Following Mr. Gossage’s statement we were joined via satellite by IndyCar drivers Danica Patrick, Dario Franchitti, and defending champion Scott Dixon. The IndyCar teams are participating in pre-season testing at Homestead Speedway near Miami, Florida.
Danica has been in the news lately–primarily for her second appearance in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. But her name has also come up as a possible driver for the newly-announced U.S. Formula 1 team. She moves to the No. 7 car for Andretti-Green Racing this year, has a new race engineer, and will have team principal Michael Andretti on the pit box calling the race for her.
When asked about making a run at the championship, Patrick responded, “That’s definitely the goal. We all didn’t run up front as much as we wanted to last year. So we’re definitely looking to win more races as a team and for me individually.”
Dario Franchitti returns to IndyCar after a less-than-successful season in NASCAR. Franchitti lost sponsorship for his Sprint Cup ride with Ganassi, and then suffered a broken ankle in a bizarre crash at Talladega in the fall. Now recovered, he has taken over the No. 10 Target car from Dan Wheldon, who has moved over to Panther Racing.
The 2007 series champion talked about 2008, “It was a character-building year, but there were definitely some high points. I was starting to run more competitively. The Sprint Cup was really satisfying to me towards the end unfortunately for a bunch of reasons we didn’t get the results we were probably looking at.”
Needless to say Dario is happy to be back in open-wheels, “I watched the cars going round on the street course in Detroit and at that point I realized that I have been missing driving these things a lot. The chance to get into the Target car in a unified series–all those things stacked up and we did the deal.”
Scott Dixon looks to repeat as champion and spoke of the reception from his countrymen.
“It was lovely, you know, we’ve always had a ton of support from New Zealand but to see like the ‘Lamb for life’, which I think there was a bit of a joke made about that because I thought it was ‘Land for life’ with a ‘D’ which I was pretty proud of that until they told me it was ‘Lamb’.”
“Obviously the Helberg Awards (where Dixon received the New Zealand Sportsman of the Year) was fantastic and then more amazingly was the (postage) stamp.”
8 Comments
Loading more comments...
This comment and all replies have been deleted This comment has been deleted Undo delete