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CART: Robby Grodon and his first year troops look to get back on track at Mid-Ohio

11 August 1999

LEXINGTON, Ohio (Aug. 11, 1999) – With all due respects to the great
Motor City and the state of Michigan that surrounds it, Team Gordon and
its 30-year-old owner-driver Robby Gordon are glad to go back to Ohio.

Back-to-back CART FedEx Championship Series events – at Michigan
Speedway for the U.S. 500 last month, and last weekend’s Grand Prix of
Detroit on Belle Isle – ended way too prematurely for anyone’s liking in
the Team Gordon camp.  They’d just as soon put it all behind them and
get on with this weekend’s Miller 200 at the beautiful Mid-Ohio Sports
Car Course.

“That was a thoroughly forgettable pair of weekends up there,” said
Gordon, who was forced to park an ill-handling car early on in the U.S.
500, and ended up in the wall with a broken wing after getting run into
from behind at Detroit.

Gordon has a hunch the scenic 2.25-mile permanent road course at
Mid-Ohio will bring him better luck this weekend as he straps back into
his #22 Johns Manville/ Panasonic/Menards Toyota-powered Swift Champ
Car.

“I’ve always enjoyed driving at Mid-Ohio,” continued Gordon, who
finished third, fourth and eighth here over a three-year stretch from
1993-95. “It’s a place where you can really let it all hang out.  A true
road course with a good balance of fast and slow sections – a momentum
track – and one where we did pretty well in testing a couple of weeks
ago.  We hope we can build on that starting the first practice session
on Friday.”

Something else Team Gordon appears to be building on is upon a pair of
key engineering and mechanic additions to the lineup.

The return of engineer Brian Berthold and a healthy dose of his “Shock
Therapy” has shown the potential for great improvement for the Team
Gordon program, and the arrival of chief mechanic Brad Fibley has had
the race shop running like, well, a well-oiled machine.

Shock absorbers are Berghold's specialty, and his presence paid off at
the recent Mid-Ohio test, where Gordon was third-fastest over two days,
and in qualifying last weekend at Michigan, where he was approaching the
top-10 after the opening qualifying session.

“It’s like the ‘black magic’ Brian seems to apply in fine tuning the
race car to his special brand of shocks. We’re slowly fine tuning our
first-year race team, which everyone knows doesn’t happen overnight,”
said co-owner Mike Held, who with Gordon and John Menard launched this
program during this past offseason.  “We’ve had some breakthroughs here
and there, but overall it’s been a matter of taking baby steps all along
the way that’s getting us to where we’ll eventually want to be.  We’ll
just keep fine tuning things until the results are where we want them to
be.  And then we’ll keep fine tuning to keep us there.  It’s an exercise
in patience, to say the least!”

Practice and qualifying for the Miller Lite 200, Round 14 of 20 on this
year’s CART FedEx Championship Series, begins Friday (Aug. 13) and
resumes Saturday (Aug. 14).  The green flag falls Sunday (Aug. 15) at
2:30 p.m. EDT with a one-hour tape-delayed broadcast by ABC-TV set to
begin at 3:30 p.m. EDT.