{"id":53096,"date":"2018-07-05T11:03:48","date_gmt":"2018-07-05T18:03:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/?p=53096"},"modified":"2018-07-05T11:03:48","modified_gmt":"2018-07-05T18:03:48","slug":"cowdin-and-kanaan-a-great-partnership","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/cowdin-and-kanaan-a-great-partnership\/","title":{"rendered":"Cowdin and Kanaan – A Great Partnership"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Cowdin
Image courtesy A.J. Foyt Racing<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Eric Cowdin and Tony Kanaan first met at \u201cThe Gong Show,\u201d Steve and Christine Horne\u2019s talent search for their Tasman Motorsports Indy Lights team. Held at what was then called Firebird Raceway east of Phoenix, AZ late in 1995, the duo connected quickly, despite the fact that the driver barely spoke English and his American engineer spoke no Portuguese, the native language of Kanaan\u2019s homeland, Brazil. The Horne duo told their prospective Indy Lights talents that they had to speak English if they were hired.<\/p>\n

Kanaan got the nod to race with Tasman Motorsports as the Marlboro Latin America team, learned English and took all the information gleaned from working with Cowdin to great success in Lights, earning the series championship in their second season together, 1997. They\u2019ve pretty much been joined at the pit box ever since, earning the 2004 championship in what\u2019s now the Verizon IndyCar Series by finishing every single lap of every single race (3,305) in their championship season.<\/p>\n

After both driver and engineer left Chip Ganassi Racing following the 2017 season, to no one\u2019s surprise Cowdin and Kanaan are reunited at A.J. Foyt Racing, working toward a renaissance for Super Tex\u2019s squad. They\u2019ve had some good finishes thus far in the season, but not enough to satisfy either INDYCAR\u2019s \u201cIronman\u201d Kanaan, whose consecutive starts will amount to 294 once the Indy cars take the green flag at Iowa Speedway this weekend, or his engineer.<\/p>\n

There have been issues to overcome, as the Foyt team hasn\u2019t tested as much as they\u2019d like, but they\u2019ve had the opportunity to work the simulator to acclimate themselves with the series\u2019 new UAK18 aero kit. Two eighth place results and one seventh place finish won\u2019t cut it for the driver or the engineer, and certainly not for team owner A.J. Foyt, winner of four Indianapolis 500 Mile races.<\/p>\n

\"Cowdin
Image: Anne Proffit<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The series conducts its 11th – of 17 – races this weekend on the short Iowa Speedway oval, an event where Kanaan owns a single victory in 11 races held at this venue; his best start is second in 2015 and he\u2019s led 523 laps and has five podiums (two seconds and two thirds). Although he hasn\u2019t tested at Iowa Speedway, teammate Mattheus Leist did attend the test a couple of weeks ago. Cowdin, who also serves as technical director at A.J. Foyt Racing, is hoping the lower downforce levels of the UAK18 don\u2019t create too much of a challenge.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe bumps are the biggest challenge at this track,\u201d Cowdin acknowledges. \u201cYou can tune the springs and dampers for a particular line the driver is taking, but as soon as he drives a different line, you have a whole new set of bumps to deal with. The key is to find the best compromise overall.\u201d Kanaan did finish eighth at the only other short oval contest held in 2018 – at Phoenix\u2019s ISM Speedway, an event held in April of this year.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe basic short oval package will be similar,\u201d Cowdin said. \u201cThere are changes required for the increased load in the banking and those bumps. Because of the new aero kit, we have had to refocus our efforts in different areas of development than in years past.\u201d Both Cowdin and Kanaan are learning a new team after moving from Ganassi – and they\u2019re back to using the Chevrolet engine they hadn\u2019t utilized since 2013, the year Kanaan won the Indianapolis 500.<\/p>\n

\"Cowdin
Image: Anne Proffit<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Still, Iowa Speedway \u201cis one of my favorite tracks of the year,\u201d Kanaan stated. \u201cIt\u2019s a place that keeps you on your toes at all times and although it\u2019s just under a mile long, it makes for an extremely fast and exciting race.\u201d Because he didn\u2019t test the new aero configuration, \u201cI expect it to be a harder race than usual. Being a short track, we\u2019re always running in traffic and, hopefully, we have a good balance to keep the No. 14 ABC Supply Chevrolet up front and get another trophy for the hardware collection.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s often said that the relationship between a driver and an engineer is akin to a marriage. Sometimes it\u2019s good and sometimes it\u2019s the pits. The long-standing relationship between Tony Kanaan and Eric Cowdin gets put to the test every time they arrive at a racetrack. They\u2019re hoping this year\u2019s visit to Iowa Speedway yields even more success for their marriage of friendship and work.<\/p>\n

\"Cowdin
Image: Anne Proffit<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric Cowdin and Tony Kanaan first met at \u201cThe Gong Show,\u201d Steve and Christine Horne\u2019s talent search for their Tasman Motorsports Indy Lights team.<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":65,"featured_media":53099,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3470,5029],"tags":[2001,5614,6078,712,41,1632,1874],"class_list":["post-53096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-racing","tag-aj-foyt","tag-anne-proffit","tag-eric-cowdin","tag-indycar","tag-news","tag-racing","tag-tony-kanaan"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/Kanaan-action-min.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p42YSK-dOo","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/65"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53096"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53096\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53101,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53096\/revisions\/53101"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}