Andretti

Hello! It's been a busy, busy time at Team Motorola. We literally just got home Monday from Milwaukee and now we are out Thursday for a two-week trip to the west coast for races in Laguna Seca (Calif.) and Portland, Ore.

For me, these are both good events. There have been races at Laguna and Portland that have been really, really good races and on the flip side, there have been races that have been really bad races. So, my goal is to have one of the really, really good races over the next two weeks.

Laguna is a really neat track. It's a 2.4-mile, 11-turn natural terrain road course and I think what people remember most about the Laguna Seca track is the famous "corkscrew." The corkscrew is Turn 7 on the track and it basically is a quick left and then right turn at the crest of a hill. Although the layout of Laguna is a lot of fun, it can be a really tough track to pass on. You have to have your car and tires working really well and maximize any opportunities to get around someone in order to move through the field.

I'm always optimistic that I'll have good results when I come to Laguna and over the years I've won there on three occasions, but I'm also realistic that everything has to be in sync to have a good day at Laguna. We're still learning our new chassis so we've got some extra work ahead of us. We haven't run the Lola on a road course yet because our test day was rained out, so we'll have a bit of learning to do, but I have all the confidence in the world in my engineer, Eddie Jones.

The one good thing about a three-car team is that my technical partner Dario Franchitti has tested the Lola at Mid-Ohio and felt it was a very promising package. So we'll see what the weekend brings. Either way, I'm sure we'll get some good information from our Laguna weekend that will work for us at Portland.

After we race in Laguna we immediately go up the coast to race in Portland. Portland is another natural terrain road course, although at only 1.97-miles and 10 turns it's a bit shorter than Laguna. Portland is another fun track to drive and it's always a challenging race. Portland can throw a little bit of everything at you like last year's race when it went wet to dry through the whole event! Now that was interesting, just deciding which tires to run kept my engineers busy the whole afternoon.

But I have always enjoyed racing in Portland and I have some really good memories from Portland. In fact, people always ask me about the one-two finish with my dad in 1986, which just happened to be on Father's Day. And it's funny because they always say "Wow, that must be a great memory" and don't get me wrong, it is -- but it would have been much better had I finished first and my dad had finished second! In saying that, it will be Father's Day on race day, but my son Marco is still a few years away from Champ Cars, so it will be a while until we can duplicate that finish from 1986.

Well, I'm off to get things organized for two weeks on the road. The goal for Team Motorola over these next long weeks is podium finishes to give us that much needed momentum!

Talk to you soon,

Michael

Michael Andretti, the driver of the No. 39 Motorola for Team Green, is providing a diary to ESPN.com throughout the CART season.