Tyler Tadevic walked into an IndyCar Series team owners meeting earlier this month in Watkins Glen, N.Y., and took a big gulp.
“I looked around and I saw Roger Penske and Chip Ganassi and Carl Haas and Bobby Rahal and I thought, ‘What the heck am I doing here?’ said Tadevic, owner of Pacific Coast Motorsports, a first-year IndyCar team.
That’s a good question, considering where Tadevic has come from.
“I started out cleaning and polishing wheels, and I’ve done everything else, including sweeping floors and washing transporters,” he said over the weekend at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, where driver Mario Dominguez had another difficult day in the PCM car.
Dominguez, a journeyman who won two races while racing for a string of teams in the now-defunct Champ Car series, spun off the track twice, the second time after his rear wing suddenly broke. But the Mexican driver came in for a new wing and went on to finish 19th in the 26-car field, a lap behind winner Ryan Briscoe.
That type of perseverance has been pretty much the story of the season for Oxnard, Calif.-based PCM, one of the five teams transitioning from Champ Car into the newly unified IndyCar Series.
New cars that had to be put together from scratch, new tracks for the drivers to learn and the strength of the existing IndyCar teams have made it tough on all the new teams — but particularly on PCM, which didn’t even get to start the season on time.
Tadevic, whose team began in the steppingstone Atlantic Series, said the move to IndyCar almost didn’t happen.
“Tom Figge, (driver) Alex Figge’s dad, was the primary source of funding for our organization for the last six years,” Tadevic explained. “He was my partner and, when he decided he didn’t want to take Alex IndyCar racing, I had to step up and buy the team out from him.”
That was after the team had sent out a release saying it would make the move to IndyCar with a two-car team.
“At the time we made that announcement, I didn’t know that we’d come to that conclusion yet and I was just assuming that Mr. Figge was going to roll everything over and we were just going to go IndyCar racing instead of Champ Car racing,” Tadevic said. “But that didn’t turn out to be the case.
“(The release) was a little bit audacious, but on the flip side of that, we also ran an ad … that said, ‘Anybody who needs any help doing anything in regard to racing, give us a call.’ We looked at championship off-road racing, we looked at Grand-Am, we looked at ALMS, we looked at the offshore boats, IndyCar.”
That’s when Dominguez came to the rescue.
“Mario came in at the 11th hour with his Mexico City sponsor and resurrected the team,” Tadevic said. “We would not be here right now without Mario. It’s been the most difficult season I’ve ever had in motorsports by a long shot, but also, like I said, we’re still here, we’re winding down toward the end of the season and we’ve got a lot of good things going for next year.”
The first race the team ran this season was the Champ Car finale in Long Beach, run on the same weekend that the IndyCar regulars were racing in Japan. Dominguez finished on the podium in third.
But he then failed to qualify for the Indianapolis 500 — a big blow to the new team — and finished 26th and 21st on the ovals at Milwaukee and Texas. That’s when Tadevic decided it was time to take some time off and get his house in order.
“We made the decision not to go to some of these ovals,” Tadevic said. “We skated out of Texas without any damage. We had a really rough Milwaukee and we said, ‘We have to take some time here and get our legs back underneath us. We don’t have the resources right now to be prepared to run an oval, so let’s just chill and get ourselves ready for the road courses.’ “
Dominguez, who finished 13th on the road course at Watkins Glen in the team’s return to action, said it was the right decision.
“These guys are great,” he said. “I worked with them last year (in Champ Car). They have a lot of quality people, great personnel. I like the attitude. They’re all very enthusiastic, put their hearts into their work.
“But nobody here is Superman. We don’t have any testing and we just have the car and no time to test anything, and the IndyCar teams have been developing these cars for five years.
“We don’t have a big budget for wind tunnel. … There’s only so much we can do showing up at a race and trying to figure out how the car’s going to behave in one hour or one hour and a half.”
Still, Dominguez is looking forward to the future with PCM.
“We knew this year was going to be tough,” he said. “We understand our limitations, but I think it’s a big deal that we’re here. Nobody expected us to be here.
“We came in later than anybody else and here we are. It’s a building and learning year for us. Next year, a proper program. Wind-tunnel testing and development work that will help us be competitive next year.”
Tadevic seconded his driver.
“Certainly, at this point in the season, we do feel like we’ve got a number of things more in control than we did just a short period of time ago,” he said. “We’re hopeful that by the end of the year we’d like to finish on an upnote, get some good results at these road courses, then really plan hard for next season.
“Really, I’m just happy, and still a little surprised, to be here now.”
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