Diakonos Community
Circle City Village
Suring Up Our Weaknesses
On June 8, 2014 By llongardIn Missional Church, Servant Leadership, Wisdom
Last night I enjoyed listening on-line as one of my favorite IndyCar drivers, Ed Carpenter, won his third career race in the Firestone 600 at Texas Motor Speedway. I'm always partial to the smaller teams in IndyCar, especially owner/driver teams like Carpenter's, and enjoy any chance I have to see them win out over their highly funded competition. They do everything they can to help their teams survive in a sport where it is often hard to make ends meet. Sometimes as team owners they make decisions that are hard to make as drivers.
After winning his first career race in 2011, Carpenter launched his own team in 2012. He has continued to experience a measure of success with 8 top ten finishes and 1 win on oval courses. His weakness as a road and street course racer has become more apparent in the last two years as IndyCar shifts to more of these type of races. For the first two years as a team Carpenter has an average finishing position of 8th on oval tracks and 19th on road / street courses (16th overall). So, for the sake of the team, Carpenter the owner needed to make a decision on how to improve their overall standing for the team to survive and how Carpenter the driver fit into this.
Along came Mike Conway, a relative newcomer to IndyCar who has shown an ability to win on road / street courses. After two serious crashes in his three starts at the Indy 500, Conway decided he was no longer comfortable with racing on ovals and became a fill-in road / street course specialist in 2013. As a race team owner, Ed Carpenter made the decision in 2014 to split his ride with Mike Conway behind the wheel in the 12 road / street course races and himself as driver in the 6 oval races. So far this year they have won two races and the car's average finish has improved to 14th overall (12th if you factor out the Indy 500 where Carpenter had a good chance to win until bad decisions by two other drivers took him out of the race with 20 laps to go). Neither will have a chance of winning the IndyCar points championship, but their combined points is enough for the car to be in 6th place so far.
Sometimes leaders need to identify their weaknesses and find people that are able to compensate for these weaknesses for the bettering of the overall team. This is not only true in auto racing, but in all areas of life. Team will often outshine individual performance. Ed Carpenter Racing may become a great example of that this year.
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llongard
I grew up in northeast Wisconsin. After high school, I moved to Minneapolis, MN to attend North Central University and graduated 1992 with a degree in Biblical Studies and Humanities. I spent most of the next fifteen years in the Twin Cities area until my family and I moved to Indiana in 2007. For most of the first seventeen years after college, I was involved in university ministry either as a volunteer, bi-vocational, or full-time campus minister. Through those years, I also worked in the main street marketplace as a retail manager/trainer and as a service representative in the insurance industry. I've also worked in various education roles. Most recently, I have been working on various projects addressing homelessness in Indianapolis and as team lead for Diakonos Community, a Communitas International missional initiative. Through this ministry, we seek to build missional communities in Indianapolis that serve and bring the life of Christ to those on the margins of society. Our strategy is to collaborate with community agencies that serve those in need and share Christ through meaningful relationships. I am blessed with a wonderful wife, three amazing daughters, and two cats (can't forget the cats, LOL). As a family, we enjoy camping, hiking, gardening, and going to the YMCA together. I also enjoy fishing, riding bicycle, and being involved in whatever my daughters are doing. Though I have not lived in the Green Bay area for over 20 years, I am still a major Packer fan.
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