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"During IndyCar testing in California last week, Schmidt Hamilton Motorsports driver Simon Pagenaud let our man Marshall Pruett rig up a helmet cam before hot lapping Sonoma Raceway. The resulting five minutes of footage\u2014wherein the former ALMS LMP1 champ reigns in 725 unbroken horses with stunning precision\u2014got the R&amp;amp;amp;T offices buzzing. Max Prince caught up with Pagenaud to discuss the video and how he handles Sonoma Raceway.      R&amp;amp;amp;T: You don&amp;#039;t mess around coming out of the pits, huh? Just get right at it ...  SP: Yeah! That&amp;#039;s what you&amp;#039;ve got to do \u2026 When you&amp;#039;re testing, you want to extract the best of the car and you want to have good feedback to the team. So if you don&amp;#039;t go 100 percent, you don&amp;#039;t feel what the car is going to feel like in qualifying. For me, I always go ten-tenths in testing because I want to know. WATCH THIS: CEO&amp;#039;s Ultimate Fantasy Is His Own IndyCar Race R&amp;amp;amp;T: And once you ran into oversteer, you didn&amp;#039;t back off. SP: Obviously, that&amp;#039;s too much oversteer. The car doesn&amp;#039;t allow me to commit as much as I should be able to in some corners. The car snapped very quickly, which isn&amp;#039;t the ideal balance. I remember feeling the car going really loose underneath me, really quickly \u2026 The feel [for snap oversteer] comes from your lower back, and your lower back is transmitting information to your brain, then your brain transfers information to your feet and hands. I think certain drivers like a car that&amp;#039;s more stuck in the rear, some like a loose car. Me? I like a loose car. I don&amp;#039;t like understeer. Some drivers would rather have understeer but, essentially, a loose car with new tires is going to be faster (than an understeer-prone car). R&amp;amp;amp;T: So why is the car getting so loose in this video? SP: We were very aggressive with the setup, and it was too much. [Sonoma Raceway] is a track where you have a lot of elevation changes, so the suspension keeps changing on the compression. Every rise in compression, the downforce was going away too much.  R&amp;amp;amp;T: Sure looks like a rough ride \u2026 SP: Sonoma is one of the most physical tracks. You&amp;#039;ve got no time to breathe. It&amp;#039;s left, right, left, elevation change, a crest, sliding rear end\u2014you&amp;#039;ve got to be really precise with how you put the power down. You can see in the hairpin, where you&amp;#039;re not flat until you go to second gear. It&amp;#039;s one of those tracks where you have to be attacking all the time and commit. In terms of driving, it&amp;#039;s one of the most challenging tracks you go to. READ THIS: Marshall Pruett&amp;#039;s Best of IndyCar 2013 R&amp;amp;amp;T: How can you even keep your vision ahead to the next apex when the one you&amp;#039;re at is tearing you to pieces? SP: When you drive at this level, I think you kind of slow down the image. You anticipate what&amp;#039;s going to happen. When you get very focused as an athlete\u2014whether you&amp;#039;re a driver or do strength and athletics\u2014you get in a zone and everything has a tendency to slow down. In that first chicane [Turn 8] you&amp;#039;re basically placing the car one corner in advance. It&amp;#039;s a thought process. R&amp;amp;amp;T: What about that new twin-turbo setup? Is it nastier than last year&amp;#039;s HPD motor set? SP: Well Sonoma is the lowest-grip track we go to, so it&amp;#039;s always difficult to get around the corners without a loss of traction. But, for sure, the Honda engine has more power available. It seems like it&amp;#039;s faster; it seems like there&amp;#039;s more loss of traction. Every year there&amp;#039;s going to be more and more power\u2014that&amp;#039;s the advantage of an engine war, and that&amp;#039;s what&amp;#039;s great about the sport right now. Every year, the cars are faster and faster. READ THIS: What Would Richard Petty Say if Travis Pastrana was a Woman? "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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