TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Steadier Briscoe Gets 2nd Chance

ADVERTISEMENT

By TONY FABRIZIO, The Tampa Tribune

Published: March 5, 2008

Here he was, coming up through the field like a rabbit chasing a lifetime supply of carrots ... again. And here he was, crashing ... again.

It was the 19th lap of the September 2005 Indy Racing League race at Chicagoland Speedway, and young Australian Ryan Briscoe made wheel contact in the third turn with Alex Barron.

Briscoe's car rode up the left-front wheel of Barron's and launched into the air as vertical as a rocket blasting off. Centrifugal force carried the car hard into the outside wall, where it burst into flames and broke into countless pieces.

Miraculously, Briscoe sustained only two broken clavicles, a burned lung that "healed in a week" and a compressed vertebra.

"In a crash like that, you've got to be lucky," the now-26-year-old said last week at Homestead, where he officially took over at Team Penske for 2006 Indy 500 winner and three-time series champion Sam Hornish Jr.

A test driver for Toyota's Formula One team in 2004, Briscoe was hired by Chip Ganassi's IRL team for 2005 and showed amazing speed as a rookie. He also crashed in seven of his 14 races and didn't start at Milwaukee because he tore up his car in practice.

He was leading the Honda Grand Prix of St. Petersburg with 10 laps to go when he - you guessed it - tangled with Tony Kanaan and wound up hitting a tire barrier.

On his first trip back to St. Petersburg next month, Briscoe will be driving for the team that has won the race the past two years with Helio Castroneves.

"We're going to focus on maybe holding him back a little bit," Penske president Tim Cindric said. "The most important thing he can do for his career is start out with some solid top-five, top-10 finishes."

Briscoe rehabilitated from his Chicagoland injuries in Italy. He learned Ganassi wasn't bringing him back when the team had hired St. Petersburg's Dan Wheldon, then the reigning Indy 500 and series champion.

In 2006, Briscoe started rebuilding his reputation by driving a variety of cars. He raced sports cars, Champ Cars, Australian V8 (touring) Supercars. He ran a few IRL races and finished third at Watkins Glen for Dreyer & Reinbold Racing, a small team that doesn't usually run up front.

The strong showing at Watkins Glen helped Briscoe get an introduction to Cindric through mentor Wayne Taylor, a veteran sports car racer and team owner who aligned with Team Penske to field a car in this year's Rolex 24 at Daytona. Cindric began reviewing Briscoe's brief tenure with Ganassi and concluded there was more to the story than several piles of twisted metal.

"He kind of ran into the perfect storm where he was in inferior equipment," he said. "Not Chip's per se, but the G-Force chassis and the Toyota were the two things not to have that year.

"He'll tell you he was overly aggressive in trying to carry the car."

Wheldon, who joined Ganassi after all the IRL teams switched to Honda power, agrees. He says that when Briscoe drove for Ganassi, the team had to take downforce out of the chassis to compensate for the underpowered Toyota engine. The car was fast, but also was prone to losing grip.

Compounding that, Wheldon said, Briscoe was a young driver racing for a team that "expects a lot right off the bat."

Cindric hired Briscoe to drive one of the team's Porsche Spyders in the American Le Mans Series LMP-2 class, reasoning that the experience of running endurance races "where he's in all this traffic with slow cars and fast cars" would be a good test of his abilities.

Briscoe and teammate Sascha Maasen finished second in the series points and took three class victories, including the Acura Sports Car Challenge at St. Petersburg.

By last spring, Penske's brass started looking at Briscoe as a potential replacement for Hornish if Hornish moved to NASCAR for the 2008 season. They tabbed him to race in the Indianapolis 500 for Luczo Dragon Racing, co-owned by Roger Penske's son, Jay. Briscoe started seventh and finished fifth.

Now, he's getting a true second chance.

"It's a different organization here," Briscoe said. "Everyone doesn't expect that you can win every single weekend."

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT