Overheard in Houston

Graham Rahal blamed his mediocre qualifying result in Houston Saturday on being blocked twice by other drivers. (He discussed this in video to the right)

The Newman/Haas/Lanigan Racing rookie had been third-quickest Friday but ended only sixth fastest after running into similar traffic problems as most of his rivals.

"It was difficult to get a lap out there and, frankly, on the lap that I did have, which would have probably put us third, both Will [Power] and Robert [Doornbos] blocked me, so that was it. It's just disappointing because they weren't on good laps, so they should have gotten out of the way. Instead, they decided to ruin mine."

Despite his obvious frustration, Rahal remained confident that he has a good race car.

"I think we've got a good race car, and we can drive around most of the guys that are in front of us," he said, "Honestly, Seb [Bourdais] is the only one who I think has got a much better race car than we do. We were very consistent in the pre-quals – everybody ran new tires and we ran old tires and were third. The car felt really good doing those speeds, so I think we're looking pretty good."

On a separate topic we overheard one person say that the back injuries to Paul Tracy and Alex Figge may be as a result of the driver sitting a bit more upright in the Panoz versus the Lola. Certainly the more upright a driver sits the more horizontal load the relatively flimsy (long and slender) spine has to absorb as most of the crashes result is high g forces in the horizontal direction where the spine is the weakest. This may also have been a flaw in the Panoz IRL car, which saw a lot of drivers suffer back injuries.