INDYCAR MEDIA CONFERENCE

June 28, 2021

Jack Harvey

Press Conference

THE MODERATOR: Good afternoon. This week it's round 10 of the NTT INDYCAR Series championship and a return to the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course for the Honda Indy 200 at Mid-Ohio presented by the HPD Ridgeline. Races in Ohio certainly very special for several drivers and teams, and certainly that includes Jack Harvey and the Ohio-based Meyer Shank race team.

Last year you may recall Jack with a top 10 in race one at Mid-Ohio. This year he sits 14th in points. But all part of a crazy season; he's in a pack of drivers with Will Power, Alexander Rossi, Ryan Hunter-Reay, Sebastien Bourdais all trying to make a big move up or two in the standings, so that's really how tight this series is in 2021.

He's the driver of the No. 60 Auto Nation Sirius XM Honda. Great to have Jack Harvey with us this afternoon, and Jack, certainly racing back in Ohio this week, how important is it to your race team?

JACK HARVEY: It's massive, mate. It's such a special place for the team, obviously it being Michael's home race, the track that he grew up at, so everyone at Meyer Shank Racing is obviously very excited.

Mid-Ohio was a place that I got my first win in North America back in Indy Lights, and just a track that has flowed pretty well for me the whole time I've been there. Last year we qualified really well in race one, had a good race in race one, as well.

Day two was when we had that massive pourdown, and there's one thing I can tell you about Mid-Ohio in the rain, it's incredibly slippy, probably the slippiest track I've ever been to, and ended up not being able to qualify because I ended up spinning -- well, there was already a red. That's how slippy the track was. Our strategy was playing out pretty good at the time but kind of left that weekend thinking that we could have been a little better.

The thing we've had this year is pretty much pace every race. There was a few bad strategy calls, maybe need to work on a little decision making, but we've had so many great things we just want to keep that ball rolling, especially in what is one of our home races let's say.

THE MODERATOR: Let's talk about Mid-Ohio specifically as mentioned, the top 10 last year, and it wasn't all that long ago you swept the Indy Lights weekend double-header at Mid-Ohio. What is it about that facility, that track, that you enjoy, when it's not raining?

JACK HARVEY: Yeah. Honestly I even like it when it's raining. We had the wrong setting in the car. We still had our dry pedal map in, so just a bit of an oversight on my side but also maybe on the team's side, as well.

Man, it just flows. It's a super great track. There's a nice bit of elevation change there, a lot of the corners kind of link together, so you might have three corners that actually all directly feed into the next one, so your car placement, your precision. I feel like I have gone well on tracks like that, been able to like give a little to try and get a little in a certain part of the corner.

I remember even when we went testing there in Indy Lights we just were quick. It was one of them tracks that I get to naturally and probably because of my history on road courses and whatnot, it's probably more similar to some of the tracks I've grown up on.

I just love Mid-Ohio. I like the track. I always have enjoyed driving there. It has such a variety of corners, some of the highest speed corners that we go to, and then obviously you get that little bit in the middle where it's super technical and kind of slow speed. But the track flows really nice, a lot of nice -- when you're there you kind of feel like you're on this nice roller coaster kind of feed. You kind of feel that you're just going with the ebb and flow of the track, and I just love it.

THE MODERATOR: We talked a little bit about the start to the season. You had a lot of success and momentum. How close are you to getting that back here in 2021?

JACK HARVEY: I think we have it now. We haven't lost any momentum. I think we've shown really great pace in qualifying pretty much everywhere. I think Detroit was a tough weekend for me just because that was the first time I was there and I was learning the track, and by the end of race 2 I think we looked pretty competitive, but you take that out of the equation, we've been quick everywhere. Certainly we have momentum. Just things that together as a team we're learning.

I would say we don't often repeat mistakes. We have an uncanny ability at the minute to find new ones, which I'm hoping that we kind of stop doing that, but just from a sheer pace perspective, we've got that at the minute.

But like you said, you look at the people around the championship, and it's an unusual year because there's a lot of really great drivers who have been on the receiving end of not necessarily bad luck but just unfortunate events, and like I was talking to Michael this week, we started the season well, we've had great pace everywhere, but the last six races for us, I mean, have been pretty not awesome.

I started thinking about it more, and Road America the last three starts we've had there, we've been P2, P3, P9, and the best result we have is a P17. It's not like a bad day, it's a really bad day.

