Q&A with IndyCar's newest rookie Matt Brabham

This Saturday will see the American Australian get the green light for the first of two (so far) guaranteed race entries in the 2016 IndyCar season – the Grand Prix of Indianapolis around the 11-turn, 2.439-mile road course at IMS and two weeks later the 100^th running of the Indianapolis 500 on the 2.5-mile Speedway itself.

He will be competing for the part-time Pirtek Team Murray arm of KVSH Racing, and therefore teaming up with renowned Indy car champion, Sebastien Bourdais. (Two weeks later, this pair will be joined by Stefan Wilson for KV's three-prong attack on the Indy 500.)

Also on the grid this week on the road course will be series returnees like Canadian veteran Alex Tagliani (AJ Foyt Racing) and JR Hildebrand (Ed Carpenter Racing). Meanwhile, another GP Indy starter, Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing’s Spencer Pigot, is barely more experienced than Brabham at this level, having made his debut at the season-opener at St. Pete, and then (in racing terms) sat on his hands ever since. 

But it is Brabham alone who will start his IndyCar career with two races in Indianapolis’ amphitheater of the racing gods. Motorsport.com caught up with a calm but eager rookie…

DM: Your comments after the Sebring test seemed entirely positive, and the team seemed pleased too. What was the hardest thing for you to adapt to?

MB: Obviously it wasn’t all brand new because of the test a bunch of us did at Sonoma last year, but one of the things I wanted to prioritize was the pitstops, and in-and-out laps, because I’ve never had any training within a series for pitstops.

Obviously I’ve done Formula E, but that’s not a normal pitstop, is it? You pull into the garage, jump into a different car and drive out. There were no marks to hit, changing tires or risk stalling as you pull away. And there was no need to do mega in and out laps; the tires in the last corner of a stint are as grippy as in the first corner.

So at Sebring we laid out cones in pitlane to simulate pitboxes and practiced coming down pitlane on the speedlimiter, pulling in and stopping on marks, and then getting going again from the confines of a pitbox, as if there’s a car in front of me. Obviously that’s a huge part of race strategy in IndyCar, and that’s something I’ve been learning from Sebastien [Bourdais, KVSH teammate] this year and watching Andretti Autosport last year.

It’s things like that which are almost like the silent killer of a rookie’s chances of having a strong debut! You see them showing a lot of pace, they make a big impression, and then the result at the end of the race is hopeless. Often I think it’s because even though they’ve matched the pace of the leaders on warm, fresh tires, they’ve screwed up the crucial in-laps on worn tires, out-laps on cold tires, or they’ve done something dumb on pitlane.

So that’s why my engineers Andy Brown and Mitch Davis were making me practice using the hand clutch for getaways, spinning the wheels, hitting my marks on when I came to a stop. That was the biggest learning curve. The rest was acclimatization where I just got used to the Chevrolet systems, a different steering-wheel setup – and feeling comfortable on the driving side, obviously.

Did you start hunting for setups that suited your preferences, or was it a case of you adapting to whatever was fastest for these cars?

A little bit of both to be honest. At Sebring we were getting used to the car and use the setups we’re going to use at the Indy road course which obviously won’t be the optimal setups for Sebring. Indy road course is so smooth, whereas Sebring is so bumpy that it’s used by teams to configure street-course setups.

So because we had that approach, it was more about getting used to a KVSH road course setup. We definitely didn’t do any tuning it to the actual track to see how fast we could go. But that also meant that myself and Andy could also look at things that particularly suited me and improved some stuff.

Without Seb there – or any other cars, actually – it’s not like we could do a comparison. But I think I’ll be quite similar to Seb’s style.

Bourdais is quite unusual in IndyCar in that he can generate great speed from a car that understeers and prefers it that way. Dario Franchitti was the same way. Will that kind of a setup work for you?

Hmm, well that’s probably why KVSH has taken a different technical route to what Penske and Ganassi have done with their car setups. Listening to Seb’s comments, I don’t know how close we’ll be in terms of driving style, but I’m hopeful it will be close. When Spencer [Pigot] and I were teammates in USF2000, he and I had almost identical setups, but his car had a little bit of oversteer and mine had a little bit of understeer.

But I think the car’s pretty strong. Seb was very fast at Barber and that’s another smooth roadcourse Indy’s, plus KVSH had a strong car for GP Indy last year…

Absolutely. Last couple of years KVSH has had a good handle on setups for high-grip tracks like Barber, GP Indy and Mid-Ohio. 
But however much you’re thinking about your debut, how hard is it not to be distracted by the biggest race of your life, the biggest race of anyone’s life, two weeks later?

It’s really been on my mind but in the background. The teams have mentioned little details about the “500” here and there over the past couple of months or so. But I’ve filed them away to think about after the GP.

The thing I’ve learned over the past year and a bit, since the end of our 2014 season, when I last had a full-time ride, is to cut out those thoughts that distract you from what you’re doing at that moment. I think some of the one-off races I did, like in Formula E and Indy Lights in 2015, I made mistakes because I was worrying about ‘Is this my last race?’ And so I was overdriving, and thinking everything is on the line, and wondering what will happen if I do or don’t succeed. And what I learned from that is to not think beyond the weekend.

Now, I don’t focus on that big longterm career stuff at all during a race weekend. So even though I’m heading for what you described as the biggest races of my life, I’ve almost been relaxed about it. I’ve just been enjoying the fact that I have this opportunity, and pretty much every mental effort has been toward what I’m doing – looking at car setups, watching videos of races at the tracks, keeping fit, talking to the guys on the team. I’m not thinking about chasing opportunities. My family have been really helpful with that – my Uncle David in England and my Dad [IMSA legend Geoff] here.

So to answer your question, I think if I focus on making the GP strong and learning everything I can over this weekend and processing it, that alone will make me that much better prepared for the “500”, even though the driving discipline itself is totally different.

So what can we expect from you on your IndyCar debut?

I think there’s a lot of good potential. One of the things that has surprised me is how well everything has come together on the team side. I didn’t expect to have people as good as Andy Brown or Mitch Davies or our tire-changers. I didn’t think that people who are so experienced and good at what they do would be available for a part-time entry, you know? But we’ve ended up with a team just as good as Seb’s so I think we really can compete with the full-time entries.

I’m not trying to put extra pressure or expectations on them or myself by saying random things like I can make the Firestone Fast Six in qualifying, or whatever. For all I know, I could be a couple of tenths or a couple of seconds off the pace! So I don’t want to say something that turns out to be way off, and then get upset with myself if I don’t meet that expectation.

You only need to look at the timesheets where you have one second covering 16 cars in qualifying to know how close the margins are between looking great and looking bad. I guess as I’m the only guy on the grid who’s never raced an IndyCar before, you could even say that there’s no expectation of me doing anything better than starting last and finishing last!

But I think we have good potential if everything goes smoothly. That’s all I can say at this stage. Let’s see where we stack up in first practice, take it one session at a time, and try to make progress each time we're on track.