Photo Credit: Kreistina Blinova
Alex Tagliani’s been an Indianapolis 500 Rookie of the Year, and an Indy 500 polesitter. Now there’s only one thing left for the Canadian to do in order to complete the hat trick – win.
If Tagliani is going to complete the hat trick on Sunday, he’ll have to do it starting from position 33 after a crash in qualifying. Tagliani felt like he and his AJ Foyt Racing crew had prepared a good car for the race, but poor conditions on Sunday proved to be hindrance for his No. 35 Alfe Heat Treating Honda.
“You always think that you have it saved,” Tagliani told OnPitRoad.com on Indianapolis 500 media day in Toronto. “I saved one on Saturday, but the conditions were far worse on Sunday, and the weakness of the car shines at that point. The wiggle in turn four was unexpected. I was not expecting to have a wiggle like that, especially when you have tail wind. I was expecting more for the car to push out.
“It’s just one of those things where it’s sad because we had speed in that car, and we never really had the chance to show it because of always some small things happening over the course of the week and we went for it. I think we should’ve been a little bit more conservative on our approach considering the conditions were really bad. Hats off to our crew who basically wanted to be in the top-10, and we felt like we had the speed to do it.”
While his teammate Takuma Sato seems to have found speed at Indianapolis, Tagliani and his other teammate Jack Hawksworth have struggled with the handling and how to find the speed, but Tagliani thinks that what you see in practice isn’t exactly the raw speed everyone will have for the race.
“On (last) Wednesday when we 13th (in practice), it was our best car, and I would say that I think we were better than 13th,” Tagliani said. “In those weeks, what happened was that a lot of the guys get tows. They get a huge draft, and get huge numbers, so in qualifying is when everything becomes more real. You have nothing to tow behind. We felt like we were under the radar a lot. We felt like that we had a fast car.”
Tagliani has had his triumphs at the famed speedway. He finished 11th in his rookie year at IMS, and won the pole just a few years later in 2011. Over the last couple years of being at Indy, he’s been in either a second or third car for a different team, while making the Indianapolis 500 his only start of the year. This year, AJ Foyt Racing brought a third car for the entire month of May for Tagliani to race. Bringing a third car to the track for just a few weekends a year can be a struggle for a small team like Foyt.
“I’m sure it’s quite a lot,” said Tagliani. “If you take for example comments from Simon Pagenaud with his season last year saying that it took him a year to get comfortable, and to get the crew working together – and that’s at Team Penske. We’re trying to do it in 20 days, so I think the challenge is enormous.
“When you have a group that works together – when you have mechanics that work full-time on the car – everything makes it easier, and Pagenaud will be the first one to tell you. If a person like that believes that there’s a huge difference between a year to another, we’re trying to do the impossible, but it is possible.”
For Tagliani, the Indy 500 is going to be about making no mistakes. He believes that as long as he and the team stays out of trouble all day that they will be a factor in the end.
“We might not have the fast pit stops, but as long as we don’t make mistakes, we’ll be better than those making mistakes. I think overall it could be a good race for us.”
