Coyne team rallying to make Road America test

Tuesday, 13 June 2017


By Marshall Pruett / Image by IMS Photo

It has been an expensive and exhausting four-week span for Dale Coyne Racing, but those obstacles have not prevented the team from readying two cars for Wednesday's IndyCar test at Road America.
Both of DCR's drivers, Tristan Vautier in the No. 18 Honda and Ed Jones in the No. 19 entry, were taken out in the pileup triggered by Tony Kanaan Saturday night in Texas, and with a need to get Jones and the returning Esteban Gutierrez some Road America mileage in an IndyCar prior to the June 25 race, the Illinois-based crew haven't stopped working to make it happen.

Led by chief mechanic Todd Phillips on the No. 18 and Roy Wilkerson on the No. 19, the DCR transporters are expected to leave later today for the circuit located in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin.
"The mechanics here work really hard and I felt really bad for them; it seems like every week there's more work to do than expected," DCR engineer Craig Hampson told RACER. "It gets old and tiresome to constantly take wreckage apart ... they deserve a break. But everyone here is a racer, none more so than and Dale and Gail Coyne are racers, and if they looked at it as a rational business, it wouldn't make sense, but thankfully they don't."
DCR lost two Dallara DW12 tubs this season in a pair of crashes by Sebastien Bourdais, incurred more damage when his replacement James Davison crashed in the Indy 500, and the Texas Tango broke two more cars.
"The Ed Jones car was not a disaster, I'm happy to say," Hampson continued. "That was a matter of replacing bodywork and suspension. Roy's making good progress. But there's significantly more to do on the car Tristan drove. The gearbox is beyond repair. We're working to get another from Xtrac. The tub is damaged but repairable. We're stripping that to get it off to Indy for repair, but there's no timetable for its return, so we'll be using the tub from Davison's crash to test."

Frustrations are running high and sleep is at an all-time low at DCR.

"There isn't much we can say that's been good recently, but the thing we can be gratified about is we were running up front at Texas," Hampson said. "Neither guy did anything wrong and both were quick. And our crew are the best you'll find, and they keep going until we're done."
Hampson hopes the extra effort is rewarded tomorrow, but that will take some sunshine to become a reality.
"We need to get the cars in the trucks by late afternoon to make it to Elkhart tonight and get everything set up," he said. The track goes green at 8:30 a.m., and we're doing all this staring at the forecast that's 50/50 rain ..."