DP:
It is a car that I cannot buy right now! No, I probably could. It is one of those teams that you look at and think seriously about what you do with your life if they called. They are a very competitive team, a top team, and it is one of the teams you would not doubt try their hardest. You cannot get them to call you; you cannot pay them to call you. It only happens off of merit, and so I think its a huge compliment, as well.
Q:
Has anyone called you?
DP:
Has anyone? Not me. No. Not directly, I don't think anyone has called actually. I have to say I don't know.
Q:
Which was the tougher race: the 500 or Texas last weekend?
DP:
Texas. You know, when your car is not great and things are not going your way exactly, the racing is harder, the car is harder to drive, you are mentally draining out and everything else. It's easy to drive a good car, it really is. At Indianapolis, I had a great car, and we worked hard all month to get a great car. Texas was OK. We still qualified in the front but the race car was not great in the race. We race two-abreast, three-abreast, at Texas. It is very much side-by-side racing all the way around. My car was oversteering on the top when I was going around the top of people. And underneath on the bottom with the pack of traffic I had understeer, so it was not happy anywhere.
So once I finally figured it out, which takes time because I am new, and that was really only the second side-by-side racing I have done in my life, so considering I was a rookie I think that just figuring it out in general and staying on the lead lap and racing hard is all you can really ask in a situation like that. I came away from it with experience, and that is the important thing, and that is what I am going for all year. More experience, more experience, learn as much as you can, finish every lap.
Q:
The
F1 world looking at your road racing ability. How do you think you will
do?
DP:
We had our St. Petersburg race, and that was OK. We again played the fuel strategy a bit and we were running up the front and Buddy Rice, my teammate, was behind me when we were doing that, and we made a mistake and went back out, but there was a problem with the pit limiter and then the gears went out so we had to change a gear stack. He finished fifth or sixth or something like that. We would have finished in the top five or six, I am sure. But that did not happen, and you learn. And again I finished all but five laps because that is what it took to change the gears. We will see how it goes at Sears Points and Watkins Glen.
