Brack

Hello everyone. If any of you saw the race Sunday from Portland, Ore., you should know how I'm feeling right now. For those of you who didn't, I'll give you the short version.

We led 55 laps and had just made a pit stop. When I left the pits, I felt a vibration right away and before I knew it, my left rear tire came off of the car. Needless to say, it was a very frustrating day for our team.

We were very fast all weekend in the Target Toyota. We qualified second Friday and Saturday and had a fast car for all of the practice sessions. When the race started, I was able to get around the pole-sitter, Cristiano da Matta, and put a little gap between us. My pit crew gave me a great pit stop the first time in and I was able to keep the lead. We had the car to win the race.

The one bright spot in this whole deal is that we have shown over the last two weeks that we are very competitive on the road courses. Hopefully, that is sign of good things to come for us this year. It is encouraging for us to be the front at these types of tracks. We have a week off to regroup now before we head to Chicago next week for the CART Grand Prix of Chicago.

Speaking of Chicago, I'm there today to participate in a media day. I guess I'm going to meet Richard Dent today from the Chicago Bears. Being from Sweden, I haven't heard of him, but I hear he's pretty famous here in Chicago. I'm not a big football fan, but it will be pretty cool to meet him. Chicago is a pretty neat town. There's a ton of things to do and they have an outstanding collection of restaurants. It's also the home of one of my wins last year. I always like towns where I've won races.

We are in a stretch of seven races in eight weeks right now and this is our off week in that period. It's going to be good to spend some time at home and get re-charged for the next three races -- Chicago, Toronto and Cleveland. What a unique combination of races to have. Chicago is a one-mile oval, Toronto is a tight street course and Cleveland is a wide road course at an airport. These next three races will go a long way toward determining who the champion will be. After Cleveland, we will be almost halfway through the schedule.

Our team has done a great job so far this season, we just have had several bad breaks that have really hurt us in the points chase. We were taken out on the first lap in Monterrey, Mexico, we had a turbo problem in Motegi, Japan and then the tire came off in Portland. If it weren't for those mishaps, I feel we would be right at the front of the points chase. But that's racing. We have had competitive cars all season and that's important.

It's going to be important to qualify up front in Chicago. There probably won't be a lot of passing, so we need to make sure we're up front. We led a bunch of laps in Milwaukee and we turned the fastest lap of the race there. Hopefully, we'll have the same result in Chicago and maybe bring home our first victory of the year.

I'm off to go see the great city of Chicago. Our race will be on CBS next week, so make sure you watch it and root our team on to victory.

Kenny

Kenny Brack, the driver of the No. 12 Lola for Target/Chip Ganassi Racing, is providing a diary to ESPN.com throughout the CART season.