I think the thing we're headed into the weekend, we just want to execute. I said to the guys, there's no need to get in our own way, let's not try and be too smart. Let's not roll the dice for all in unless we have to be all in.

Looking back at Road America, our strategy call was aggressive, probably more aggressive than what I would have done if they'd have radioed me and asked, but at the end of the day I think it also shows the desire and aspirations of the team that we're here to try and get really great results.

Honestly I really believe that we're on the brink of it, we just need them pieces to come together on a smooth weekend, and I think we can do it.

Q. How much does Mid-Ohio mean to Michael and is that conveyed to the team?

JACK HARVEY: Oh, my gosh, I knew how much it meant to him almost within our first meeting. Although we were talking about Indy, yeah, it was put to us to let us know what Mid-Ohio meant to the team, what Mid-Ohio means to the team, what it has meant to him, his whole upbringing. He's very much a local there. He knows a lot of the guys and girls at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, and obviously with the race also being supported by Honda, I think it means a lot of extra good synergies all together in one event.

But at the end of the year when we look at races that we obviously want to do well at all of them, but if you had to pick a couple that you did well at, Mid-Ohio is almost top of the list, outside of Indy.

Michael has a nice ability to let you know what it means to him without feeling like there's added pressure just to perform that weekend. We're all going there trying to deliver our very best all the time. I'd be lying if I said to you we all truly know it's not more important, but there's never any additional pressure just because of that. He just wants us to go and all do our job. One thing about him as a team owner, I actually think he tries to take the pressure off all of his employees, me included.

Q. How confident are you going into this weekend that you can kind of roll off strong, obviously with it being the home race for the team? But also kind of in terms of getting a strong result because we're going into the effective summer break because of the Olympics, right?

JACK HARVEY: Sure. I mean, we always want to get good results, you know, so no extra emphasis there apart from we want to learn what we have not been doing well, and we want to fix it.

I think, like I mentioned already, qualifying has been a real strong suit for us. I think we've been on the wrong end of a couple of calls, but in truth you've probably got 25 other drivers who are going to tell you the exact same thing in one way or another.

So going into Mid-Ohio it's a track that we've been strong at before. We were good there last year. Our technical partnership with Andretti Autosport, they have also been strong there.

I mean, I don't see any reason not to start the weekend on the front foot and just try and progress and get better and better throughout the weekend. Obviously with it being the summer break, it would be nice to go into that with a great result because everyone in the team is working so hard, and before the race Michael and Jim would be like, you deserve a great day, and I am like, guys, we all deserve a great day at this point.

I look at our season on the whole and think it's got so much potential there. Like we're really on pace and where we've been running this year, I feel like we could be -- if things had gone a bit better we really could be top seven in points.

At the end of the day we have to do that, so as long as we're learning from what hasn't been great and we actually try and fix it and make it a strength, I think we're going to be in great position, and I'm really hopeful that I keep learning and keep improving, the team do the same, and if we can just find that ingredient that pulls everything together, I think we're going to be in really great form.

There's different kinds of struggles, right; sometimes you struggle because you don't have pace, sometimes you struggle because you're not on the right side of some strategy calls. I'd rather be in the we have pace but we're struggling in some other areas because that's the hardest thing to find, and right now I think we have that.

It's easy to lose it, we just have to keep digging away.

Q. On the flipside of that, obviously after the break we go to Music City for the Grand Prix of Nashville, and you've got Helio back as your teammate for this race. How good is that going to be for you guys? Obviously it's a brand new track for everyone, but having the extra car there, is that going to be a huge benefit for you guys, having the extra set of data for that weekend?

JACK HARVEY: I just like having Helio around, really. He has enthusiasm. He's an incredibly nice guy. I don't think there was one person at the Indy 500 who wasn't happy to see him win. That's just the kind of guy he is.

You know, one of the things that gets a bit of a challenge, for as great as it is having another car there, attention is all getting pulled a little bit away, but Andretti Autosport have five full-time guys if you include us in their stable, so there's plenty of data to be looking at.

But it certainly doesn't hurt. I just hope that as a team we have to be ready to put people in place to be able to deal and handle with all the extra work that comes along with that car, but I know we're talking about Mid-Ohio, but if you look just forward to Nashville just for a moment, I think everyone is so incredibly excited for that race.

