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The Champion's Diary: Development of a Pro Champion - Part 3 |
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My goal long-term is the IndyCar championship.
Wade Cunningham
October 16, 2005
December 8. We talked with Wade about three weeks after the California race. That allowed a little time for the excitement of his race victory and championship to settle down a bit. Especially in the second half of the season, Wade knew he was good enough to win the championship. On October 16 he knew he was the IRL Pro Series Champion. By the time we talked with him he was really starting to think and talk like a Pro Series Champion. We had seen that kind of Champion perspective from Wade earlier when he had talked with us about being a World Karting Champion. We think that you will see that in him in this, our final Diary story, as he talks about his 2005 IRL Menards Infiniti Pro Series season.  The 2005 IRL Pro Series Champion
>>Was California the greatest race of the season for you?
I think I drove as well at other tracks. It’s just that everything came together at California. We were not very strong in practice. We missed pretty much the first practice because of a fuel relay problem. So we were just behind the 8 ball. We had to make big jumps between practices and qualifying, and between qualifying and the race, because we didn’t get in any warm up laps before the race because of the accident [Dodge and Wilson had separate accidents]. So we kind of got lucky with the car setup and it was good for the race and it was good for the entire distance. But I don’t think I drove any better than I did at Milwaukee or Indianapolis. Just everything came together for California.
>>We wondered about your practice times and what was going on there because you were a little slower than we would have expected. We didn’t know if that was on purpose, a little psyching of your opponents or what was going on there.
No, it was just the first practice we didn’t do any laps. Then being in the first pit box we went out of the pits [in the second practice] and I did a few laps by myself out in front and then I stopped. Everyone else was getting drafts and improving their times that way and putting good laps in. But I pretty much never ran in a draft the entire practice. We were planning on doing that for the final warm up and then there wasn’t a final warm up. So we never got a chance to throw down a really big lap. But I was quite happy with our qualifying. We were 5th, although we should have been 4th. You know we weren’t going to be 1, 2 or 3 in qualifying. The way the year had gone though we knew that the three Schmidt cars never race as fast as they qualify, so I was pretty happy.
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