This week, for the first time, Ryan Hunter-Reay got to meet reporters as the IndyCar Series champion.
Of course, he got a question he couldn’t answer.“How do you follow up a year like last year?”How could he know that? This is the first time he’s been a series champion.He might not know until October. But he will start finding out March 24 when the open-wheel series starts its season with a street race in St. Petersburg, Fla.“I really don’t have the answer for that,” Hunter-Reay said Monday in a conference call. “We’re going to have to be better than last year, that’s for sure. I know that. … We didn’t have too many weak spots last year, but if anything you can point out, the superspeedways — I think Texas, Fontana. We were running decent in Indy, but we had a mechanical failure there.“I guess the big tracks we need to step it up a little bit. But I think across the board we’re just going to have to be better than last year. It’s going to be a really tough season. I think this is going to be the tightest competition we’ve seen in IndyCar in a very, very long time.”It’s been three years since the series began a season with anyone other than Dario Franchitti as the champion.Hunter-Reay unseated the decorated Scotsman with a season that included three consecutive victories (at Milwaukee, Iowa and Toronto) in midsummer and a win in the next-to-last stop of the season, at Baltimore.He’s right about the big tracks. He was 27th at Indy, 21st at TMS and 18th at Sonoma. But he was so good everywhere else, it didn’t matter.So it was a relaxing, happy off-season for Hunter-Reay. He has a new baby. And he got to walk around with the word “champion” in front of his name.“It’s all still a pretty new feeling, the champion side of it,” he said. “There was so much pressure packed into the last bit of the season, I just kind of had the blinders on. The next thing I know we’ve emerged from the masses as champions of the IndyCar Series.”Carlos Mendez, 817-390-7407 Twitter: @calexmendez
