On the Infineon Raceway, near Sonoma, California, FKM raced his first IRL event yesterday for the AGR-AFS Team.

P8 on the grid, next to his friend and team mate Tony Kanaan, Franck was hoping for a strong result yesterday. His team was, such as most of us I presume.

It didn’t take long though to ruin most of our expectations. As the race started, Franck had to go wide in the gravels in Turn 2 to avoid a crash with 7 other cars, three of them being his AGR team mates. Although he avoided the crash, the fact that he went wide damaged his front wing and Franck had to pit to replace it. He managed to stay in the same lap than the leaders as they were behind the Safety Car but he was at the back of the field… but still with 72 laps to go, he was able to make a good result.

The race was expected to be tough and it was! Franck was in the pace of the cars in front of him. Marco Andretti was putting him under a lot of pressure but Franck kept him behind for several laps before the American finally made his move. Franck fought hard with Antinucci for several corners and then hit his car… Difficult to know whose fault it was but still Franck’s race was more or less over as he had to pit once again to repair his suspension.

But instead of following the race from the pitwall with a radio headset on, Franck asked to get back on track to work on the car set up. He was asked to come to California to help the team with the car and he did it till the end! It was probably very frustrating for him but that’s also part of being a race driver!

We would have loved seeing Franck repeating his last year’s success in Long Beach as he scored a strong second place for his first Champcar race. That was finally not the case this weekend but Franck still did an amazing job getting used to the car so quickly. He scored the 3rd-fastest laptime during the race! Pretty good for rookie!
Franck the Tank will be back in Europe in the coming days to get back on action with Peugeot and work on their development programme. He has a lot to do as his next race in Petit Le Mans is just in a few weeks now. This time, it won’t be about making a strong impression though… he will be there to fight for the win and that’s pretty good news for all of us!

More pictures in the gallery and I hope to give some more news very soon!

The joker