It would be great to have a great weekend this weekend and take that positive energy, momentum into hopefully a great Nashville because August and September are about as busy as what you can be, I think, in an INDYCAR season.

You've got to strike while the iron is hot, and hopefully we get the embers burning this weekend.

Q. I wanted to ask about as far as sharing data is concerned, obviously this is your -- now one and a half seasons into working with the Andretti guys. Obviously we've got much -- it feels like we've got much shorter time on track now. When you split duties to try various setups on a weekend, if say a Colton Herta says, okay, this works for me, this doesn't work for me, do you now know enough about your competitive driving styles to say, okay, I know this will work for me and I know that won't work for me?

JACK HARVEY: I think so. At this point you kind of know who in the room you're likely to gravitate towards, and because of that I think it's easier to split some of the testing or setup plans and changes with certain people in the room. As you say we've been there a year and a half now and kind of know what most people's driving styles there but also what the engineers' styles are car to car, and I think my engineer Andy has been doing a really fantastic job in being able to be adaptable to what I need but also seeing if another car is doing something well, not necessarily just plucking it off the fastest car but plucking the part that's going to make our program be the best.

You know, the 500 was difficult having eight cars in one engineering room I can tell you, and suddenly when we went back to the regular five for the full season, it seems to flow so much quicker.

It's great to have that level of data. Obviously it takes a lot of effort for everybody to go through it properly, so being able to not team up within the team but being able to gravitate to the people who we drive the car similarly to or setup changes we get a similar read, on a short weekend certainly helps.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really great relationship and one that I know that everyone at Meyer Shank Racing hopes will continue for a few more years yet to come.

Q. Obviously Mid-Ohio we've seen that when it's a green track, the times can be like four seconds off what they eventually go towards once it rubbers up. How easy is it to be sidetracked by racing a setup while the car is just not gripping up and it's completely unrepresentative of what you're going to encounter when it matters?

JACK HARVEY: I think that's very much a characteristic of Mid-Ohio. The morning of test day even versus the end of the day, just the improvement is probably the most I've been to on a road course without any weather changing or anything like that, so at this point I feel like a lot of people have experience with letting the track kind of come to us.

I think my experience at Mid-Ohio so far is if you're not sure what the track is going to do, just leave it, wait and see what it does, and I hate to say it but the prepping in that moment for me comes to having a good plan if it goes one way or the other, if you end up being super free, or end up being super understeery, but we've been there before and to try and predict what the track will do and got it completely wrong.

It's definitely a challenge at Mid-Ohio but it's a challenge for everybody, so as long as we try to be smart but not too smart, hopefully we'll end up in a good spot.

Q. We talked about this being a home race. You haven't talked about yet the fact that Meyer Shank Racing is building a 43,000-square-foot facility just east of Columbus. That's some serious commitment there.

JACK HARVEY: It is, mate. Michael and Jim's commitment to INDYCAR racing and to motorsports is incredible. I think they're very lucky with all the partners we have with Auto Nation, Sirius XM but also Liberty Media now and on the sports car side the partnership they have with Acura.

There's a lot of really good things happening at Meyer Shank Racing right now. I haven't seen the new shop recently. I ended up seeing it kind of in the preseason when the structural building was -- the sides were on, the roof was on, they were just getting ready to put the floor in.

If you ever wanted to know what the intention of the team is, I mean, it's there. Everyone is very dedicated to being competitive in an INDYCAR, being competitive in IMSA. You never know with these guys, they may just come up with something else to add to that because as everyone knows you get a bit more space and then naturally you want to fill it with something else.

It's a really exciting time for everybody at Meyer Shank Racing and especially if you're an Ohio resident or you're based in there and you have a particular pull towards people.

The thing I like about Michael and Jim, I don't know if anyone saw it -- kind of hard to miss it, but Michael's beer of choice, Busch Light, he's just a super regular guy who happens to be a race team owner in two of the best series in the world. I think that's what makes him relatable, and kind of trying to get away a little bit from that underdog feeling, but the team in the nicest way is just full of very real people. I think that's what makes them likable.

Q. Are they going to put a snake display in that new building to show how many snakes you've been bitten by this year? Do you feel a little snakebitten? And are you feeling some pressure to deliver with this new expanded team? Like you said, you guys aren't a small team anymore. How does that pressure kind of like a bear on your shoulders?

