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Jon Herb: Pro Series Points Leader |
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By Bill Bernett - fromthetrack.com
March 31. After the first two Menards Infiniti Pro Series races
Jon Herb is sitting right where he wants to be, number one in the
driver points standing. He also is targeting to be there when the
season ends. While the Pro Series has the motto, “The Fast Track
to Indy,” Jon is looking for the fast track “back” to Indy. You
see, Jon drove in the 2001 Indy 500 race where somebody took him out on
the 104th lap. He has some unfinished business and is totally
committed, with a passion, to crossing the bricks at the finish line
the next time. 
Jon comes to this year’s Pro Series with the experience of thirteen
IndyCar races. Although he has been in Pro Series races before,
this will be the first year that he will run the full season
schedule. He believes that this is the best way to get into the
IndyCar Series for a long run. His driving experience started in
1997, and early on he ran the road courses in SCCA and F2000.
After that it was ovals. Midgets, Silver Crown, ARCA, and the IRL
Pro and Indy cars.
In addition to his driving skills, Jon also has business talent. He
helped form Aercon Industries, where he is head of the residential
marketing group, and owns his own Pro Series racing team, Racing
Professionals. His team manager is one of the best in open wheel
racing, Larry Curry. Larry is also the Team Manager for Tony
George’s new Vision Racing, whose Pro Series driver is Jay Drake.
As such, Jon and Jay might be called pseudo-teammates of a sort.
At the Homestead race, Travis Gregg and Jaime Camara, of Sam Schmidt
Motorsports, qualified 1-2, and led the race from start to finish in
that order. Jon qualified fifth and finished, on the podium,
third. At Phoenix, Travis and Jaime again qualified 1-2, and Jon
fourth. This time Jon rewrote the race script. He took the
lead when the green came out to stay on for more than a lap and ended
up leading 21 laps, including the most important lap, the last one.
Gregg finished sixth and Camara eleventh.
What did the race look like from Jon’s view? “I can’t tell you I
wasn’t disappointed at Homestead that we couldn’t race with those guys
in front. They just had a little more speed than we did.
That’s a place where you hold the throttle wide open, so driving skill
on that sort of oval is at a minimum. It’s all about the
horsepower and the drag…but certainly compared to the rest of the
field, we had all of them covered except for those two cars in front.”
He continued by saying, “We expected to qualify a little bit further up
than we did We made a pretty good spring change that I think
helped out, but we basically ran …what we ran in qualifying, but on 70
lap tires. So we knew we would have a good car for a long run and
we set it up to run real good on the bottom line. I knew those
guys behind me were going to have to work really hard to get by
me. Early in the race when everybody’s tires were good and we had
more of a pack back there behind me, some of those guys got some good
runs up on me, and were able to make some challenges. We were
fast enough though to just hold them off and hold that bottom line,
which gave us the advantage.”
“These cars are so evenly matched that you have to get a really, really
good run and you have to be just a lot stronger than the guy you are
trying to pass if you are trying to make a high side move… So we
used that to our advantage in the race, and once we held off a few
guys, and some guys settled in and they burned their tires up a little
bit, we were off to the races, so to speak. But then so were the
two Schmidt cars. We just couldn’t catch them.” However,
the rest of the pack just couldn’t catch Jon, and there he was on the
podium.
The Phoenix one mile track brought a different challenge. After
qualifying, two Schmidt drivers, Gregg and Camara, made up the front
row. Jon remarked, “Again those guys sat on the pole and I was
disappointed we didn’t do better, but we were right behind them now on
the start. We had a race car that was very consistent and designed to
run the fastest laps, lap after lap in the race.” And the two
Schmidt drivers? “Those guys couldn’t touch us in the race, and
it didn’t matter who was behind us. Had the yellow not flown on
the initial lap we would have come around and taken the lead on the
first lap of green flag racing.” The numerous accidents
themselves, which brought out five yellows, were not an issue for Jon
as they were always behind him. (Above, Jon's number 6 car.)
Jon acknowledged that his previous Indy car drive at Phoenix gave him a
big advantage. He went on to say that, “There is obviously a wide
variety of ability and experience out there in the Pro Series. So that
caused me some moments in lapped traffic.”
At one point when he came up to lap a particular car, “they were
hitting the brakes going into turn three, which is something you just
don’t do. You run it flat out. So you don’t expect someone
to be doing that there. During the whole weekend there were probably
three close calls I had from not expecting someone to do what they were
doing.”
At the end of the race Jon concluded, “We had a good fast car for the
race. Phoenix is a driver’s track. Obviously you can’t
really run wide open lap after lap. You have to drive the car,
make it handle well. You’ve got to hit your marks… and I think we
proved we could do that better than anybody else.” This time
Jon’s position on the podium was one he liked even better!
On the subject of this weekend’s race on the streets of St. Petersburg,
Jon acknowledged that the other drivers are, “mostly road course
racers, so now they are coming into their element and I’m moving out of
mine. Our goal this weekend, and at the other road courses, is to
be competitive. Sure we want to shoot for the podium, but most of
all we want to run all the laps, finish all the laps. We don’t
necessarily have to win that race because we plan on being most
competitive and winning on the ovals.”
“I think our win at Phoenix bodes particularly well for the Milwaukee
and Pikes Peak one mile tracks. We are in the hunt now and we just need
to get a little bit better, so we’ve got our mind focused on that
obviously, and on going to Indy. A lot of what you do at Phoenix
can translate to Indy from a set up stand point, so we’re real happy,
hoping that what we ended up with at Phoenix is going to help come Indy
time.
Don’t be surprised if you see Jon Herb spending a lot of his time at the front of the pack this season.
(For more about Jon Herb go to www.vipmanage.com/jonherb2005.htm)
(Watch for a future story on Jon Herb and the challenge of being both a team owner and a driver.) |
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