending support!

-Zach