JACK HARVEY: I mean, I don't feel any extra pressure honestly. At the end of the day that's Michael and Jim's business whether they want to expand into a brand new shop, and I love that they are. I love the direction the team is going.

It's more of just a positivity boost, and you just want to do a great result because there's so many great things going on with the team. It's a tough one. I feel like we've been in position to have some really great races, and obviously there's such a -- I think even just mentally the approach of thinking, oh, we're just really unlucky or we've had bad luck I think is a really dangerous thing to go down. I don't believe that anybody is lucky or unlucky.

Definitely sometimes in INDYCAR racing or in motorsports, maybe even life, you end up on the right side of some decisions, you end up on the wrong side of some decisions. That's down to us to learn and to try and make the best decision at the time.

I don't see that we are super unlucky. I see that we've made some not-great decisions that are within our control. We just have to strip back the layers, figure out what did we not see that we should have done, and repeat.

I love what I do, so I feel a bit hard done by when we're driving back home on some of these drives, yeah, maybe for a moment, but Monday morning I'm like, yeah, it happened, it's time to go again.

The thing we ask for from everybody is, feel bad for us on a bad weekend for sure, but definitely don't feel sorry for us. We're getting to live all of our dreams at one time.

I think it's a dangerous thought process or like rabbit hole to go down if you just put it down to bad luck because at that point you're almost accepting it's out of your hands, and I don't believe that that's the case. Just try and learn and improve and go again.

Q. Mid-Ohio in particular, is there a joy of driving that track after it does get rubbered in, et cetera? It's a real -- seems like a good flowing track. There's no concrete street barriers next to you for the most part, et cetera. Can you just explain the joy of driving a track when it kind of comes in?

And number two, what is that key turn on that track that you've got to get right every time or you've blown it? Is it Turn 1 under the bridge?

JACK HARVEY: Yeah, I mean, I think any racetrack when they're rubbered in always feel better than when they're slippy and slick and whatnot, but particularly Mid-Ohio pretty much when you get into Turn 4 to the exit of Turn 9, that section, you're so -- the car is so loaded all the time. Being able to really lean on the car, feel the tires work, especially on reds in the middle of qualifying at probably peak grip, it's an awesome feeling because it's so fast, and you're throwing rights and lefts, a few chicanes in there, over crests in there.

The reality is the NTT INDYCAR Series is so competitive right now, if you want to be on pole -- how many turns is at Mid-Ohio, 12, 13? You can't have a bad corner. There's not one corner that is going to change your life. You might be mega in Turn 1 but if you're not good in Turn 2, you've got to Turn 4 and it's balanced out.

I think when you look at it -- I would say, I would actually say Turn 2, there's a lot of time to be found on the brakes but also still getting a good exit because it is such a long straight after that. I think it's going to be incredibly close. I think you're going to see really small margins of people transfer in this weekend or people not transfer in this weekend. I just want to make sure we're on the right side of that.

Q. Is it ever amazing to you as a driver how close these things are in INDYCAR on road courses? You're not even talking about a blink of an eye, you're talking about an eyelash. Is that amazing to you that these cars and you guys are that close?

JACK HARVEY: It doesn't surprise me. When you take in this is the best series in the world, if you think of the cone and the pyramid of getting to this point, you've taken cars that are now minus maybe a little bit in shockers still, and obviously Honda power, Chevy power, it's a spec car. There's definitely different aero configurations you can run but not very long but it seems like all the teams end up gravitating towards the same thing. So no, it's not really surprising to me that one of the best series in the world and a series that has so much parity, I guess, that's so close and competitive. It would be surprising to me if it wasn't.

Q. Seven different winners in nine races. That's how tight this has been for the 2021 championship.

JACK HARVEY: It's awesome. It's so cool. Just a side note, I feel so lucky to be a part of this year. I know everyone always said that and feels it, but I feel like you may look back on 2021 in a few years and go, wow, that was a golden year in the NTT INDYCAR Series.

Q. I know that you just talked about living the dream; what has made your journey to INDYCAR so unique compared to some of the competitors that you see every weekend?

JACK HARVEY: I mean, probably having to sit out in 2016 while we put together some of the funding to be able to get back to trying to do the Indy 500 in 2017. Honestly even just the way we met Michael was really through happenstance. He had a deal to race with Stefan Wilson, we obviously had the deal with Andretti Autosport, along comes Fernando Alonso, pairs me and Michael together.

