Oak Park Journal Sports Page

“It was a weird day. As far as two hours ago, I had no hard card. I
wasn’t cleared to drive, and I was just packing and shopping and getting ready to go home tomorrow, and I got a call and said that there was a chance that I could drive. I mean, I was shopping on 86th Street. I’m like
a half hour from there, I don’t have my hard card or passes to get into
the track. So I called Susan, from Brian Barnhart’s office and asked her what to do to get in the track. She goes, ‘Well, I don’t know, maybe stop
by and …’ It would’ve taken too long to get into the track. So I told my wife, ‘Let’s just try to sneak in.’ So I got my 2004 IRL hard card and
kept showing it to all the guys, you know, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’ And we just kept driving. A guy was coming this way and said,
‘Hey, hey, hey, stop!’ I said, ‘Thank you,’ and just kept going. I parked
my car and got out of the car and went in. Everything happened in about
a half an hour, I had my physicals and I had my hard card, and I have to say thanks to Brian (Barnhart) because it usually takes a really long
time to get all that. I went through all my exams and everything, but
they made my life very easy and very fast, you know.

Thanks to A.J. (Foyt) for remembering me, as well. I’m going to have
to go to sleep to realize what really happened today, tomorrow. I was
really excited considering that I’m at Indy, you know. I was very nervous the first two laps because I had to kind of erase what I had in my mind
for the past two days because I wasn’t driving. When you’re going to
drive the next day, you have to sleep a certain way, go through certain steps, you know, to kind of concentrate for the next day, and I think that was the toughest part. I just had to try to calm down and say: ‘Hey,
they get this job done. They gave me this opportunity"

“I was trying to change my line because the wind was blowing a little bit toward Turn 2, and once I got a little bit of push coming in and then the steering got a little loose coming out, so it’s just working with my line because usually I have so much time, so I was just trying to forget the
lap time for that one and just work with my line to pick the best one for qualifying,” he said. “What I knew should be OK for qualifying and
finally, for qualifying was the first time I was flat all the way around.”