AUTO RACING - INDYCAR: Battistini Close To Kentucky Debut

The boom continues for Firestone Indy Lights Series drivers, as former FILS standout Dillon Battistini is just one step away from making his IZOD IndyCar Series debut at Kentucky with Eric Bachelart?s Conquest Racing team.

Bachelart, the 1991 Lights champion, will test the 33-year-old Englishman this Friday at Kentucky, and provided Battistini passes his Rookie Orientation Program, the four-time FILS race winner will return one week later to race for Conquest on the 1.5-mile oval.

?We?re going to do the test first and see how it goes,? Bachelart told SPEED.com. ?If it goes well, we?ll consider doing the race with him. Myself, I?ve seen him coming to the races, and I don?t know how many times he?s come and talked to me. I really appreciate his perseverance and motivation, because it?s not easy for a young driver like him with no funding to do this. We have a chance to give him a test, and hopefully he does good and we then go race with him.?

With three of Battistini?s four FILS wins coming on ovals?including one at Kentucky--adapting to the Dallara-Honda package shouldn?t present a major challenge, despite spending almost a year away from open-wheel racing due to a budgetary shortfall.

?He should do well,? Bachelart continued. ?He hasn?t driven in a little while, but he was good on ovals and it should come back pretty quickly for him, I think. It?s a bigger car and there?s a lot of new things for him like pit stops, but we?ve been doing this many, many times with rookie drivers so it shouldn?t be too much of a problem.?

It?s possible Battistini could also return for the season finale at Las Vegas, but as Bachelart shares, Sebastian Saavedra, who raced for the team from St. Petersburg through Baltimore, has the first right to race, provided he can find more funding.

?Sebastian [Saavedra] is contracted through Las Vegas, but he had some problem with his sponsors, so if he isn?t able to fix that, we will have to keep doing something different without him,? he said.

With a long history of running Indy Lights graduates, Bachelart says he?s proud to provide a path for open-wheel talent to make it to the big leagues.

?I don?t know if it?s a coincidence or not, but at the end of the day, there are some teams like myself that are specialized to give the young drivers a chance,? he said. ?For us, we?re a small team and it seems that we?ve become more specialized this way because we can work with less funding than maybe Chip [Ganassi]. It?s important for us to be able to develop young drivers, and in the past, sometimes they come from Europe or Brazil and do a good job and then at the then of the year, they get picked up by a bigger team.

?This happened with Justin Wilson [in 2004], for example. And I?m OK with that. When you do that?when you help a young driver or a new driver to Indy cars to learn the cars, or to do setup, that?s a good feeling. To get the funding we need, sometimes, we take the younger drivers and we both benefit. But for sure, as a former Indy Lights champion, it is always nice when we can bring another good driver into the series.?

Marshall Pruett is SPEED.com's Auto Racing Editor, covering IndyCar and sports cars. He also contributes to Road & Track and Racecar Engineering. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

Source: http://auto-racing.speedtv.com/article/indycar-battistini-close-to-kentucky-debut/

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