It's been a journey, I guess, is the silliest thing to say, but it's the fairest thing that it's been. Our first season with Michael was only six races, then it was 10 races, then it was finally full time, and now we're talking about strategy calls with oh, we could have won that race if...

So you're basically seeing us, not in a mean way, but start from the very entry level but also now making improvements every year to now be able to compete for the very best results, and that's to win on Sunday.

How is our journey different? I don't have super wealthy parents or anything like that. Everything that I've been able to do has been with sponsorship and support from the Racing Steps foundation from when I was racing mostly in Europe but also came out here, and then also the generosity from Auto Nation and Sirius XM, they have allowed our program to grow and expand, as well.

Everyone feels like they have a unique story, and I guess so much of mine has felt like trying to make the most of this situation that we were in, but also the fact that even to this point it's been a longer process than I would have liked it to. If you had turned around and said at the end of Indy Lights after finishing second both years, hey, you're doing INDYCAR in 2016, I would have been like, yeah, let's do it because that almost felt like the natural path.

So then to come off of that, have to work hard from the sidelines, doing one race and then watching it very slowly grow back into being full time was a bit of a patience test, but I'm hoping that with Michael and Jim and everybody at MSR, we're building something that's going to last for hopefully many years to come, and with the foundation the team are stable.

I think it's rare kind of that you see a driver and a team really build and grow from nothing essentially to being able to go full time, and I'm proud of what we've achieved up to this point.

Q. You have been always very good on road courses. Of course it's one of your strengths coming from Europe. It's logical. Four of the last seven races are on road courses starting with this weekend in Mid-Ohio and of course the Indy Grand Prix you have been very good the last few years there. Does that give you a lot of confidence for this last part of the season?

JACK HARVEY: Yeah, obviously I love all the tracks we have here now. It's no secret that road courses are my bread and butter. That's what I grew up doing, especially in Europe. Street circuits are nothing new to me. We have them over there, as well. But I feel like my oval performances have come on big time in the last few years. You look at last year I think we had seven more top 10s on ovals than almost what we did on road courses.

I'm just excited for everything that's coming next, really. Mid-Ohio has been a good track for me, Indy road course has been a good track for me. We qualified really well for Gateway in St. Louis last year.

To be honest with you, at this point I feel like I've been in America so long now, I just see all the tracks and I love them, whether road course, oval, street circuit. I just want to be driving the car, and I don't care if we're just turning left or turning right and left and if we're doing it separated by grass or a wall. I don't feel like at this point that ovals are my achilles heel or street circuits are my achilles heel and I can only excel on road courses.

I feel like we're doing pretty good across the board. Even this year at Texas we finished seventh in race one. I think I was running fourth in race two before we had a bearing failure.

Taken some time to get used to that and to learn them, obviously, but I feel like we've done a good job on all tracks.

And again, if you want to be competitive in this series at the end of the year, you really have to be good on all of them because it's just so competitive, man. There's so many great drivers, so many great teams that seem to just be good every weekend that you can't have too many bad ones at the end of the year, that's for sure.

Q. You've talked about taking time to master all the disciplines in INDYCAR. Now it's your fifth year with Meyer Shank Racing, fifth year in INDYCAR. We talked about the growing up starting with one race in 2017 and building up. Do you think it was a good thing for you also to get almost a feel -- of course you would like to be full time every time, but to get a feel for the series and to grow up with the team without that much pressure?

JACK HARVEY: I mean, I think you can make cases for it being good and bad either way. We kind of took the idea to Michael and we tried to create this roadmap of how we were going to get it done, and that was in Detroit, 2017, the weekend after the Indy 500. If you're asking me if I could have just jumped into an INDYCAR full-time, the answer would have been yes. I would have much rather have done that because until last year, the only track that I had driven in an INDYCAR was the Indy 500.

So going to Iowa, going to Gateway, going to Texas was all a new experience for me, but at that point I was in my third season of INDYCAR racing but as a rookie. Like you just said, in my fifth season now, and going to Detroit it was the first time I had ever been there.

You end up in kind of a weird position on occasion where you're still learning but you're not a rookie anymore. I feel like our oval performances only really started last year because we were doing the road and street circuits up to that point.

