Aussie Power the driver to catch after taking pole position
Once a drag racer on the streets of Mississauga, Tom Howatt turned his love of automobiles and sport into a career in the big leagues.
On Saturday at the Honda Indy Toronto, Howatt — crew chief for A.J. Foyt Racing’s famous No. 14 entry — watched as his driver, Takuma Sato, came oh-soclose to making it into final qualifying for a run at the pole for Sunday’s 85-lap, 150-mile Verizon IndyCar Series classic.
In the end, Team Penske driver Will Power was fastest, taking the pole with a lap of the 1.755-mile Exhibition Place circuit in 59.4280 seconds, which translates into an average speed of 104.198 m.p.h. Although that was blisteringly quick, it was not as fast as last year’s pole time of 58.9479 seconds set by Sebastien Bourdais, who qualified fifth this year.
Power’s Penske teammates, Simon Pagenaud and Juan Pablo Montoya, will start second and third in the Sunday afternoon race, which will be telecast by Sportsnet. Scott Dixon, who swept both races of a Honda Indy double header in 2013, will go off fourth, with Bourdais fifth and Luca Filippi sixth.
IndyCar employs a knockout format for its qualifying, and that can sometimes have spectators shaking their heads. In the case of Sato, his lap of 59:950 — which left him on the outside looking in — was actually faster than Filippi’s fastest pole-attempt lap of one minute and .2312 seconds.
But Sato set his time when 12 cars were on track and, although he was thirdfastest at one point, he slid down to eighth by the time the session ended and was eliminated from the pole run. Filippi, who was faster than Sato at that point, set his slower time when the final six-car showdown took place.
Power’s pole, his second straight and fifth of the season, was the 41st of his career, tying him with Rick Mears for first on the all-time IndyCar list.
“Starting on the pole is great to keep out of any messes for the first few laps,” Power said in the pits, shortly after climbing out of his car.
“But IndyCar races are never straightforward,” said the two-time Honda Indy winner (2007 and 2010). “You’ve really got to drive around here.
“It’s all man-handling because you’ve got those slippery surfaces in the middle of the corners.”
Sato was disappointed but optimistic about his chances in Sunday’s race.
“We were very close to advancing (to the Fast Six Shootout),” he said. “I think we were just five-one hundredths short, or close to it. But that’s racing. This is a tricky, very bumpy track, with a lot of surface changes. Even after they ground (the surface) it’s still rough.
“But that makes for an exciting race, and this race gets such fantastic support from Honda and all of the Canadian race fans. I hope to be able to give them something to celebrate tomorrow.”
Howatt grew up in the Burnamthorpe-Mill Rd. area of Mississauga and went to Silverthorn Collegiate.
“I was always a car guy,” he said during an interview in the Foyt Racing hauler. “It was cars and motorcycles on the streets. I had a buddy who took it all a little more seriously than me and he had a GT1 and we used to go to Mosport. One time when I was at Mosport, a guy asked if I wanted to get serious about it and I said sure, and that’s how I got into Trans-Am racing.”
A chance encounter in the mid-1980s with Brad Francis, who — with David Billes — started the Canadian Tire Racing Team, first for the Can-Am Series and later the CART IndyCar series, gave him a career. He was with Canadian Tire during the Jacques Villeneuve Sr. era and then worked for Vince Granatelli’s and Pat Patrick’s IndyCar teams.
Howatt has been with Foyt for eight years now and lives in Texas. He’s always delighted to get home to Toronto to visit with his old buddies.
“And I got to visit with my mom for a few hours last night,” he said. “That was nice.”
As crew chief, he’s responsible for the day-to-day running of the No. 14 car and works closely with chief engineer Don Halliday. “Don will tell me the adjustments he wants to make and it’s my job to tell the other members of the crew how to do it. In the end, it’s my job to get it done.”
Although Saturday’s practice and qualifying was held in glorious sunshine, Sunday’s forecast is for scattered showers. The fact none of the IndyCar teams practised during Friday afternoon’s rainstorm was inconsequential to Howatt.
“There was no reason to go out on Friday,” he said. “All you do is do damage and that costs you money. If it rains, you deal with it” by putting more downforce into the car.
And Howatt says he has an unfulfilled ambition — to win the Honda Indy.
“We’ve won Long Beach; I’d love to win this one.”
Although there were a few spins and near-misses during IndyCar on-track activity as well as in some of the support races, spectators got a fright late in the afternoon Saturday when there was an accident in the open-wheel, open-cockpit Indy Lights race that was reminiscent of the 1997 crash that killed driver Jeff Krosnoff and marshal Gary Avrin.
No one was hurt in this one, but it was close. Heading into Turn 3 at the end of the long Lake Shore Blvd. straight, a car being raced by American driver R.C. Enerson hit the rear of one driven by Brazil’s Nelson Piquet Jr. and was launched up into catch-fencing on the south side, just past where the Krosnoff-Avrin fatal accident happened 18 years ago.
Enerson’s car bounced off the catch-fencing, landed upside down, hit a row of tires and flipped again before coming to rest. Amazingly, Enerson climbed out of the car unharmed.
The Honda Indy Toronto will go to the post shortly after 3:30 p.m. Sunday.
A full slate of support races is again scheduled, with activities scheduled to get underway at 9 a.m.