Justin Wilson was all smiles after Saturday night’s Gainsco Auto Insurance Indy 300, the 2008 IndyCar Series season-opener at Homestead-Miami Speedway, which was curious considering he finished 15th.
The former Formula One driver from Sheffield, England, was one of eight drivers making an IndyCar Series debut after coming over from Champ Car to give open-wheel racing its first unified IndyCar series in 30 years.
Wilson finished and his car was unscathed, so the driver from Newman/Haas/Lanigan Racing considered it “Mission Accomplished.”
“I was getting a feel for what it’s all about,” Wilson said. “There are some very quick car out there that spend a lot of money making the cars go in a straight line, so we have to try and catch up to them. I think we’ll be further up the order on the streets of St. Petersburg next week and doing something we know. We’re still learning.
“It’s one step at a time. Everyone managed to stay out of trouble. We had an incident at one point where we were four wide and I went three laps down because of a cut tire, but hopefully we’ll learn from that and come back stronger. We learned a lot and hopefully we can take that forward to the next one.”
Saturday night’s race was a new experience for many of the drivers that have come over from Champ Car, but they were able to dispute the notion that oval-track inexperience would become a hazard in the race.
In a race that had only two on-track incidents, the only new IndyCar driver involved was Ernesto Viso, who punctured a tire and spun out in the third run, seven laps from the finish. As he drifted down the track, Viso’s car clipped the right-front wheel of race leader Tony Kanaan, ending his chance of winning the race.
And while the new IndyCar teams struggled to get up to speed with unfamiliar equipment on an unfamiliar circuit, they drove smart and stayed out of trouble.
It was the first race on an oval for many of these drivers. Before it closed operations, the Champ Car Series competed on street and road courses since dropping The Milwaukee Mile after 2006.
Oriol Servia of Spain was the highest-finisher of the Champ Car group with a 12th-place finish, but he had participated in that series back when it included oval tracks.
“It was a long day in the office, but that means we achieved our first goal, which was to finish the race with no damage to the car,” Servia said. “But it was also long because we did not have the speed that we were hoping for. We knew we were going to struggle. It’s just tough when you are in the middle of it.
“We did what we had to do, we gathered a lot of data and we have to take this process step by step. The team did a great job. They have all worked hard and the car ran well until the end. We knew it was going to be like this. You hope for a miracle to happen, but we will leave the miracle for the month of May.”
Servia drives for KV Racing Technology, which is co-owned by former Champ Car Series owner Kevin Kalkhoven and former driver Jimmy Vasser.
“I learned a lot,” Servia continued. “I learned what happens when you have five cars in front of you on a superspeedway and you have no downforce, those kinds of scary feelings. I think there are going to be plenty of those this season.
“It was good fun and I can only imagine when we are up to speed how fun it is going to be.”