Yeah, certainly I definitely don't feel like I've mastered anything yet. I feel like I'm still working every day to try to get better at my craft no matter what the discipline of the track is, but I wouldn't change what we've done because it's led us to where we are now, and I love my life, I love what the team is trying to do. If I had a crystal ball and we had the funding, if I could have gone sooner, I would have gone full-time sooner.

I don't know if that would have been as -- I don't know if I'd have had as much stability for the long time, and that's what I really love about the program now.

Q. You come to the home track for the team now this weekend; does that add a little bit of pressure or do you just feed off that positive energy that Mike has going into this being his home race? Like you said, he's talking about it all the time and you feel like it's the second most important race of the year after Indy? Does that give you pressure or just extra motivation?

JACK HARVEY: I mean, the way we've approached the year is the next race is always the most important one, so then we're going to finish this weekend and Nashville is going to feel as much pressure as Mid-Ohio. I actually think Michael does a good job of not adding pressure to people. We all know it's the home race. We all want to deliver that result for him, for the team, for his wife MB. He's bringing no doubt a huge amount of friends and family to the track.

So naturally you want to bring a good result, but our mindset on the year was that Road America was the most important one and then this weekend is the most important one. Whichever one is coming up is going to be the most important one.

No added pressure, but it is nice when you go to a track and you really feel that support from all the fans, and it's so amazing this year to have people back, but also from the whole team, the supporters of the team. There's no downside, mate. But also seeing how six races have gone, it's just time to get a result, really. It wouldn't matter what the track was, I just want to see us get a final result.

Q. On a very light note, of course here in Europe we've got something going on called the Euro 2020 football championship --

JACK HARVEY: Yeah, I was following everything, mate. It's coming home. That's all anyone needs to know. Football is coming home.

Q. Is there a track we go to the rest of the season that you have not raced at? You were at Gateway, Worldwide Technology Raceway last year. Long Beach you've been to before?

JACK HARVEY: Yeah, I've done Long Beach. I've done all of them now apart from Nashville. Everyone is in the same boat with that one. It's nice. At the start of the year we kind of knew Detroit may be an anomaly weekend, especially with the way practice is there at the minute. I think now it's nice that everything that's coming is a little bit more of a known quantity and I'm not sad about that.

Q. How do you prepare for the race when you already know the track? Do you do anything extra to maybe learn some like different better lines, to learn it a little better or do you just take it easy since you maybe already know those good or better lines?

JACK HARVEY: A little bit of both, mate, honestly. I've spent a lot of time last week, this week with my engineer looking at a variety of stuff, from how am I driving, how are the other guys driving, if they're taking different lines than I am. Obviously with that we're looking at the data to see if there's any areas where they're doing something much better than I was or if I was good in a certain number of corners.

So hopefully we end up working smart and not just hard. The thing I always do, I always watch the races back from the TV broadcasters because I like the commentary but I also like to have the big picture of how the race was playing out from everybody's stance.

And then we do a viewer strategy and what could we have done differently, what could we have done better. Honestly all just trying to learn so hopefully when we come back this weekend, we're just a little bit better prepared.

I'm actually meeting my engineer again on Wednesday and then I'll be at Mid-Ohio Thursday for the track walk.

The nice thing about knowing the track already is we're already just looking for those real tiny gains. Hopefully if we find a couple of hundredths in a one corner, a couple of hundredths in another corner, that might be the difference between getting on pole. When you know the track it's easy just to go and work on those tiny, tiny things to start with.

Q. In terms of Mid-Ohio, is there any kind of characteristics that are similar to any tracks in Europe for yourself?

JACK HARVEY: I thought your follow-up was going to be a football question.

Sorry, I was so ready for an England question --

Q. I'm Irish so we're not even in the Euros. It was just about Mid-Ohio. Is it kind of similar to tracks in Europe. I have a feeling Spa maybe and Belgium?

JACK HARVEY: It reminds me a lot of tracks from the UK really, not necessarily like Silverstone but more like an Oulton Park, a Brands Hatch GP, like that kind of style of track where it's pretty narrow but high speed, one corner flows nicely into the next corner. Mid-Ohio is pretty punishing really. If you drop a wheel on the exit of Turn 1, the rest of your lap could be completely ruined. It's a tiny error margin there I would say.

Probably not really Spa. I guess you could look at it and maybe say that Spa is just a much more stretched out version. If you just kind of condense Spa together, maybe I could see it.

