Dalton Kellett, A.J. Foyt Enterprises: NTT IndyCar Series News Conference, Pre Mid-Ohio

NTT IndyCar Series News Conference - Thursday, September 10, 2020 - Indianapolis, Indiana, USA
Dalton Kellett, A.J. Foyt Enterprises

THE MODERATOR: Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to another NTT INDYCAR Series video teleconference with a driver from the series in advance of the 2020 NTT INDYCAR SERIES two (2) race weekend in this week's Honda Indy 200 at Mid-Ohio. Saturday's race will be on NBCSN at 4:30pm ET. Sunday's race will be on NBC at 1:00pm ET.

We are joined today by the driver of the No. 14 K-Line USA for A.J. Foyt Racing, Dalton Kellett. Dalton, welcome to the call.

DALTON KELLETT: Thanks, Arni.

THE MODERATOR: We're headed to a place you're pretty familiar with, the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course. Raced there a lot in the Road to Indy, maybe an IMSA race there. How excited are you to get back to a road course?

DALTON KELLETT: Yeah, I'm really excited. The pacing of this year has been a bit different, right, with big breaks, the staccato rhythm of how the races have been going. A big focus was the 500. We're through that.

At least on my calendar, we have two doubleheaders left. Pretty exciting to get back to developing the road course car, working on that again.

I didn't do the IMSA race. I did Mosport, Laguna.

THE MODERATOR: What do you find as the biggest challenge to a track like Mid-Ohio? There's a lot of undulations, some of the corners are pretty technical.

DALTON KELLETT: Yeah, I think in and of itself the layout is quite technical and challenging. There's a lot of rhythm sections where you have the setup and entry at the start of the section affects the entire string of corners. An example would be turn five through turn nine. You can even make the case that turn four through turn nine is really one big rhythm section. If you kind of make a mistake in that turn five or six area, it's going to affect you all the way out of turn nine.

I think that makes it challenging, but it makes it really fun. I tend to prefer tracks like that. I'll take a Mid-Ohio that's go, go, go, no break, over Road America. I just prefer that flow. This weekend, especially with the doubleheader, it's going to be physically challenging, as well.

THE MODERATOR: Difficult season for you anyway with the way the schedule worked out with you and Sebastien and Tony sharing the 14 car. You really haven't had a chance to drive the 14 car much since June when Road America happened. How have you been preparing yourself for road course racing?

DALTON KELLETT: Staying up to date with the home sim right there. Staying up to date with the sim on iRacing. Been on the training side physically preparing really hard with the Pit.Fit guys, mentally kind of doing some visualization, looking at old onboard, going over stuff with the team. Kind of that standard quiver of tools that we have to stay sharp.

Without testing, obviously it's a challenging season. Looking forward to getting on track.

THE MODERATOR: We have some media on the call with questions. We'll open it up for questions for Dalton Kellett.

Q. Obviously with the truncated schedule this season, what have you learnt this year that you can take forward for the rest of the season but also into next year? In terms of the road courses, what are you most looking forward to about the challenges of Mid-Ohio this weekend?

DALTON KELLETT: So I think, yeah, the answer to the first part of your question, what I learnt the most, kind of a nod to the condensed schedule, it's really highlighted the importance of being accurate and kind of correct with your feedback with the engineers because we don't have the time to develop the car as we normally would on a race weekend. We practically have no testing. The importance of being kind of correct and giving good, honest feedback has been highlighted, for sure.

As far as what I t