A lap of Indianapolis with de la Rosa

After the Canadian Grand Prix at the Gilles Villeneuve Circuit at Montreal, the Vodafone McLaren Mercedes Team travels to Indianapolis for the upcoming US Grand Prix. Test driver Pedro de la Rosa talks us through a lap of the famous Indianapolis Motor Speedway circuit

Pedro de la Rosa “The Indianapolis Motor Speedway is a very good track for overtaking. It is possibly one of the best circuits, at which if you have a quick car you can overtake easily braking into Turn One. Here you have an extremely long straight which starts from Turn 11 on the exit, a second gear corner where you quickly upshift from third through to seventh and you are full throttle for a long time, over 23 seconds. So if your car is quick and you have good traction coming out of Turn 11 then overtaking is easy braking into Turn One.

It is not one of my favourite tracks, basically as I have never been able finish a race here. There is a big difference between the straight, which is very high speed, and the in-field, which is all slow corners. It doesn’t have the rhythm and flow of some other circuits. It is quite tricky as well, as the entire infield, especially corners like Turns Seven, Eight, Nine and 10 are all very low speed. They are pretty much first gear corners, especially Nine and 10, where you virtually just have to kill the speed of the car and run all over the kerbs as much as you can. However the important thing is that the spectators can have a good time here as the qualifying is not as important as it is in Monaco.”