Simon Pagenaud is third in the Verizon IndyCar Series championship standings heading into the Honda Indy Grand Prix of Alabama this weekend.
The driver of the No. 77 Schmidt Peterson Hamilton Motorsports car, who made his series debut at Barber Motorsports Park, was a guest on the INDYCAR teleconference April 23.
Click it: Listen to the full teleconference
Pagenaud talks about the physical aspects of the 2.38-mile, 17-turn road course:
"It's a very demanding road course. I compare it to an oval. On an oval the stress is mostly mental. Most of the time you just have to be so focused, so precise with your movements, but everything you do is very slow in the car. You're traveling at such high speed, you can't do any brutal movements. Whether your throttle traces are very smooth, you're looking ahead, very far ahead, you're planning in advance.
"On the road course, you have to brake as late as you can, as hard as you can, utilize all the grip available from the wings, the downforce, and from the Firestone tires, which are really grippy. All that with no power steering. So, as you can imagine, the steering gets really, really heavy. It's similar to a road car without the ignition on.
"It just gives you an idea. It gets heavier as you go faster. On a road course you have curves to use to try to shortcut the track as much as you can. It gets pretty bumpy. The G forces are really high. In braking zones, we get about 3.5 Gs. You have to multiply your body weight by 3.5, basically, that gives you an idea how heavy gets your head, how strong your neck has to be, your back. Your whole body just has to be really strong.
"That requires a lot of training in the gym every day and running for cardio because obviously you have to hold your breath in the high-speed corners because you're being thrown into the car and you don't have the opportunity to breathe much. Pretty intense to drive an IndyCar around a road course."