The bespectacled young woman who started and finished 12th a month
ago at Kentucky Speedway bore more than a passing resemblance to the
teenaged girl who drove in her first IRL IndyCar Series race nearly six
years earlier at Texas World Speedway. Much has changed for Sarah Fisher
since then, but much remained familiar upon her successful return to
open-wheel racing.
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Sarah Fisher. Photo by Earl Ma.
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"I've had a great time and have been working with some great people
at Dreyer & Reinbold -- I can't ask for anything more," she says on
the reunion with her full-time team from 2002-03. "There has been some
turnaround with some new people coming in, but here are still some
(senior) core people there, and it helps getting back into the car with
some of the people I already knew. We had a very smooth weekend without
a lot of ups and downs; it was just a very executable weekend and it
came off very well."
Surviving the full race distance, albeit one lap down, with a
conservative setup intended to reacquaint her with 210+ mph speeds,
gave Fisher the confidence boost she needed after a few years away. She
had spent four seasons as a series regular and three-time Most Popular
Driver, during which she earned her share of podium finishes without the
benefit of a consistently front-running team behind her. But Fisher had
not raced in open-wheel since a one-off appearance for Kelley Racing
in the 2004 Indy 500. Instead, she'd opted for a new relationship with
NASCAR team boss Richard Childress, who helped put her into a Bill
McAnally-owned Chevrolet for the 2005 Grand National West Series.
Despite no prior stock car experience, Fisher adapted quickly to the
equipment and the more laid-back lifestyle. "The only thing I didn't
like about it was that we had about three months where we didn't do any
testing or running -- from April to June. So there's a lag during the
summer after we got the momentum running with a couple of races where
it was just stagnant. Towards the end of the (13-race) season, the last
five races we had consecutive races with top tens, running up front and
qualifying on podiums; we did really great, but it was on the other side
of the country, so the east coast didn't know what was going on."
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Sarah Fisher. Photo by Jim Haines - IRL.
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That said, she did not mind the relative anonymity of a NASCAR touring
class, where she could learn from her mistakes without constant public
second-guessing. "The Nextel Cup series doesn't allow you to just come
in and be dominant; you have to work your way up through the various
feeder series. So I knew going in that I wasn't just going to jump into
a (high-profile) car, but I was willing to do that looking at the big
picture. I needed to learn what those 3,300-pound cars were like, how to
manage them and and learn what that car control was all about first."
Fisher cites greater car control as an invaluable asset she brought back
with her into the cockpit at Kentucky. "You really have to hustle those
cars and be on top of things. It demands driver feedback because when
they're testing they can use data, but not while they're racing. So it's
highly reliant on driver feedback and working together really well with
the crew chief, and I pride myself on having great feedback. The car
control that came with a 3,300-pound car really helped me when getting
back to these."
She also enjoyed learning some of the less-refined aspects of racing
that open-wheel vehicles simply cannot offer. "Well, you can't hit
people the same way you can in a stock car! That was a lot of fun, being
able to hit people and have people hit me -- it's just a part of that
sport. It was a totally different feeling."
Despite finishing 12th in Grand National West points and looking to
graduate to an east coast NASCAR touring class or Craftsman Trucks,
sponsorship woes kept her sidelined. That is, until Dreyer & Reinbold,
which recently replaced Buddy Lazier with Ryan Briscoe, came calling.
"I've had a great relationship with Dennis Reinbold all these years,
and he's been greally great to me and my career. I've also been hanging
out because I'm engaged to Andy O'Gara, and his father John is the team
manager here. So I've been out to a couple of races this year, and
Dennis made the comment that they didn't have a driver for the Kentucky
and Chicago races (with Briscoe having prior Australian touring car
commitments), and I said I'd be interested in that! We just sort of got
things started that way and made everything make sense for the bottom
line."
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Sarah Fisher. Photo by Earl Ma.
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Fisher has also resumed her undergraduate college career, and has
taken her first real-world job. "I work for (Atlanta-based) Ignition
International now; it's sort of part-time, and I'm on sabbatical I
guess, now that I'm back doing racing. They did some things for me while
I was in IRL, so I went to help them out with some traditional marketing
stuff. At the same time, I'm going to school at Ellis College (New York
Institute of Technology) online (studying business marketing) and it all
works together. I think the more well-rounded of a person you are, the
better you're going to be.
"I started off with engineering, and I did that through Ohio State
University at the beginning, before all this mess started (then on to
Butler). It's just too hard to do engineering on the road. When you're
trying to do calculus and a lot of the physics stuff, you need to be
in the classroom and in the labs, and you can't do that while you're
traveling."
Fisher believes that, unlike Mark Donohue or Alan Kulwicki, pursuing
an engineering degree would not necessarily benefit her on-track. "My
dad's a mechanical engineer from OSU, so I grew up with a lot of that
technology background. When we approached our race cars, it wasn't
necessarily about driving techniques, it was more about what the car is
doing and what you can do to make the car better, in every sense of the
word. So without having that school background, I still have a lot of
that background from my dad."
For the upcoming IRL season finale weekend in Chicagoland, Fisher
returns to the #5 Escort Radar Dallara after Briscoe handled road racing
duties at Sonoma. While admitting she would need more off-season testing
to address her lack of road racing background, if a more concerted
return to IRL were pending for 2007, "I'm just looking at everything.
There's some stock car stuff still out there, and hopefully I can get
into Indycars some more next year. I'd love to do both -- I'd love to
have a full Indycar ride and have a Busch East ride on the side. That
would be excellent.
"I think as long as we have a good, solid run in Chicagoland, produce a
top ten and do maybe a little better than Kentucky, it would be a matter
of just getting my name back out there, getting confidence back in the
team and keeping the rhythm going."
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Sarah Fisher. Photo by Earl Ma.
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Meanwhile the retro Sarah Fisher has brought back her trademark
eyeglasses (which she actually did without for all but the first and
last of her 49 career IRL races to date). "I had laser surgery when
I was 19, and (the quality of my eyesight) fell off because I wasn't
old enough really to have the surgery done. Because I'm only 22 and
three-quarters, they won't laser my eyes again (now) because the
technology's not that great. So I have to wait for two years before I
can have surgery done again.
"In the interim, glasses are a whole lot better than contacts when
you're racing. I actually never had contacts until this year. The
glasses don't bother me (while racing). I've run with them my whole
life, and in my first Indycar race I actually had glasses. It's not a
bother; I like them, they're comfortable and pretty easy, actually."
It may have taken a little longer than expected to reach career start
number 50, and that timespan may have produced amazing highs and lows
most young drivers never experience in a lifetime. But Fisher isn't
regretting the journey that brought her from promising newcomer to
superstar and back again. That first race in Texas may seem like ages
ago, but "no, I haven't been in it too long. It's been what, only six
years? I've enjoyed every minute of it, and I hope there's more than six
years yet to come."
