Brack Is Back

It has been three years since Kenny Brack drove on any circuit other than an oval. During that period he won the 1998 Indy Racing League championship and the 1999 Indianapolis 500.

Not bad for a driver from Sweden who grew up in road racing and street racing, turning right as well as left.

This week, in the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach, he will return to his roots.

“I’m very excited about racing at Long Beach,” Brack said of Sunday’s CART FedEx championship race. “I am expecting great things there. We have done quite a lot of testing and after a few tests, things come back to you.”

Brack left the IRL at the end of last season to join Bobby Rahal’s CART team as a teammate of Italian Max Papis, who got the team off to a fast start by winning the season opener at Homestead, Fla.

Although Brack will be racing on Long Beach’s 11-turn, 1.97-mile circuit for the first time, it won’t be his first look at the scenic circuit with the Queen Mary as a backdrop.

“It’s a very classic race,” he said. “I’ve even been there once, in ’95 or ’96. It was a fantastic event [to watch]. Very spectacular. To me, it’s very exciting to go there to do my first [street] race in three years.”

Although Rahal plucked the 34-year-old towhead from the IRL, where he had been winning in A.J. Foyt’s car, Rahal had his eye on Brack long before that.

“I remember back in 1996, when Kenny first called me about a ride,” Rahal recalled. “He had won a number of races in Formula 3000 and he wanted to race in CART. We didn’t have an opening then. But I remember our conversation.

“I remember he was a hard worker and had a good record in everything he drove. Plus, he had a good reputation with the people he had worked with in Europe. They said he had the dedication to win. That sold me on him.”

Brack, like most of the drivers in CART, grew up wanting to drive in Formula One, but after testing for several teams, he realized that it was futile to try to compete unless he was with one of the few competitive teams.

“I think both Max and I were in the same situation in Europe,” he said. “We couldn’t get into the top teams. So we knew that the U.S. had competitive series. In Formula One, there are only two, maybe three, top teams. The rest are just there to drive the laps. They never have a chance to win. That’s not competition.

“The IRL and Formula 3000 gave me the opportunity to drive and win. I had a very good road-racing record, but I couldn’t get a ride in CART. My ride, the opportunity that opening up, was in the IRL. Personally, I have a lot to thank the IRL for my success.”

He got his opportunity early in 1997, when he drove for Rick Galles as a replacement for the injured Davy Jones at Phoenix. He qualified ninth, led 24 laps and finished 11th. Later, he had top-five finishes at New Hampshire and Charlotte in an abbreviated season with Galles.

Foyt liked what he saw and signed Brack for the 1998 season. Foyt was rewarded when Brack won consecutive races at Charlotte, Pikes Peak and Atlanta and the IRL championship with its $1-million bonus.

Last year he won the Indianapolis 500--No. 5 for Foyt, who won four times as a driver--and was runner-up to Greg Ray for the IRL title.

“I had a wonderful relationship with A.J.,” Brack said. “He is a more emotional man than I am. If he was happy, I was happy. If he wasn’t happy, I was still trying to be happy.

“We developed a very special relationship. To this day, we still have that relationship. He was more than a team owner to me. He was like a mentor. It made me very proud when he asked me to be co-owner of one of the cars he entered in the coming Indy 500.”

Last November, Brack joined Team Rahal in spectacular fashion. At the announcement were team co-owner David Letterman, comedian Don Rickles, a chorus line and a special musical number by Paul Shaffer and the “Late Show” band that had all the trappings of a motion picture premier.

Low key and soft-spoken, Brack was not awed by his welcome, nor from the pressure of jumping into another series.

“The greatest pressure is the pressure I put on myself,” he said. “I am a rookie here because no matter where you go the first time, you are classified that way. Everything is new to me--the cars, the tracks, the competitors--so I am trying to learn bits and pieces here.”

When Brack led six laps during the Grand Prix of Miami last month he became the second rookie ever to lead in his first race. Nigel Mansell, who came in 1993 as the Formula One champion, led--and won--in his first race in Australia. Another rookie, Alex Tagliani, also led at Miami in his first start.

Diplomatically, Brack refuses to get caught up in the CART vs. IRL situation, which has America’s two premier open-wheel racing series seemingly bent on self-destruction instead of pulling together.

On the difference in the cars: “Racing is racing, as far as I’m concerned. I can’t really say that I find anything, any big differences. The cars are very similar to drive, speed-wise, grip-wise. They’re so similar you can’t feel it. It doesn’t really matter in what series. It’s all hard competition. You got to have everything right to be running out front, wherever you are.”

On the prospects of a CART-IRL compromise: “There’s a lot of issues, obviously, that I’m not familiar with. I’m just a driver. What a driver thinks in this whole situation is quite irrelevant.”

Brack is not so reticent in discussing his teammate, the flamboyant Papis, who won his first race at Homestead in five years with CART.

“Max and I have similar driving styles, but not so similar personalities,” he said with an impish grin. “I think I am perhaps a little bit more even-keeled when it comes to emotions. When things go wrong, I try to be even-keeled. When things go right, I try to be even-keeled.

“When I take my driving suit off, Max is a friend, one of the few drivers that I socialize with. We’ve known each other for a long time, way back to the European days. I’m very happy for him with his first win. That’s with my overalls off, of course.

“When I put my driving suit on, he’s my competitor, so of course I want to beat him. That’s normal. He’s the same way, because otherwise you couldn’t be a good race driver.

“On the other hand, we work together as Team Rahal mates. We try to start off the weekend pretty much with a similar setup. Of course, drivers are a little funny because they all have their little things that they think will just help them. We have our engineers, Don Haliday and Tim Reiter, and after each session, we sit down and go through what we’ve done, how we changed the car.”

Haliday, the engineer for Brack’s car, came to Rahal from Barry Green’s Team Kool Green, where for the last two years he engineered Dario Franchitti’s car. Franchitti was runner-up to Juan Montoya for the CART championship last season.

“Let’s say I have a problem and Max has done something to his car that helped in that area. In the next [testing] session I’ll try it and see if it helps me, and vice versa. It’s a good situation between us.”

Even though Brack is listed as co-owner of an Indy car with Foyt, he won’t be at the Speedway to defend his title. Rahal, with insistence from his sponsors, says he can’t do it.

What Ford, a major Rahal sponsor, would not like would be to see a headline the day after the 500: “Brack wins Indy 500 with an Olds.”

Foyt’s Indy cars are powered by Oldsmobile Aurora engines.

“When I joined Team Rahal, there were no promises made about going to Indy.” Brack said. “In fact, we never really touched on the issue when we did the deal. Personally, of course I’d like to be at Indy. It’s the greatest race of the world. That’s the bottom line. You can ask any driver that’s driven there. It’s not just another race.

“It’s a big undertaking. You don’t go there on Friday and go back Sunday night, you won or you lost. The whole event takes two and a half, three weeks just to be there, to prepare, to drive every day. Prior to that, you probably have to spend another two, three, four months preparing for it to make sure you have the best possibility to go there and win.

“To do that in the middle of my rookie season in CART would be very difficult. I have a lot of other stuff to learn this year. I need to devote all my time to make this a success for myself and for Team Rahal.”