I think one of the things that makes Mid-Ohio so cool is the way that the spectators are able to actually be there, be so close to the action, and when you're driving you really actually do get a chance to see that. Not that we're going into Turn 5 staring at all the gazebos on the side, but you've got a bit of peripheral vision.

I think that's what makes this weekend fun. So to me it probably reminds me more of like an old-school English like track that you'll find in the UK more so than Spa, but maybe if you condensed it together, it might feel like that.

Q. And in terms of tracks you might like to see in the future, what would be your kind of ideal track?

JACK HARVEY: In America, anywhere?

Q. Either in America or Europe.

JACK HARVEY: I'm biased, mate. I'd love to see INDYCAR go to the UK. I thought Brands GP would be such a good track for INDYCAR because it's long enough that it would fit INDYCARs -- the style of the actual INDYCAR. I'd love to see them go to Silverstone. What I don't want to do is go and replicate what we've seen in COTA there. The Formula 1 cars are so fast and those tracks really were designed to be geared around them. Anywhere in the UK I'd be pretty happy to see an INDYCAR car go around.

Maybe we can try and talk to Roger or someone to see if we can make that happen because I think right now motorsport is in such a positive place, and if anyone saw the numbers from even what we're getting now from last weekend at Road America, there's so much momentum behind INDYCAR right now. It feels like now is the time. I'm so happy to be part of the series in this moment because it just feels like it's going to get ready to take off again.

Maybe that's the time you get back -- you get the opportunity to go back to Surfers Paradise maybe, which always I thought looked like such a great event.

I think if we had the opportunity to go somewhere, you want to go somewhere that has a cool racing history that they're really going to embrace us when we get there. I feel like Australia would be a cool place, UK would be a cool place. Yeah.

Q. When you guys transitioned from the '18-'19 car to the one now with the aeroscreen and how much that shifted the handling balance and how much technical work you've had to do to get into that, is it as big a shift as when you switch from the old Indy Lights car to the IR15 because I'm not sure any series has been through such a dramatic transition as Indy Lights did that year.

JACK HARVEY: Yeah, that was a huge change to go from such a car that, in the kindest way, was super outdated at that point to jumping into something that was so new. That to me was a bigger transition than when INDYCAR added that aeroscreen.

The thing about the screen, it's heavy. But because you know it's heavy in a particular place, it kind of makes it a little easier just to try and shift a few things around, go and test it. That transition between '14 and '15 in the Lights car, that was just like throwing your engineering rule book out the window and starting again. Actually what was kind of hard about that looking back was some of the Lights teams here who had done Indy Lights for so long were very adamant that this is what a quick race car looks like, and I'm like, yes, it was, but now you're bringing a much more European style of car over here, and I think that's why you saw Carlin be so fast so quickly in Indy Lights when they came because that was a car that they were completely used to. It went from I felt like a little bit of turbo lag.

So that transition was pretty big, and I'm still not sure we ever really had the fastest car out there. I felt like I drove pretty well that year. But certainly a bigger transition than the INDYCAR with the screen and the halo.

I'll be the first to admit, I was somewhat skeptical about all that when INDYCAR first launched it, but I love it. It is absolutely saving drivers left and right, and I hate how many times we've had to see it already work so well, but again, not that anyone would have really cared, but I'm really super proud of everybody at INDYCAR, everybody at Dallara for making safety such a priority, and I think that's why you're seeing so many drivers look at it again with stars in their eyes and they're looking at it going, wow, INDYCAR is so cool and it's safe. Safer, I should say.

I was never against it at any moment because at the end of the day I'd always want my friends here with us now. But that's such a hit. I think they've done such an incredible job with that that I'm really, really grateful that everybody involved in that process stuck to their guns and pushed on with it because they're saving people's lives.

THE MODERATOR: Should be a big weekend for you and the team at Mid-Ohio, Jack. There's fireworks Saturday night. It's a 4th of July thing.

JACK HARVEY: Of course it is. I'm still kind of new here. I'm learning, but that should be a really great celebration. No doubt we'll enjoy that.

Yeah, is "happy 4th of July" the appropriate reply?

THE MODERATOR: It is, yes. Happy Independence Day.

JACK HARVEY: Happy Independence Day, there you go.

THE MODERATOR: Have a great week. Safe travels, and we'll see you just north of Columbus, Ohio.