INDYCARNATION

Firestone Indy Lights driver Pippa Mann offers up her latest entry in her 2010 driver diary. This week, she takes to Chicagoland Speedway for the Chicagoland 100.

Since the Firestone Freedom 100 earlier this year, I have had something of a monkey on my back.

Admittedly at times it has felt more like a raging gorilla, armed with a baseball bat to beat me with, rather than just a monkey. Wherever I've gone to, however well I've done, it's been there constantly.

I did not want my legacy in this series to simply be “girl who qualified on pole, but never led a lap”... The memory of that race has stayed as fresh as the day it happened, both haunting and taunting not only me, but all the members of my team. I truly believed we had something for everyone out there that day, but as we all know I never got to find out.

In the first session at Chicagoland Speedway, I spent nearly the whole time just looking for people to run behind. We fine-tuned the car, and the handling in the dirty air got better and better.

With a year's experience behind me, I knew what I wanted and needed from my race car to be able to stay there during the race. We already knew we were looking good, but the only thing that concerned us was my solo-speed.

Sometimes having a car that's great in traffic does not translate to the fastest car outright on the road. But if you go after the fastest car outright on the road, often that translates into a car that does not like the traffic.

I really wanted a good car for the traffic and side by side running, and besides, I seemed to have something for just about everyone out there when running in close quarters to them. Everyone except one guy in a yellow car – James Hinchcliffe.

For the first half of the test session on Saturday morning, we tried to make the car a little faster in traffic, knowing that although we were good, we didn't quite have enough.

Some of the changes were good in clean air, but every time I went close in behind someone to get a face full of dirty air, or found someone to run two by two with me for a few laps, I knew we had just lost that great balance when behind another car. When we reverted the car back, the balance came straight back. We took the decision then and there - that would be our race car.

Maybe the decision was influenced by the ghost of Indianapolis, or maybe it was common sense. I just knew I needed a car I could run flat out in the dirty air and side by side with people all day long to run up front at Chicagoland.

For qualifying however, you get clean air. I'm fairly confident as to what I can drive in clean air, and we already knew I had a good race car. If we left the car fairly well alone, we thought we would probably qualify somewhere around fifth position for the race.

Kent, my engineer, sat and looked at me, and we both decided we didn't really want to qualify there. We decided to throw some stuff at the car – the worst case scenario, we might look a bit slow in qualifying if we went too far and I couldn't quite drive it properly. But then we had a great handling car in traffic. 

In the team we all drew relatively early qualifying slots to go out onto the track, and I was sixth to go out. The car felt slick and slippery through the air, and even before the times popped up on my dash, I knew it was going to be pretty good. I went provisional pole by nearly two tenths of a second over the two laps. It doesn't sound a lot, but on an oval, it's a pretty good margin.

I thought at the time that it might be good enough for a second row starting slot, but then as time went by and more people went out, tried and failed to beat me, I started to believe it might be pole number two. And, of course, almost the moment I finally started to believe it, immediately another car went quicker than me.

I'm kind of glad there wasn't a big gap between qualifying and the race. Not having a good start from the front row at Indy, and then getting caught up in what happened to me because I wasn't out front where I should have been, was sitting fairly close to the front of everyone's minds, including mine. I was absolutely determined to have a good start this time.

I may have nick-named my car "white lightening" after the suggestion of some of my fans, but I was going to do everything in my power to stop lightening from striking twice.

This time, the start was good. In fact it was so good I came really close to getting the job done in terms of passing for the lead through Turns 1 and 2 on the very first lap of the race. Close, side by side, closer still, but not quite enough. Dropped back into second, another draft, another run, another attempt.

That was pretty much the first half of the race for me. I was trying everything to get around Martin Plowman for the lead. The problem was, with my determination to have a good car in traffic, when I pulled out alongside him I just kept stalling out, and having to eventually fall back in behind. I was using everything I could think of, including the side draft from his car, and a few times I really thought I was getting it done and making the outside lane work, then he would just sneak back in front through the D and across theline.

Eventually, after 30 laps of close racing, we made light contact. I pulled out to make another attempt to pass right as he pulled off the white line just a little as he turned into Turn 3. The contact punctured his tire, and I was extremely lucky it didn't do more damage to my car.

It's not the way I wanted the battle between us to end, but after my rear puncture here the previous year in similar circumstances, the sense of irony was not lost on me. I felt bad he was out of the race, but we were racing close, and racing hard, and sometimes that's just racing - especially on the ovals where we race so fast, so close and so hard. I've had it happen to me, and I've been the innocent party in someone else's accident – it's not pleasant, but it does happen sometimes, and it is racing.

The restart was my first time leading the field around in single file to the green flag, and then I was able to finally lead my first green flag laps of the year. The laps ticked away.

No one behind me got closer to me than my outside corner. I was in control, focused ahead and just running my line. I started to believe this one was going to be mine...

Then with just a few laps to go, there was that yellow car - the one car that had just been able to drive around me all weekend, up all the way from the back of the pack, now racing me for the lead.

I did everything I could. I tried everything I could think of. I thought he had gone for the lead across the strip one lap too early, and he wouldn't be able to get me again on the last lap. But, despite the fact we were both running flat out, he was just so fast.

It may have been a photo-finish for the crowd, but I saw he was ahead at the line on the lap that mattered. It was a great pass around the outside for the lead, and I was beaten fair and square by the better guy and car combination on the day. I gave absolutely everything I had in, and I lost by 0.0159 of a second.

Indy was heartbreaking. But to lead for so many laps, to come so close, to have it slip away by so little right at the end, was a whole new type of he

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