The Rookie: Davenport native Figge fights off challenges

Font Size:

By Nate Bloomquist | Tuesday, November 13, 2007 |

Davenport native Alex Figge stops in the pits during a race in April in Las Vegas. (CONTRIBUTED PHOTO)

To say the learning curve for Davenport native Alex Figge was sharper than a hairpin turn would be an understatement.

The rookie in the Champ Car open-wheel racing series has faced plenty of challenges this season with fledgling team Pacific Coast Motorsports.

After starting the season with an eighth-place finish at Las Vegas, Figge crashed and suffered a back injury. For the rest of the season he had to endure some mechanical problems. With all of that behind him, Figge said he is excited to finish the season on a strong note this weekend in Mexico City.

“It’s going to be a huge race for us,” said Figge, 26. “We’ve had a few more downs than ups this season, so hopefully Mexico is a place where we can end on an up.”

Figge’s career is full of high points. Last season he scored two second-place finishes with former teammate Ryan Dalziel in the American LeMans touring-car series. They took five top-10s in ’05. Since Figge began racing at age 17, he has racked up trophies in the Formula Mazda, Formula Ford, Toyota Atlantics and LeMans series

“He’s really the complete package — he’s the real deal,” Pacific Coast team manager Tyler Tadevic said.

Figge’s father, Tom, is a team co-owner.

“I can’t say enough about him because I really don’t think he gets the respect he deserves because his parents have paid his way,’’ Tadevic added. “But Alex can race with any one of these guys here. He’s worthy of his spot.”

This season’s lows are uncharacteristic for Figge. After the eighth-place finish in the season-opener, a late-race crash at Long Beach injured his back and kept him out of the next week’s race in Houston.

Figge has failed to finish in the top 10 since and struggled through a couple of mechanical failures and crashes. For example, he was running as high as eighth in the Oct. 21 race in Australia when a brake failure sent him to the back, and he finished 13th.

Some of the troubles this season stem from his team. The Oxnard, Calif.-based group is Champ Car’s first new team since 2004. The team has fought to crack Champ Car’s new chassis, a Panoz, with little success. The spec series, in which all teams use the same engines, tires and chassis, switched to the design to cut costs and improve drivability.

For smaller teams such as Pacific Coast, the car has caused headaches for the engineering staff. The team had almost no testing data to start the season. But things haven’t been all bad, as Figge’s former teammate, Dalziel, led 16 laps of the July 8 race in Toronto before fading to seventh. Dalziel was let go in September after he broke his collarbone in a bicycle accident, and Mexican driver Mario Dominguez has taken over the ride.

“We didn’t think the difference between Triple-A and the majors would be that big, but it really was,” Tadevic said. “I think we really underestimated the difference.”

Figge grew up in Davenport and lived there until age 14, when he moved to Colorado. While at Colorado State University, he started racing in the Formula Mazda Series and worked his way up. Many of his family members live in the Quad-Cities and have deep ties to the community through the V.O. & Elizabeth Kahl Figge Charitable Foundation, which gave a $13.25 million grant to build the Figge art museum in downtown Davenport.

“I love the Quad-Cities,” he said. “It was a great place to grow up, and anytime I go back there it’s a lot of fun.”

Where the future will take Figge isn’t clear. He said he would like to stay in Champ Car, but that might not be under his control. While costs have come down, leasing engines and chassis for a season for a two-car team costs roughly $10 million.

His team might leave the sport, which has struggled to find sponsorship dollars and fans since the split with the rival IndyCar Series in 1996. Many teams that raced in Champ Car now race IndyCars, and the series formerly known as CART filed for bankruptcy in 2003.

However, Tadevic said the team is close to reaching a deal to field a two-car team next season in the series, with Figge as one of the drivers.

“We’re bullish on next year,” Tadevic said. “We’ve improved a great deal across the board this year, and we want to keep improving.”

Nate Bloomquist can be contacted at (563) 383-2201 or nbloomquist@qctimes.com. Comment on this story at qctimes.com.